Why Do Canadian Skylines Overperform Relative To Their Metro Populations?
 

I know I'm probably stating the obvious here, but just for some discussion.

I was looking at some wonderful skyline shots of Vancouver, Edmonton, Halifax, and Calgary recently and I just thought how small their respective populations are in comparison to their skylines, which actually betray their numbers. Only Montreal and Toronto seem about right to me, with Ottawa maybe underperforming a little bit..Having said that, Ottawa does have some nice density.Halifax has a metro of just around 500,000, Vancouver (+/-) 2.5 million, and Calgary just under 1.5 (+/-), yet you would think that they were 3x their respective sizes in comparison to what other metros in other countries look like, and yes we are talking metropolitan figures..I guess you could say the same thing about both Australian and New Zealand metros which also seem to also overperform in the skyline department.

I think the easy answer is the scarce hinterlands and rural areas to draw into their CMA numbers..There is lot of barren nothingness once you leave Canadian cities, so basically what you see is what you get in a nutshell..

Thoughts?

I find this a more interesting question outside of Toronto, which we've discussed ad nauseum here, and vancouver, where the answer is obvious (china)

eg, why is calgary building tons of new highrises, despite $5 oil and 25% office vacancies?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...tion-1.5393055

I kind of feel like if Calgary were in the US, and had the same current economic fundamentals, we would be seeing very little investment in real estate there..there may be some peculiarity with canadian financial markets that leads to the difference

with 1/4 of total office space vacant, Calgary basically has a 25% larger skyline that it should have, based on economic fundamentals.

It probably would..because Houston still attracts a lot of investment and it's been floundering from stagnant oil prices for the past few years.

Well the notion of barren nothingness when you leave a city is kinda absurd, particularly the big 3:

Toronto area:
hard to love Mississauga but 800,000 locals and hundreds of millions/billions of planned and u/c hi-rise growth. Thankfully the Absolut twins will temper future mistakes. Missie has 1.5 billion dollar project in the works.

Vaughn, Markham, Brampton - too much to count


Vancouver: Burnaby, Surrey etc. growing like weeds


Montreal: to lazy to document

I know this is a skyscraper thread but:

Calgary: heft and tall but a very small footprint of tall built form compared to Phillie, Boston etc.

Edmonton: glad you have a tall, call when u have another

Halifax: don't join the tall game, just keeping improving ur mid-rise aesthetic

Canadians are much more apt to live in large multifamily buildings. This (mostly) accounts for the difference.

Mostly it comes down to the demand+economics of cities where sprawl is limited, driving isn't encouraged, and transit is easy. Also critical mass.

Vancouver was building residential highrises in large numbers 50 years ago, long before immigration kicked up. The Downtown Peninsula was considered desirable, and a lack of in-town freeways made commuting harder. Due to "housing first" land use policies, housing has always taken precedence over office growth. A critical mass of housing and a relative lack of urban ills (better transit, healthcare, safety net) have resulted in an urban wonderland that continues to attract more people.

Suburban Vancouver has always relied on transit more than most US equivalents. Since the Skytrain lines have been built, walkability to stations has always been important, and worth paying a premium for. That's made land expensive, encouraging density. Since highrises have been allowed and encouraged and the economics work, they've proliferated there too.

Tight growth management has been a key to all this. Since there's very little sprawl, growth is concentrated inward more than in any US city. Even the SF area has the other side of the mountains, and Portland has Clark County WA's somewhat easier GM restrictions.

Then add much more acceptance of highrises. In the US, TODs might be limited to six stories that would be highrises in Canada.

PS, Calgary might be about to tank due to oil prices.

I don't know whether 'over perform' is the right way of putting it. Canadian (and Australian) metros build taller and denser than US metros of the same size due to urban planning policies. They also tend to have higher population growth rates. They need to build a lot to satisfy the demand for new housing, offices, institutional, etc. Canada and Australia have some of the highest population growth rates in the developed world. It follows that their metros grow quickly too.

Calgary started tanking a few years ago.

And yet they have 37 cranes building (presumably) Highrises

Canada didn't deliberately sabotage it's inner cities quite as much as the US did/does.

Australia and New Zealand are arguably better still. It's transit, high-rise multifamily, and all that. Just Commonwealth middle-class stuff.

The "overperform" thing is really just an artifact of Canada always looking across its southern border (and only there) for comparisons. I mean, why do Canadian transit systems underperform German or Swedish ones so badly, metro-to-comparable-metro? I feel like you bring that up and Canadians are all shrugs and like, "well, you know, inescapable byproduct of history/can't even really be compared". But you get the US falling back on whatever metric, and we're all "hmm...obvious cultural and political failure, a shame really."

More people using public transit, walking, and biking reduces the demand for parking in downtowns, freeing up space for development, allowing for a greater number of buildings to be built in a smaller area, and allowing for each building to have more non-parking levels above ground relative to the amount of parking levels below ground.

Halifax in 2011 had higher public transit usage than every US metropolitan area except New York, Washington, and San Francisco. So a dense core there is to be expected.


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United States:
United Kingdom:
Canada:

The differences in the built form of US cities is just the result of coordinated planning policies to encourage alternatives to driving and the lack of investment in public transit there compared to other countries.

The Calgary metropolitan area is basically just Calgary. The development can be more easily directed a certain way. Compare that to a typical US metropolitan area which can have dozens or even hundreds of different municipalities. That political fragmentation and lack of unity makes development there much harder to control.

And Halifax transit sucks. I realize now that I have no idea what transit in, like, Toledo or Wichita is like. Last time I used Halifax transit, I thought "this is really Middle America-style stuff", but I guess no.

Are these two cityscapes all that different? I think people exaggerate the commonwealth vs US divide.

How does the first one "outperform"?

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...cfe963c2_h.jpg262-flkr by ScootaCoota, on Flickr

https://live.staticflickr.com/4228/3...e7eef474_h.jpgNKC_1466 by Nick Chong, on Flickr

Halifax transit is bad but it's quite different from the US. In Halifax there are lots of fairly busy milk run type bus routes. In the US those routes either wouldn't exist or maybe one or two of them would be a streetcar that would be nice but wouldn't connect to much else.

I think the cause-effect relationship is that lots of people live in the urban core and in multifamily housing, and vehicles are relatively unaffordable. This drives demand for transit, and causes people to take transit in Canadian cities even when it's not that great.

Halifax has been growing a lot lately but the transit isn't improving much. There are so many plans, like commuter rail or fast ferries, but nothing is ever built except more incremental bus infrastructure. Canadian cities are unfortunately pretty unambitious and risk-averse when it comes to infrastructure.

Wow, the UK actually has pretty terrible transit share for Western European standards. Really only London and Scotland perform as expected.

Canada (and other countries) did not destroy their cites with urban freeways to the same extent

Wrong.

Vancouver had an impressive skyline for its size long before the money started pouring in from China in 2012. The West End went up when China was still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. The Vancouver model (downtown high rise living in "point towers") preceded that capital flight out of China by decades.

Has Chinese money greatly influenced high-end to luxury high-rise developments within the region over the last decade? Of course it has, but Vancouver was already out of land, had implemented the TOD-style of development, and had an impressive skyline long before Xi's policies started to drive the tidal wave of Chinese money out west.

Also, as SIGSEGV and mhays mentioned, Vancouver residents blocked the development of a large freeway that would have changed the course and culture of the city and its downtown forever. Because of this, Vancouver's downtown remained walkable and a desirable place to live.

Vancouver has had a history of high-rise living since the 60s, and whether Chinese money came or went, we'd still be building high rises in and around downtown.

Americans generally don't want to live in residential towers unless they are luxury buildings or in prime locations. Suburban towers, like what you'd see in Toronto, is not appealing to an average American.

I thought I'd like this lifestyle but eventually grew tired of bringing up groceries and taking garbage/recyclables to the dumpster. And it wasn't even a tall building. I can't imagine dealing with this and a kid. Going up and down elevators is a nuisance, like living in a hotel.

Yes, but you are answering someone who has made a point of hammering ad nauseam his view that Vancouver's skyline is the product of Chinese money, exclusively.

You could also tell him that there were a couple of Chinese Canadians in BC before the nineties.