Toronto, Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago. All of these are cities in North America where there is an scarcity of housing.
There are many advantage to living in a big city:
- Better job opportunities
- More efficient public transportation
- Opportunity to meet with a greater variety of people
- Great diversity of cultural events
- Greater variety of restaurants
- Better medical service
Living in a big city is better for the environment
It’s common sense, 100 people living in an apartment building, do less damage to the environment than 100 people spread over a horizontal mass of land. Larger, denser cities are cleaner and more energy efficient than smaller cities, suburbs, and even small towns. Ecologists have found that by concentrating their populations in smaller areas, cities and metros decrease human damage to the land.
There is great resistance by local dwellers towards bigger cities
Yet, there is a lot of resistance to building bigger cities and taller buildings. In Montreal, in the area where I live, it’s illegal to build anything taller than a triplex. At the same time there is a housing crisis; the rents are high and there is a vacancy rate of less than 2%. People are having a hard time finding affordable housing in the areas where they would like to live.
Empowered homeowners want to restrict the influx of new comers to their neighbourhoods, and local government’s lack or courage to introduce legislation that would allow cities to grow to their full potential. Other than parks in the cities, all other restriction should be eliminated. Builders should be allow to build buildings as tall as it’s safe to build them and single family zoning should be changed so that more multi floor building can be built.
Of course, if you are a single family owner, you will fight like hell to keep the supply of housing low in your neighbourhood, so that the value of your house will go up. There are many ways to do that. For example, there are organizations that fight to preserve old building because of the cultural value they bring to the city. This is FAKE caring, prevent cities from providing newer, taller, better buildings for their inhabitants.
Self serving organizations are preventing the growth of the cities
Many organizations claim that increasing the size of a city could be damaging to the already fragile environment. Those environmental concerns, are one-sided, because they ask only about what happens if you build on the local environment. They don’t ask what happens in the global environment if you don’t build.
If you don’t build higher buildings in Toronto, Vancouver, or San Francisco, people are going to build horizontally on the outskirts of those cities, and thus creating more damage to the environment.
Make your vote count in the next municipal election
Next time, when then next municipal elections come about, we should ask the candidates about their housing and zoning policies, and vote for those who are in favour of building bigger and taller cities.