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Saturday’s Grope & Flail has a fine article by architect Jack Diamond on the whole suburbia and sprawl thing. It’s behind the subscription wall, but here are a few excerpts:
Most new urban growth occurs on the perimeter of urban centres, and does so at densities that render residents of those areas automobile-dependent — such low densities make public transit uneconomic. Paradoxically, this also means that significant sectors of the population are rendered immobile. Those who don’t own cars, or who are too young or old to drive, have no alternative means of transportation. Automobile dependency also acts as a social centrifuge, segregating land use and socio-economic groupings into discernibly distinct areas. Indeed, urban poverty is now centred in suburban growth, where it is largely invisible, distant from inaccessible, but desperately needed jobs, social services and retail facilities. The rioting in Paris suburbs is an instance of the results of this festering, but unrecognized, problem.
… Retail concentration in shopping malls does little to encourage small, start-up enterprises that the more mixed and individually owned Main Streets foster.
Most significantly, the cost of providing services to such areas exceeds the tax revenue derived from low-density development. In an analysis of one such area in Southwestern Ontario, it was found that for every dollar received in real-estate tax, $1.40 was needed to service such low-density development.
This form of urban development has been made possible, and indeed encouraged, by … what amounts to subsidies that land speculators and low-density developers receive from provincial and federal governments in the form of highway construction, and the provision of trunk-line sewers, water supply and other services. The burden of this cost is not borne by the beneficiaries, but by all taxpayers.
So, what can be done to change current development trends? And will those who have the power to initiate such change do so before it is too late?
The means to make these changes is first to institute full-cost pricing. Let the market forces exert their logic: If each increment of suburban growth were to bear the full unit-cost of expressways, trunk water supply and other services, the market would adjust to more appropriate urban forms. That this would create densities capable of supporting public transit, creating a richer mix of land uses, would be an added benefit to affordable development.
Nowadays, development occurs at the extremes of density — either vast expanses of single or semi-detached housing (and low-density commercial uses), or high rise/high density condominiums. There is a wide variety of satisfying housing in between these two extremes, from town houses and duplex dwelling to low-rise apartment buildings of about six to eight storeys. Ingenuity, when confronted with necessity, will out.
A.J. Diamond is a principal of Diamond and Schmitt Architects Inc. He was a commissioner of the Greater Toronto Task Force that made recommendations on governance, taxation, land use and transportation for the GTA.