Shoshanna Saxe is an associate professor in civil and mineral engineering at the University of Toronto and the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure.
The issue of affordable housing is increasingly dominating political debate across Canada, and that is sparking dramatic changes in our governments’ policies. For better and for worse, the discourse has been used to justify laws that would have been unimaginable not so long ago, including Toronto’s legalization of rooming houses and Ontario’s terrible dismantling of chunks of the Greenbelt.
However, one essential feature of affordable housing has consistently been overlooked: the critical need for good, well-designed and well-maintained public space, from parks to streets to cultural centres, in support of that mission.
One of the easiest and most efficient ways to build affordable housing is to build a higher number of smaller units. They are cheaper to build and maintain, and they require less land, less construction materials, less labour per unit, and less time to build. But too many Canadians – and too many policy makers – believe that the “good life” is only achievable in a single-family detached home with a garage.
While this thinking is understandable on an individual basis, it’s destructive when it’s the foundation of our land-use and budget policies. The average size of homes in Canada has doubled over the past 50 years, while the number of people living in each one has shrunk – and with a limited amount of land available, especially in desirable city centres, home prices have skyrocketed. To achieve affordable housing, we need to adjust our expectations.
Quality public space makes living in smaller homes more appealing by making it possible to live well in less space. Excellent parks and playgrounds mean that people won’t require a backyard. Good beaches and recreation centres free us from wanting a pool of our own. First-rate public transit and bike lanes diminish the need for cars and for space-sapping, expensive garages in which to park them.
Smaller homes also drive communitywide affordability. Building homes close together or on top of each other results in higher density, which brings benefits such as more customers for local stores, a larger tax base on which to sustain infrastructure like sewers, and more riders to justify frequent, reliable public transit.
This has long been the classic trade-off of urban living: For less space at home, city dwellers get more and better shared amenities. When a lack of access to city spaces forces people to rely on private amenities, the trust in this trade-off is broken and people tend to flee. Inadequate or inaccessible public space incentivizes those who have the money to opt out and buy as much private space as possible; this further reduces the user base, which inevitably diminishes the communal space even more.
This can lead to what the economist Kenneth Galbraith called “private affluence and public squalor,” which he diagnosed as a key ill of Western society. He urged us to object to the building of communities where people drive increasingly fancy cars on increasingly crumbling streets, or live in increasingly large homes with increasingly unreliable sewers. Instead – to riff on Mr. Galbraith’s concept – we need to aim for public affluence and private sufficiency.
While the COVID-19 pandemic drove a renaissance in public space – open streets for cycling, high demand for public skating rinks, busy beaches and sidewalk cafés – it also prompted a dramatic violation in the public-private social contract: months of fenced-off playgrounds, fines for sitting on park benches, cancelled public events, closed public washrooms and turned-off water fountains.
We need to rebuild our investment and trust in public space if we want to get to functional affordability.
But Toronto’s 2023 budget, for example, proposes cutting public-transit funding to approximately $325 per person a year, which will lead to service reductions, higher fares and an expected backlog of $6-billion in required maintenance over the next decade. If the city were to even triple that funding number, Torontonians wouldn’t just enjoy a dramatic improvement in service – we would also still each be paying less than the annual average cost of owning one car between four people, reducing demand for cars in the first place and creating space for new housing.
Similarly, if each Toronto couple living with children put just 10 per cent of the cost of Amazon’s cheapest backyard playset ($2,189, at time of writing) toward our often understaffed and undermaintained public parks system, that would be over $68-million – more than the entire state of good repair budget for Toronto’s parks department.
While the long-standing legal hurdles to building affordably sized homes are finally starting to give way, it’s not enough to simply legalize new forms of housing – we have to make it functional and desirable, too. Good public space will not singlehandedly solve the affordability crisis, but it is an important part of a new way of building and living in Canada that would ultimately be cheaper for everyone.
Unfortunately, it seems to be currently beneath our consideration. We need to change that urgently, because the quality of life in Canadian communities over the next decade will be largely influenced by the choices we make now, around how we invest in the public realm. We will only get the future we build today.