Learning Housing Lessons From London

Five years ago, Nancy and I visited London (the UK one, not the Ontario namesake). We had a wonderful time and would like to go back (perhaps next year). I was struck by several things, among them the density of the city and the ubiquity of the transit network. Yes, sometimes it felt crazy crowded, particularly in the central city at the end of the day, but so does Toronto. Despite that, London's traffic never seemed to hit the insane congestion levels that now seem ubiquitous in Toronto. 

As Matt Gurney points out in this excellent opinion piece from TVO, London crams 600,000 more people into half the area of Toronto proper. Yet they manage to do this with human-scale housing and neighbourhoods dotted with small parks, busy ground-floor retail, and with more bike lanes and wider sidewalks. Oh, and subways. Lots of subways. And buses. 

Before we moved to the suburban wilds of Pickering, we lived in a triplex in North Toronto. There were three large apartments. We had as much square footage as in our current townhouse on one floor of a building that's about the same size as some of the single-family monster homes that are gradually replacing the original homes in our neighbourhood. 

Toronto's central core is getting denser, but the buildings are giant, expensive condos. Even Pickering is going condo crazy. From my patio, I can see the crane constructing a thirty-two storey building that will eventually be part of a seven-builing complex near the GO station. The few open areas are being filled with new subdivisions full of single-family homes crammed into small lots with two-car garages because you have to drive kilometers to buy a loaf of bread. In the meantime, our antediluvian provincial government plans on building more sprawl in the formerly protected greenbelt farming lands surrounding our cities.

(I am aware of the concept of so-called 15-minute cities and will have a blog post about that in the near future.)

I'll wrap this up with a quote from Gurney's article. Sadly, he's right.

So, no, dear reader, I’m not seeing London only through rose-coloured glasses. There are real problems here — worse than ours, in many important ways. But the city is living proof that high-density urban living, at least relative to Toronto, can be delightful. ...

It feels almost academic to bring it up. It won’t happen. And even if we actually did have all the right policies and the political will to stick with them, we’d need generations to do it. Even so. All the problems we have with housing, all the concerns we have with pressure caused by immigration, all our worries over paving over the Greenbelt — we could buy ourselves decades if Toronto were only as dense as London, a wonderful city. Instead, we’ll get what we have: a booming population in those high-density areas where the politicians permit it and a falling one in the single-family-home areas where owning a home guarantees that one will eventually be rich.

I’m done lamenting it. What’s the point? But it’s still worth noting now and then, isn’t it?