The Best Value is Downtown

Linked here is an interesting article by Todd Litman from Planetizen discussing smart growth and the impact on affordability. For years we have put our social housing at the edge of urban development believing that avoiding infill NIMBYism was essential to achieving the housing at all. That was possibly true, but not as true today.

Right now I’m consulting on an AHP project located at the bleeding edge of new development. I regret the decisions that were made not to further pursue a downtown site after our initial effort. Hindsight is great and in retrospect government imposed timing conditions, project size, and the path of least resistance put us on that site. But in the long run we may have not done our residents a favour, especially as transportation costs rise.
That is a rental development, but for ownership – equity building suburban developments, the negative impacts are likely worse. It seems counter intuitive but the case made in this article is persuasive. Litman summarizes saying, “a typical household is likely to be a hundred thousand dollars wealthier in a decade if they choose a smart growth location over automobile-dependent sprawl.”

If we are going through “the great reset” as Richard Florida calls it, toward a new economy and new priorities, the Niagara Growth Strategy needs to be strengthen, not diluted by the pressures of old habits, to ensure we create the right conditions for good transportation options in our urban cores, and between the municipalities. Appreciation for high density urban living, by necessity, will evolve to be the new paradigm. Affordable rental housing efforts need to be there, involving smaller developments, multiple sites, and mixed with and in ownership housing.