The Centre for Urban Research and Land Development at Ryerson University recently published the following chart on their blog:
It’s a look at population growth across a few North American cities, broken down according to natural increases, net internal migration from other parts of the respective country, and net immigration from outside of the respective country.
When you sum up the pluses and minuses shown above, you get to population growth numbers that look like this:
Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta are monsters in terms of population growth. They’re obviously smaller than New York and Los Angeles, and so on a percentage basis they are really adding a lot of people. Much of this has to do with the ease in which housing can be added in those cities and their relative affordability.
Toronto is competitive with New York and Los Angeles in terms of an absolute number, but again our base is smaller so on a percentage basis we are growing faster. The big story with Toronto is our dependence on immigration to grow.
The one city on this list that might surprise some of you is Chicago. Toronto and Chicago share many similarities and are often compared. But when you look at how the Chicago metropolitan area is shedding people, you see that, at least in this regard, it’s in structural decline.
Image: Financial District, Downtown Toronto, Canada by Yeonju SEONG on 500px
Today I learned about something new called 2030 Districts. They are: “designated urban areas committed to meeting the energy, water, and transportation emissions reduction targets of the 2030 Challenge for Planning.”
Toronto’s new 2030 District is downtown, which is bound by the lake in the south, Bathurst Street in the west, Dupont Street and Rosedale Valley in the north, and the Don Valley in the east.
It’s the first district outside of the US. The other established districts are in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Denver, Stamford, San Francisco, and Dallas.
The goals for Toronto’s district are as follows (quoted from 2030 Districts):
To cut district-wide emissions in half, including zero-emissions from new buildings by 2030.
Support a better understanding of where and why energy use, water use, and GHG emissions occur across the District.
Work in partnership with building owners, service providers and conservation groups to accelerate the adoption of best practices for building design and management.
Facilitate broad stakeholder dialogues to uncover and overcome systemic barriers to long term reductions in energy use, water use and GHG emissions.
I’m looking forward to following and learning more about this initiative. I think many of us can agree that producing less, not more, GHG emissions in the future would be preferable. And we know that the bulk of it comes from both buildings and transportation.
Earlier today I tweeted this:
What Other Cities Learned: These five tore down highways and reaped the rewards. http://t.co/aR8STHTX9o #urbanism pic.twitter.com/I07iwRF8EP
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
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It’s a link to an article talking about 5 cities – New York, Milwaukee, Seoul, Portland, and San Francisco – who all demolished an elevated highway that used to run through their downtowns.
To be completely fair, some of these cities didn’t really have a choice. San Francisco’s Central Freeway was so badly damaged in an earthquake that it had to be closed. But it doesn’t make the lessons any less relevant.
In all of these cases, the elevated highways were taken down and never replaced with another highway. Some were turned into large boulevards. Others were turned into parks. But in none of the cases was a new road of similar capacity built.
Intuitively it might seem like this would cause utter chaos. I mean, where were all of these cars going to go?
But that didn’t happen. Instead, demand redistributed itself. Car volumes dropped dramatically. More people took transit. Some people took other routes. And some people traveled at different times. Oh, and nearby property values all went up.
And the reason this happened is because of something that economists call induced demand (I’ve written about it before, here). What it means is that as you increase the supply of some valuable good (such as free highways), more of that good becomes demanded.
In other words: more free highways = more cars on the road.
So if you’re a city – like Toronto – with an elevated highway running through your downtown, you should give this some serious thought. The outcomes aren’t as bad as you might think. In fact, they’re quite good.
Image: Seoul via D Magazine