Whether it's said out loud or not, invariably something like this comes up when talking about new housing development:

“There’s another solution,” says Lucas, mulling over the housing shortage. “I’m not saying I know what it is. Maybe the city’s full. What’s wrong with Windsor instead? Or Cornwall? A hundred years ago, manufacturing and employment were spread out way better than they are now. Everybody needing to be in Toronto and Vancouver is killing us.”

So, is Toronto full? Do we need to return our urban economies to what they were a century ago? To use rough whole numbers, let's consider that Toronto's average population density (in the city proper) is upwards of 5,000 per km2. It's much higher in the downtown core, but our low-density inner suburbs bring down the average.

Now, let's consider Paris, as we often do on this blog. Paris proper has roughly 1/6th the footprint of Toronto (again, the city proper boundary) and roughly 4x the population density (upward of 20,000 people per km2). So, if Toronto is full, what the hell is going on with Paris?

Even Paris is nowhere near full. The opportunities for intensification in central neighborhoods may not be as obvious as they are in Toronto, but urban Paris continues to grow through small-scale projects, office conversions, and, most notably, through ambitious transit projects and mixed-use developments designed to stitch together the greater urban region.

Cities do, of course, face constraints, but they're never technically "full." "Full" is generally shorthand for, "I already live here and I like the way things are, and so I would prefer no one else come and disrupt what I've presently got going on."

Because if this weren't the case, then I suppose you might hear more people say, "I really wanted to move to Toronto, but it was quite literally full. Like, absolutely no physical room for me. I couldn't do it. I would have had to sleep on the streets." Nope. We've got a space allocation for you. In fact, if you're in the market for a new home, give me a call.

Importantly, this is different from a city being, maybe, too expensive. That is not the same as not having any more room. But the two are interconnected: saying a city is full and then blocking housing because of said fullness creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of artificial scarcity. This drives up prices and can then create a false sense of being full.

Of course, in this scenario, you aren't out of land; you're out of permission to use the land differently. "Full" is a funny thing.

Cover photo by Julian Gentile on Unsplash

The traditional narrative when it comes to NIMBYs is that these are individuals acting out of self-interest. Quintessentially, these are people who own their home and do not want development "in their backyard" out of fear that it might negatively impact the value of their property and/or have a negative impact on their local community.

But in reality, anti-development sentiment is likely more nuanced than this. In a recent working paper called "The Symbolic Politics of Housing," researchers at UC, Berkeley and UC, Davis show that anti-development sentiment is not always just about self-interest; rather, it can be predicted by how people feel about certain "salient symbols."

This is based on something called "symbolic politics theory" and it works like this: We all have positive and negative associations with certain "symbols." Often these are developed early in life. And so how we might feel about a development or a particular land use policy, depends on the symbols attached to it and whether we like them.

Here's an example.

Consider two identical apartment developments happening in your neighborhood. The first is being developed by faceless "Wall Street investors" and the second is being developed by a nice local entrepreneur who also happens to be of the exact same ethno-cultural group as you.

If you don't like people on Wall Street and you don't want them profiting from the development, the research suggests that you are more likely to oppose the first development, even though it's the same as the second one, and maybe even if it runs counter, in some way, to your own self-interest. You just don't like the symbol attached to it.

This is also why people who live in cities tend to be more pro-development on average. It reinforces symbols that they already like; ones associated with cities, density, and urban living. This is fascinating, but it also complicates matters. Because it means that strong opinions are not just being formed based on measurable impacts. It's also a question of symbols and feelings.

A beautiful new 43-storey rental building was just approved in Toronto's Liberty Village neighborhood. More info about the project can be found, here. Not surprisingly, some people in the community were against it. Here is a recent article that blogTO published talking about people who live in high-rises not wanting a new high-rise next to them.

One argument that is being made is that the neighborhood is already full. It has reached its density limit. We also hear this about the City of Toronto as a whole. But we know this isn't true. Architect Naama Blonder recently did a study that found we could fit another 12 million people within our boundaries with more efficient land use policies.

This particular site in Liberty Village is also about 400 meters from a future subway stop on the Ontario Line. So it is exactly where we should be putting more density. The problem today is that the area is suffering from a massive infrastructure deficit. The road network is inadequate and the King streetcar hasn't been prioritized.

It's no wonder the area feels full. But the reality is that there are lots of examples of highly livable neighborhoods from around the world with much higher population densities. The difference is that they have the right infrastructure, the right public realms, and the right modal splits.

Liberty Village will get there as well and it's already underway. For a preview of the future, check out the City of Toronto's Public Realm Strategy for the area. It was published in April 2024 and it includes things like new streets, new mid-block connections, and new parks. It is what the area needs and it's exciting to see it happening.