What makes a successful city? The list of things you could name is long, but the first item has to be density. No density? No city.
Only where a lot of people are living close together can you stroll streets filled with block after block of shops, restaurants and other services. In low-density neighbourhoods, that kind of walkable streetscape is impossible, because there aren't enough people to make those businesses viable, and the ratio of cars to people, and road to sidewalk, is too high. Without density, you're in suburbia.
This week, Torontonians were transfixed by what was going on in Margaret Atwood's backyard. The novelist, and her well-heeled neighbours on Admiral Road in the Annex neighbourhood, were pushing the city to block a proposed eight-storey condo on the street behind them. Graeme Gibson, Ms. Atwood's husband, called it "close to a brutal and arrogant assault on a community." Grocery-store magnate Galen Weston Jr. wrote that the neighbourhood would "no longer be the ideal place for our young family."
Ms. Atwood took to Twitter to challenge those who disagreed. She found a lot of challengers, and quickly became the city's favourite social-media punching bag.
Have some sympathy for her and the residents of Admiral Road. If you were in their shoes, you'd be making the same arguments about what you don't want in your backyard. Across Toronto, entire neighbourhoods of homeowners do, all the time. They often don't even have to complain to the city; zoning generally blocks the sort of development that has folks on Admiral so upset.
If you lived on their street, or one of thousands of other similar, albeit less expensive ones, you'd be on their side.
And you wouldn't be right, either.
Cities are places where private interests and the public good are so closely related that they're basically locked in a feedback loop. Admiral Road is one of the more expensive areas in Toronto – in part because of its large, century-old, single-family homes. But what makes those homes valuable is their location. You can walk to the downtown of North America's fourth largest metropolis, or to one of several nearby subway stops, or take a short stroll to Yorkville and Bloor Street's Mink Mile, Canada's highest of high streets. It's suburbia in the middle of urban density.
That city-defining density is why a house on Admiral is worth many millions of dollars, and the same home in, say, Belleville is not. In fact, the more the city grows, and the more it correctly allows huge new office and condo towers to be built just a few hundred yards away, the more valuable homes on Admiral become.
Someone buying a house on Admiral is paying a premium to be in the heart of the city. They want all that density to be close – just not too close. Not in my backyard, literally. The same goes for homeowners across Toronto, and zoning rules largely support them.
That creates a less-than-ideal situation. Population growth means that the Greater Toronto Area faces enormous housing demand; to meet that demand, a lot of housing is being built. But the rules make it difficult for developers to build anything other than condominium skyscrapers in the few areas zoned for them, and low-rise houses everywhere else.
As a result, the GTA has sprawl in the 905, and a bumper crop of condo towers in the 416. But tall towers are basically only allowed downtown, or in a few designated transportation nodes, or in areas where developers have assembled a large enough piece of land to ensure that there are no low-rise neighbours. Whole neighbourhoods of condos have been built on what used to be industrial land.
What Toronto isn't building much of is anything between the extremes of very tall and very flat. There aren't many new mid-rises in established low-rise neighbourhoods. Even on main streets like Bloor and Danforth, beneath which there is a subway line, for heavens sake, it's difficult to build the kind of eight-story condo proposed on Davenport Road, the wide commercial street behind Admiral.
The reason these kinds of mid-rise buildings are almost always opposed is the definition of NIMBYism. A new condo almost anywhere along Bloor St. will back onto a sea of two-storey homes; the opposition of those homeowners is not hard to understand.
What is less easy to understand is why zoning, instead of trying to strike a balance, seems to be so heavily tilted in favour of the status quo. The answer may have to do with the planning disasters of the 1950s and 60s. People came to distrust the promises of developers, architects and city planners, and with good reason. In the name of progress, those brainiacs nearly destroyed the North American city.
The utopia they tried to build involved bulldozing whole neighbourhoods for "urban improvement," plowing highways through the centre of the town and replacing narrow, walkable streets with car-friendly boulevards flanked by high-rises set on large lots of grass and parking. It was a disastrous attempt to suburbanize cities, but at first only non-experts like Jane Jacobs recognized that.
It's why anyone pushing big ideas to improve cities has to start with an abundance of modesty. A previous generation of improvers was so immodest, and so utterly wrong. But rethinking the bias against mid-rise infill housing, and instead encouraging limited opportunities to bring new people and new density to old neighbourhoods, strikes us a modest approach.
A little over a generation ago, planners bulldozed more than a few places like Admiral Road without a thought. A generation later, zoning treats these same places like holy and untouchable relics. There has to be some happy medium between those extremes.