I recently came across this tweet by Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, where he argues that the YIMBY movement "employs an inadvertently dishonest sleight-of-hand" when it promises "Paris-scale density" only to ultimately deliver something quite different in cities.
In the post, he shares a fairly banal mid-rise development that looks nothing like Paris, and then says that if we're talking about Paris-style building, he'd be all for it, and likely voters would be too. His point seems to be that if only we made developments more beautiful, fewer people would oppose them.
I had to read the tweet a few times to make sure I was understanding it correctly because the "Paris-scale density" language was throwing me off. Paris is not a medium-density city. It's a high-density city and generally considered to be the highest-density city in Europe. Is this the Paris promise?
I don't actually think most people want Paris; they want a city that looks like Paris, and that's because they ignore most of its urban ingredients and only focus on the two most obvious things: (1) its outward architectural expressions and (2) its modest building heights.
Paris-scale density is single-stair buildings with minimal setbacks and stepbacks, dark light wells, tiny 130-square-foot studios in the penthouse, no parking minimums, and area population densities that can exceed 50,000 people per km2. Is this what most voters want, provided they look pretty?
For the purposes of this post, let's just run with the argument that urban environments people broadly feel are beautiful would elicit less NIMBY opposition. Just build Paris-like buildings. Unfortunately, I also don't think the answer is as simple as this.
As Sam Deutsch of Better Cities points out, this runs counter to NIMBY history. Let's not forget that the Paris everyone visits today was vehemently opposed during the time of its initial development and that the city's most iconic structure was called a hateful column of bolted sheet metal, among other things.
Beautiful buildings and great places are, of course, fundamental to cities. But even then, expect turbulence along the way.
Cover photo by Deniz Bireroglu on Unsplash
I'm a big fan of walking. I like it for the health benefits, the freedom to explore, and the simple luxury of being able to walk to things. In fact, it's an important housing prerequisite for me: can I walk to stuff?
But as we often talk about on this blog, the ability to do this depends largely on the prevailing land use patterns, the overall built environment, and, to a great extent, when a neighborhood was built.
It is commonly argued that the "best" neighborhoods were all built before the widespread use of the car, and there's a lot of truth to this. (This makes me wonder if self-driving cars will eventually create a similar "pre and post" divide in our built environment.)
However, not everyone sees it this way. I just read an article about how residents in the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul are vehemently opposed to the construction of sidewalks in areas where there are currently none.
Perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention to the suburban sidewalk wars, but this is the first time I've seen this level of opposition. Some people view sidewalks as a feature, and some people view them as a bug. Clearly, there are residents in the Twin Cities who view them as the latter.
Why? Because they interrupt large front lawns:
“I chose my home with the nice big lawn out front,” Edina resident Melissa Cohen told the mayor and City Council at a Dec. 8 hearing about proposed sidewalks for streets in Prospect Knolls. “We are in a quiet neighborhood. This does not require a sidewalk.”
And for some people, they're unsightly:
In 2007, a Golden Valley resident named Charles Upham told the Star Tribune “sidewalk is a four-letter word. U-G-L-Y.”
You could call it a kind of rural ideology, where sidewalks symbolize the opposite: the city. I suppose there are also practical considerations, like the fact that snow removal on sidewalks often becomes the homeowner's responsibility.
But it appears to me that a large part of this opposition stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of pastoral exclusivity, even if we're talking about higher-density suburbs and the opposition is masquerading as an environmental preservationist movement.
On the flip side, there are practical benefits to sidewalks. They give you a safe place to walk. So, what I wonder is to what extent are the people opposing these sidewalks also anti-walkers? Or is it that the traffic flows in these neighborhoods are so low that people simply feel comfortable walking on the street, like here?
Not surprisingly, there's lots of data to support that people who live in neighborhoods with sidewalks are significantly more likely to walk and be active. If you want people to walk more, build sidewalks. If you want people to ride bikes more, build bicycle lanes. And if you want people to drive more, build roads and highways.
This is how this behavioral stuff works. We're not completely independent actors; we're products of our environment.
Cover photo from The Minnesota Star Tribune
Yesterday we spoke about the merits of fine-grained urbanism and why the direct and obvious way to achieve this is to just, you know, encourage more small-scale development. So today, let's talk about some of the specific things that would likely need to happen in order to unlock all of the small and under-utilized sites that today are not being developed at scale.
I'm going to speak from a Toronto perspective and talk specifically about small-scale "apartments," which in today's planning environment are generally buildings with seven or more dwelling units. Under this threshold, we have new terminology like "houseplex." But I'm sure that much of what I raise will translate to other cities and building types.
Here's my working list (I've also added a few items from this Twitter discussion):
As-of-right zoning permissions (the key, though, is that what's as-of-right needs to be economically viable)
No side-yard and front-yard setbacks
No site plan control approval (currently required for projects with 10 or more homes)
No/lower development charges
No parkland dedication fees
No required parking
No required amenity spaces (the city is the amenity)
Curbside garbage collection (as opposed to internalized collection facilities)
Reasonable servicing connection costs (I'm specifically looking at you Toronto Hydro)
No Record of Site Condition, or a streamlined process (Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks approval)
Single egress stair
Flexible elevator sizing
No rental replacement
Predictable financing terms from agencies like CMHC
There's a lot on this list. But there isn't just one thing standing in the way of more fine-grained development. If you think I missed anything (or you just disagree with my line of thinking), feel free to leave a comment below.
What Toronto has demonstrated with its efforts to expand housing options in its neighbourhoods is that, when it makes economic sense to do so, people will actually build small. Today, the market is building single-unit laneway houses, and increasingly, it is building things like fourplexes and sixplexes.
So, what's standing in the way of more 10-, 20-, and 30-unit projects? It's the barriers and hurdles we have erected.