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Why urban density is actually good for us
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Suburbs are not economically viable, they are being subsidized by denser areas.
I am tired of living in a cramped appartment suffering the traffic caused by suburbanites 24/7, all while knowing that us appartment dwellers are actually subsidizing suburban sprawl. Do you want to live in a single family home? Great; pay your fair share.
Like the article tells, you are subsiding them because you are much, much richer. It is not at all unusual to see the rich pay more than the poor.
They can always be de-annexed. The fact that you haven't done that tells us that, for all your complaining, deep down you know they are valuable to you. Perhaps the access to that additional labour pool outside of the city centre is even the reason why the core is so wealthy?
Yes, and believe it or not there is an in-between between unsustainable suburbs, and cramped shoebox apartments, it's called town and row houses and it's what the article is proposing tearing down in downtown Toronto and Vancouver to replace with more cramped shoebox apartment buildings.
We can also build larger appartments suitable for families. It is not rocket science.
Not that I have anything against mid-density mixed-use developments, quite the contrary. But in the downtown I can see why even taller buildings make sense.
It's the sprawl of necessarily car-dependent single-family homes that I have a problem with, because while it means comfort for the rich, it only brings externalities for everybody else.
I completely agree with that, but you're not going to solve that problem by tearing down all the single family homes that exist in our current cities. Many of the people who get priced out of their homes will just move to the suburbs and small towns and balloon them further.
Yes we can afford and need to densify around existing infrastructure, to some extent, but we also desperately and urgently need to start building transit infrastructure in small towns and connecting them to our big cities so that we can have a region of mid sized cities, all capable of supporting a walkable lifestyle. Just densifying around existing transit without investing in building new regions is a race to the bottom that will benefit the rich landlords that lease those buildings back to us.