Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 526

We talk a lot on this blog about how best to intensify and add housing to our existing cities. But here's alternative approach : Why not just built entirely new cities? This way you don't have to worry about fixing any of the things that are currently broken in our existing cities or worry about messy things like community engagement.

Now, I disagree with many, or perhaps most, of the points that Nathan J. Robinson puts forward in the above Current Affairs article, but I think this is an interesting question to unpack. Robinson's argument is that the main obstacle for building new cities in the US is ideological rather than technological. You need a bit more central government planning if you're going to pull off a completely new urban center. And that's not how things are generally done in the US.

However, I think the real problem is that cities have powerful network effects that encourage centralization (even if some people are working from home). It's easy to look at a large country like Canada and say to yourself, "but look at all that empty land. How could we possibly have a housing shortage?" The reality is that most of our land is empty and cheap because it has little value. The jobs are in our cities and that's why Canada is a largely urban country.

Indeed, this is how most cities have emerged historically. They start with some sort of economic purpose, be it an important trade route, access to resources, or some other driver of prosperity. It is for this reason that urbanists like Alain Bertaud will tell you that, typically, urban infrastructure follows the market, and not the other way around. Because who wants to live in a city with nice infrastructure but no jobs? More importantly, how long can a city without a strong economic purpose even last?

Take for example Delhi . By 2030, Delhi is expected to be the largest city in the world. This has made it exceedingly difficult for the city to build enough new housing. So government there has been focusing on building new cities on the outskirts surrounding Delhi. These cities are referred to as "counter magnets", and their purpose is to intercept and literally attract new migrants before they reach Delhi, thereby relieving some of the urban pressures on the capital.

The fact that these cities are referred to as "counter magnets" speaks to exactly my point about centralization. It is recognition that Delhi is by far the biggest urban magnet. Because of this, these satellite cities haven't been as successful as everyone had initially hoped. Migrants seem to still want Delhi. You can build new housing, but without jobs and economic opportunity, people will continue to flock to the biggest urban magnets.

So sooner or later, you'll need to fix what isn't working.

Photo by Ravi Sharma on Unsplash

Last year was a pretty good year for people who own a home in the US (or in Canada and many other places). Current estimates peg the total value of US residential real estate at somewhere around $40 trillion .

But of course, a lot of this real estate has debt on it. The Federal Reserve considers this in their calculation of "homeowner's equity," and so the net number, as of the end of last year, was just over $26 trillion (see above chart). This is up from about $10 trillion in 2012, following the financial crisis.

Not surprisingly, a lot of these gains are accruing to a pretty specific demographic. According to City Observatory , about 67% of residential real estate in the US is owned by non-Hispanic white people. And about 44% of owners are 55 years or older.

Oddly enough, this also happens to be a demographic group with a disproportionate say over the kind of new housing that we're allowed to build in our cities. Scarcity is a very good thing when you already have and own some.

The Toronto mid-rise housing typology is known for architectural forms that often end up looking something like this:

https://twitter.com/JShamess/status/1501690673879265282?s=20&t=WY5-teRQorAaeUUSgKervg

The reason for this is the infamous "45-degree angular plane" that gets applied when new developments abut low-rise residential neighborhoods. It is a way to transition down and mitigate some of the impacts associated with this kind of infill development -- usually the concerns are overlook, privacy, and shadowing.

These are, of course, legitimate concerns. But here's the other side: Should we really be reducing the number of homes that we can build on our main streets by carving away area like this? Is overlook and shadowing more important than additional housing? Stepping buildings like this also makes constructing them more expensive and cumbersome. Are higher costs the goal?

It is for reasons like these that some people have been paying attention to the new Danforth Avenue Planning Study that went to Toronto City Council this week. Among other things, the study recommended the relaxation of the 45-degree angular plane standard along a portion of the Danforth.

This is certainly a step in the right direction. But in my humble opinion, it's not nearly enough for an area that will ultimately sit at the intersection of two subway lines.