evandyk
Senior Member
I'm not particularly hopeful either. I'm hoping for a long period of stagnation at best.
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Admiral Beez
Superstar
We need to stymie demand as well as increase supply. That means Canada needs to slow immigration so that the influx matches up with housing stock. We can start by demanding where landed immigrants can settle and reside - but if we don’t have the stones for that, we must reduce the immigration numbers to match housing stock.
Undead
Senior Member
Thankfully prices are already down:
The problem is that our economy relies on immigration for cheap labour to do the jobs Canadians won't; and as new consumers (which is why big biz is so pro-immigration). I don't see this changing any time soon.
That being said, the immigration rate has been more or less steady for many years/decades. But housing prices really took off only after 2010. So there's hope that raising interest rates and loosening zoning will help.
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kEiThZ
Superstar
Globe and Mail had a great article by Oliver Moore about how Mississauga is depopulating. Their strict protection of single family homes means a lot of homes now have empty nesters in them. And there's increasingly insufficient populations in these neighborhoods to support services like schools, or local businesses. Yet, they keep shoveling density on to Hurontario. The madness of it all.....
The highlights are on their Twitter thread:
The highlights are on their Twitter thread:
evandyk
Senior Member
This isn't happening in Toronto in the aggregate, because of King E, King W and Yonge St, but is happening across most of Toronto as well, particularly the well-off neighbourhoods like the Annex, Leslieville, Danforth, etc.
evandyk
Senior Member
LOL. I had only started reading the article when I posted this, and there's a chart that makes this exact point.
afransen
Senior Member
I think we're better off having a more coherent strategy about building housing, and livable urban areas, more quickly and efficiently. Canada has absurdly long approval timelines for building permits and zoning that makes expensive high rise development the only viable way of building dense housing.
Affordability improves if we can make cities more walkable and bikeable so car ownership is not required.
Admiral Beez
Superstar
IDK, I see an inverse relationship between affordability and walkability/bikeability. Any neighbourhood in Toronto that has a high walkability score will also have low affordability.
The main thing that impacts affordability is supply/demand.
evandyk
Senior Member
This is true, but owning a car (and also driving it a lot) is also a pretty major expense.
afransen
Senior Member
This is what I was getting at. Owning a car can be 10-20% of a lower income household's budget, so being able to eliminate the car, or go from two cars to one car can go a long way to affording nominally higher cost housing.
I think walkable/bikeable neighbourhoods trade at such a premium partly because of this, and also that they are in such short supply. If we did a better job providing this type of neighbourhood it would become more accessible.
Admiral Beez
Superstar
Good points, but isn’t the horse already out of the stable, the die cast, so to speak? The outer city and the suburbs are fully developed with car dependent housing. How do we go about changing somewhere like the Rouge area in Scarborough (Walkability score 42 out of 100) or Princess-Rosethorn in Etobicoke (scored 44) into something like my Cabbagetown neighbourhood and its 93 score? This isn’t Sim City where we can just wipe the map.
Mind you, walkability or not, we still have two cars and a motorcycle. Though one car hasn’t moved in weeks.
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Undead
Senior Member
Most ROWs in the suburbs are so wide that building wider sidewalks and decent bike lanes shouldn't be difficult. These projects just need to be bundled with every road rebuilding. Repurpose the useless grassy shoulders for protected bike lanes, diet each vehicle lane in favour of the sidewalk and we've got progress.
afransen
Senior Member
Guessing that you own those vehicles because affordability is not a problem.
Zoning reform allowing more small-scale commercial uses and residential intensification in residential zones will help. It's going to take time though. Not sure these are even the worst neighbourhoods, as they are not completely cul-de-sac.
evandyk
Senior Member
Yeah, there's obviously a huge challenge in re-engineering stuff, given we spent the last 75 years building sprawl. Never mind suburbs around Toronto, where you have some transit options, what about places like Peterborough or Brockville, where you literally cannot go anywhere without a car? EV's will help, but they're not a magic bullet, we need to make a lot of incremental change.
Admiral Beez
Superstar
But sidewalks and bike lanes to where? Streets lacking sidewalks entirely aside, lack of sidewalk width is not the reason they’re not used. There’s no where to walk to.
By contrast, from my front door I have the Parliament Street shopping area within a two min walk, two subway stations, two streetcar lines and three bus routes within a five min walk, four or five of the nation’s top medical centres, the Eaton Centre, the Carlton Cinema, Massey Hall and much more within a 20 min walk. Within five mins I can walk to a dozen non-chain, non-fast food restaurants and cafes. There’s little point in having a good sidewalks if there’s no where to walk to.
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