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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
Yes... THAT'S THE POINT. Most of the city is post-war suburbia despite containing the inner less than 1/2 of the metro area population. That's not a reasonable way to use your land if you want to both grow quickly and not sprawl outward.
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Post-war suburbia is always going to be post-war suburbia. Not a reasonable way to use land? What are you suggesting, that they demolish all of Scarborough? These are suburbs, some on the edge of the urban area next to farmland, how can they be expected to be as dense as Brooklyn? Is anyone here now convinced that Toronto doesn't support enough construction of multi-family housing because the density of its post-war suburbs are lower than that of Brooklyn?
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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
I'm not cherry picking; you just don't like the implications and are desperate to make up any nonsense excuse to discount them.  I was very careful to use appropriate examples, if anything erring on the side of being overly generous to Toronto by bypassing Manhattan while including the old city of Toronto in with the current Toronto proper. If we were to do a truly accurate comparison it would be to NYC proper vs Toronto city proper, both of which contain just under half their metro area's population, or the old City of Toronto compared to Manhattan, the centre of each city. But my intention isn't to compare it to NYC in particular but rather to simply illustrate the density potential. And I didn't use Manhattan since the density doesn't need to be anywhere near that high. It just needs to be not low on a global scale. |
You are cherrypicking, comparing 50% of the Toronto urban area plus farmland to 10% of the NYC urban area to make Toronto seem more oriented to low density and single-family housing, even though density and high-rise living in the Toronto urban area is no less than the NYC urban area. Multi-family dwellings, not SFHs, are what dominate the housing supply of Toronto and its suburbs.
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Either way, the number of highrises isn't the relevant metric. What's important is the number of people the city is able to house relative to its available land. The fact that Toronto has dense areas and a higher highrise proportion is irrelevant to the point which is that the city and metro area aren't dense enough to reasonably house the number of people it's being asked to house.
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If too many SFHs and a reluctance to build multi-family housing is an issue, then the amount of high rise construction is certainly relevant.
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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
INo one is reducing it to one issue as i acknowledged that it's a multi-faceted problem on my initial post.
I called you out because you're claiming that other people are denying the role of important factors in order to overly focus on one, when in reality you want to deny the role of that one important factor and focus only on others. YOU'RE the one not willing to consider all facets of the problem.
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I just suggested Toronto use its thousands of post-war suburban towers-in-a-park as opportunities for intensification, but somehow I'm denying the need for intensification. Right.
Density might not be the main factor affecting housing prices, and SFHs vs. multi-family might not be the main factor affecting density. To reduce both the problem of high housing costs to a problem of low density, and the problem of low density to a problem of too many SFHs, and thus the problem of high housing costs to a problem too many SFHs, is just a good example what's wrong with policy-making and political debate these days. It's always simple problems and simple solutions.