Canadian Homes in 2030: The 4-Bedroom Apartment
Canada is a vast and sparsely populated country outside the major urban centres. Compared to cities on other continents, Canadian cities are characterized by sprawl because they were designed to optimize driver rather than pedestrian experience.
On balance, urban and suburban sprawl has made residents less satisfied. One study found that adding 20 minutes to your commute makes you as miserable as receiving a 19% pay cut. We believe that because of climate change, Canadian cities will accelerate their densification.
The battle lines will be drawn to determine what type of density will be built.
The Current Situation
Throughout Canada’s 153-year history a rising share of Canadians have chosen to live in cities (census metropolitan areas or CMAs). In 2018, the percentage of Canadians living in cities reached 80%. Canada's three most populous CMAs—Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver—are now home to over one-third of all Canadians.
At the same time, Canada’s working population needs to grow perpetually in order to balance the government books.
Today, density in Canadian cities is concentrated in the downtown cores. While Canadian cities may look or feel busy to downtown residents, Canada’s major cities still have lower population densities than their international counterparts. That is to say, Canada’s metro areas have the physical capacity to accommodate far more housing units and residents per square kilometre than they have today without compromising our quality of life.
Urban Design: Upward or outward?
Metropolitan regions across Canada now face persistent pressures to grow outward—building new suburbs and subdivisions—and upward—by accommodating more residents in townhomes, low-rise and high-rise apartments.
Outward growth is reaching geographic constraints from mountains, water bodies, or protected rural land.
Sprawl is also being choked off by highway and parking capacity. Even if we acquired land to add lanes to highways, there isn’t enough parking in the downtown cores to accommodate the additional cars. Car culture has reached its peak.
As a result, most Canadian cities have begun to grow upwards with transit-oriented developments.
While some residents resist changing the look or character of their neighbourhood, higher density is inevitable because Canada’s population must continue to grow.
It would be tragic if Canada built new neighbourhoods today that are inadequate for the needs of 2040, and need to be torn down after 20 years and redeveloped.
We should figure out how to design sustainable cities with ‘good density’ that will stand the test of time.
What is ‘good density’?
Ideally, good density improves our quality of life, reduces harm to the environment, and solves our housing needs for a minimum of three generations (roughly 60 years) without requiring a material upgrade or replacement.
Fighting Climate Change
Canadian cities are already dealing with the impact of a changing climate in the form of extreme weather events, increased flooding, rising sea levels and extended wildfire seasons. Without effective action, the risk of climate-related events will only worsen.
Despite occupying less than 1% of our land, urban areas are responsible for more than 70% of carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change. Our car-oriented infrastructure makes it difficult for individual residents to make climate-friendly choices. As well, most family-sized homes are single-family houses that have poor energy efficiency and can’t be adequately served by mass transit.
To reduce carbon emissions, we are highly dependent on government policy and infrastructure spending. This is why many Canadian cities are implementing green strategies, re-zoning for ‘missing middle’ low-rise housing, investing in renewable energy, developing protected cycling routes, and public transit.
The common variable in most initiatives that reduce carbon emissions is stopping further urban sprawl. Car-centric sprawl raises the pollution emitted per person, whereas designing walkable cities with well-networked mass-transit decreases emissions and improves the environment.
Urban densification helps cities become more climate and water resilient by reducing the amount of infrastructure exposed to climate change impacts. After resiliency is built-up, cities can re-deploy resources to strengthen older infrastructure.
Quality of Life
Livability and quality of life is the sum of the factors that add up to a community’s quality of life—including the built and natural environments, economic prosperity, social stability and equity, educational opportunity, and cultural, entertainment and recreation possibilities.
Looking at other high-income nations for comparison, it suggests that higher population densities don’t need to come at the expense of quality of life. In fact, Canada currently has a population deficit that threatens social programs and the livability of its cities.
Vancouver is often touted as one of the most beautiful and liveable cities in the world. This isn’t because of a lack of density or its scenic glass skyscrapers, but rather its spectacular mountains, wildlife-filled waters and lush rain forests. Equally important, Vancouver urban planners are committed to finding ways to continually enhance the livability of the city.
Core Housing Needs
By reducing sprawl and cutting down transit times, building density can provide an abundance of housing for residents. When supply is high enough, prices of modest homes become affordable to families with modest means. Building more family sized apartments helps to address our core housing needs.
Designing Neighbourhoods with a Sense of Belonging
People long for the days when they knew their neighbours and local merchants. Those social connections were a byproduct of pre-highway, streetcar dependent, 1930s urban design. When you are a quick walk or ride away from stores, you are able to support smaller merchants whom you get to know over time. This is juxtaposed, to driving to your local big-box store or supermarket.
As well, if you often visit local merchants on your way to and from work, you will also frequently cross paths with your neighbours, and that creates more frequent opportunities to establish relationships.
Every city in Canada can increase its liveability through design and urban planning.
Some of the principles cities can follow include having streets full of people and activity, ensuring the city is compact and not sprawling, and embracing their unique character. The implementation of each of these principles is relatively easy if the residents of a city and its government can agree in the long-run on what makes their city attractive and unique.
Better Amenities
A higher tax-base allows your city to invest in better amenities like parks and community centres. These provide more opportunities for residents and their children to cultivate hobbies and fitness while also reinforcing the feeling of community.
With a larger tax base and revenues, cities also have more resources for education, healthcare and infrastructure—all of which improve living standards for the average resident. At the same time, dense cities have far greater resources to support low-income and marginalized groups in safe locations with suitable infrastructure and institutional frameworks.
What are the risks of poorly planned urban density?
Higher Carbon Emissions
Higher Carbon Emissions hurt the environment, and they also cause asthma and respiratory disease.
When cities pursue urban densification built around the continued use of vehicles—rather than being walkable, mixed-use, compact, and well-served by transit—it can result in a similar level of carbon emissions and environmental damage as urban sprawl. This issue becomes even more salient if homes, workplaces, and commerce are co-located because residents will have to use their vehicles for routine and longer trips.
The link between urban pollution and respiratory diseases is well known. Generally, urbanites are exposed to between 10 and 25 parts per billion of ozone, where an increase of three parts per billion equates to smoking an extra pack of cigarettes each day. This means that even moving from a low-pollution area into one of the cleaner cities could still increase the risk of respiratory diseases.
As well, cities that don’t make investments in energy-efficient buildings, public spaces and resiliency will fail to adequately address the impacts of climate change. This consequently puts low-income and marginalized groups concentrated in vulnerable locations at an increased risk.
Mental Health Concerns
Psychologists report that people living in cities are more likely to report feelings of depression and anxiety.
Noise, traffic, long commutes, and pollution can impact on sleep quality and physiological stress. They are primarily a legacy of 20th century combustion engine car-oriented urban design thinking.
If more cars were electric, and there were fewer cars on the road, then there would be less noise, traffic, and pollution.
Once again, we are dependent on forward-thinking politicians do create policies and design frameworks that support healthy city living.
Spread of Disease
Some researchers suggest that cities are at centre of coronavirus pandemic. This has left many people questioning the relationship between urban density and healthy cities. In Canada, the highest volume of cases are clustered in Montreal and Toronto but, of course, these cities have some of the largest populations. Are you more likely to catch COVID-19 in a big city?
The relationship between urban density and the spread of disease will continue to be debated.
Hong Kong, a city known for having one of the densest populations in the world, has avoided strict lockdown measures and recorded less than 4600 cases and 70 deaths. Whereas low density rural communities across the US have some of the highest rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the country.
Some of the reasons Hong Kong has guarded against an outbreak is certainly related to the experience of the government and residents in dealing with the spread of disease and the implementation of effective measures.
The rural American counties with the highest per capita case rates, in contrast, had virtually no prior experience or measures in place to guard against an outbreak.
Perhaps most importantly, the workforces in the majority of these rural counties worked in nearby meatpacking plants or prisons where the virus took hold and spread abundantly. These workers then brought the virus to their communities when they returned home. Once a community had an outbreak, it was increasingly difficult to flatten the curve without strict lockdowns and prolonged social distancing.
Looking at cities across China that used the same measures to tackle the spread of COVID-19, it appears to support that the likelihood of widespread infections in a city is related to its proximity to an outbreak rather than its population density.
In some cases, higher densities could even be a blessing rather than a curse in fighting epidemics as cities often need a certain population density to offer high-grade facilities and services to their residents. For instance, in dense urban areas where the coverage of high-speed internet and door-to-door delivery services are conveniently available, it is easier for residents to stay at home and avoid unnecessary contact with others. If the worst should happen, cities offer higher-grade healthcare facilities, faster ambulance response times, and they have most of the intensive care beds (ICU).
Design can play an important role in helping cities densify and cope with future pandemics. Architect Bjarke Ingels, for example, has a plan to fix urban living through rearranged living spaces and redesigned thoroughfares. As well, many companies are reimagining their office space by making short-term fixes and long-term design upgrades that put hygiene at the heart of workplace planning.
On August 18, 2020, there were 142 unresolved cases reported by Toronto Public Health and 158 cases reported by Peel Public Health. Toronto Public Health Serves 2.9 million residents, including the city core (1 case per 20,000 residents), while Peel Public Health serves 1.3 million residents who live in the suburbs of Toronto (1 case per 8,000 residents). Based on this data, you are twice as likely to contract COVID-19 in the Toronto suburbs than in the city core.
20% to 30% more residents in 2030 without sprawl
If the Canadian population grows between 2 and 3 percent annually for 10 years, then we will be housing 20% to 30% more residents. We could continue to convert farmland and forests into suburban subdivisions, or we can grow up.
When compared to major cities in other first world countries, Canada’s largest cities are not dense. Up until now, Canadian cities have concentrated ultra-high density in the downtown cores but have struggled to develop holistic urban plans that would be relevant for more than 5 years. Our population continues to grow, and Canadian cities will inevitably pursue further densification in the coming years.
In the future, you can expect to see more family-sized three and four-bedroom apartments on the market in Canadian cities. Whether those family-sized apartments are in high, mid, or low-rise buildings will depend on the philosophy of your local municipality. Local elections have never been so important.
