Some folks on here have been repeating this garbage as well
I think this is a symptom and not the problem itself.
The issue is that residential zoning only allows for single family homes to be built. No mixed use, no apartments/condos. Just a house for one family with a front and back yard. I mean, who even uses their front yard? I used to live in a house like that and I’ve never seen anybody actually use their front yard aside from mowing it. It’s a chore to keep people busy designed during the cold war to prevent people from noticing any commie propaganda or thinking that the establishment as it is might not be the best thing for them. A surprisingly useful HAI video You can build an entire house in the space of a front lawn.
If the zoning restriction didn’t exist, you could build two or three townhouses on a single plot of land, or even an apartment building by combining two plots. We would litterally have more than a million new homes if we simply replaced all the single family houses with low-rise apartments. Make that a mix of mid and high-rises and we can house the entire Canadian population in Toronto or Vancouver.
Despite how dense Toronto seems, there are huge tracks of land that are completely underutilized, and I’m not talking about parks. Leaside Business Park alone is a good hectare and there is almost nothing but one-story buildings, most of which have empty yards not doing anything. This isn’t the only place Toronto (and near the middle of the city at that) has.
Despite how dense Toronto seems
In what way does Toronto seem dense? It is laughably sparse. It struggles to fill 4,000 people per square kilometre. If we look at an actual city, there are over one million people per square kilometre. Even the wannabe cities of the world have 40,000 people per square kilometre. Toronto is a wannabe farmer’s field. Which is no doubt why its people are always calling for the TTC to deploy more tractors.
Which, all of that, is to say that you’re right, but prior to 2007 it didn’t matter because you could just keep sprawling for basically no cost. Until the people of Toronto get past wishing they were farmers, which is unlikely to happen… ever, they will be at the mercy of those who are actually (dairy, poultry) farmers with a government granting them free money. Good luck.
The public perception of Toronto is that it is a top tier and dense urban city. The truth is far from that, even just outside the downtown core the density drops sharply.
That’s what I’m saying. I agree completely that Toronto is stupidly spread out, but most people think Toronto isn’t like that, especially hearing what people who haven’t really seen Toronto thinks. This is why I’m saying that it’s easy to fix Toronto’s housing problems. We have the space for it. More than enough space within the GTA to house the entire Canadian population.
Not only is this cheaper and more efficient use of space, but it’ll even bring in the city more money, rather than costing the province loads of money and only making the rich even richer.
Of course, at the same time, it is completely understandable why the average Joe doesn’t want such density. Illustratively, density means you only need one bakery instead of hundreds of bakeries spread across the city in a sparsely populated city, or thousands of bakeries spread across the rural countryside. This means wealth inequality. Instead of hundreds or thousands of people owning bakeries, one person owns the one bakery.
Which, of course, is also the draw of the city. Owning the one bakery enables you to become mega rich! But it is a double-edged sword, as if you fail to become the owner of the one bakery then you are left in a precarious spot of owning nothing productive. Whereas in a sparsely populated area, more people can own bakeries. But the pool of customers shrinks in kind, so wealth inequality shrinks, thus you cannot become nearly as rich.
Rural areas provide the greatest wealth equality (at least when the government isn’t handing special interests money printers) and therefore the least wealth capacity, and actual cities provide the greatest wealth inequality and therefore the greatest wealth capacity. The people of Toronto seek something somewhere in the middle to allow some wealth inequality for a small handful to become still quite staggeringly, but perhaps not mega, rich. They do not want to go all the way to full bore wealth inequality, however. They want the average Joe to still have some kind of chance.
Toronto already has one of the lowest median incomes in the country. It has some people doing really well, but a lot doing very, very poorly. Densification will only widen that gap. Housing may become cheaper, but if you lose even more access to capital, what’s the point? Living in a tent and owning capital is clearly better than having a nice house, but having no capital.
