Ibbotson nails it : " Suddenly, the idea of thousands upon thousands of people wasting hours each day funnelling into city centres in the morning and then back home at night seems faintly ridiculous. Who wants to go back to doing that five days a week?
If the future of the city involves more people working at least part of the time from home, housing will have to adapt. As it turns out, the detached suburban house is quite well suited to the task.
People downtown grapple with issues such as congestion, homelessness, affordability. They assign a high priority to combatting global warming. They seek redistributive solutions: social services, subsidized housing, anti-racism initiatives, bike lanes, a carbon tax. "
But the priorities of many suburbanites – including the 51 per cent of immigrants in Greater Toronto who live in suburbs – are aspirational rather than redistributive; they are more interested in getting ahead than in giving back. They don’t ride bikes between November and April, and they don’t seek to defund the police. As for global warming: pickup trucks.
If your response is that we must must get suburbanites to change their way of living and thinking, how do you plan to win their votes?
People in city centres should be thinking less about compelling suburbs to change, and more about what they’re going to do with all those empty downtown office towers and the shuttered stores in the malls beneath them, now that suburban workers are spending at least part of their work week at home.
They might ask how they’re going to get suburbanites to come downtown to shop and eat and see a movie or a play if they don’t work there much any more, cool new restaurants are opening in their own neighbourhood and everything they want to see is streamed."
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/poli...-suburb-which/