Up until now, our discussion was on personal, consumer choice to live in suburbia, not the choice of companies to locate there. This just underscores my original point: people have very little choice in where they ultimately live. It is dictated by a number of things including where their employer locates, what's available to buy or rent on the market, their diposable income, the school district they're in and a myriad of other socio-economic and cultural reasons. Despite all this, people like Kay, Brooks and a whole host of neoliberal urban theorists from Randall O'Toole to Wendell Cox to Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson posit that where you live is as much a matter of personal choice as deciding what DVD to rent on a Friday night.
Obviously people have certain limiting factors in where they can live. Not everyone can afford to live in the Annex, for example. That doesn't make it any less of a personal choice. You are still choosing, you just have certain criteria (cost, proximity to employment, public services ect...) and what area suits your needs best. I don't think Kay or any of the rest ever tried to imply that people choose the suburbs based on some kind of ideological attraction to low-density suburban living, they often make it quite clear that many people move to the 'burbs to seek exactly the thing you describe.
Comparing housing decisions to renting a DVD is a bit facile. A more appropriate comparison would be comparing it to cars. What car would you expect a low income family with 4 children to buy? Probably a low cost minivan, right? Obviously they wouldn't buy a Porsche Boxter because they probably can't afford it, and if they could it wouldn't fit their needs. Is this not a "personal choice" because the family has limiting factors (low income, many children) which prevent them from buying any car they want?
scarberiankhatru said:
Of course it's true. It isn't 1946 anymore...the vast majority of housing exists in the suburbs and urban residences are a small enough subset that people are much, much more likely to live in urban places as a direct result of choosing urban lifestyles/environments than is true of suburbanites choosing suburban lifestyles/environments. If people want to live in Toronto, most must live in the suburbs. Of course, even in 1946, the choice to move to the suburbs was less of a consumer choice than people think it was. When people continue to live in suburbia after being born there, or are unable to afford to live elsewhere, or choose to live next to their suburban job, or take part in the diaspora of their friends & relatives, etc., etc., they are not consciously choosing to wallow in picket fence, master-planned, auto-dependent, monotonous cul-de-sac suburbia. No one is saying that absolutely no one chooses to seek out an idyllic vision of suburbia, but the vast majority either do not, or it is a minor/trivial part of the decision.
This is circular logic. How many Torontonians live in the 'burbs, 4 million, say? How many of those dwellings existed 10 years ago? 30 years ago? 50 years ago? Not very many. The vast majority of housing exists in the suburbs because, for whatever reasons, that's where the demand is. There weren't very many suburban dwellings 50 years ago, and now there are millions. If you reduced this idea to its most extreme form, people would have never left the original cities in Africa because "that was were the majority of housing existed."
If people were willing to live in an urban area, there would be more multiunit housing in urban areas. Now, I will say that our zoning bylaws often put serious discouragements on densification (i.e. "stable neighborhood"), but I think it is fair to say that Toronto could easily accommodate much more housing. What is the density of "Old Toronto", ~7,000-7,500k/km2? Thats hardly a world record.
I also don't think anybody is seriously suggesting people seek to "wallow in picket fence, master-planned, auto-dependent, monotonous cul-de-sac suburbia." Nobody is saying that, or at least not so simplistically. Everyone has certain criteria for their housing. Cost, number of rooms, quality of local schools, access to transit, safety, socio-ethnic makeups and such. I'm not trying to minimize this or suggest that people move to the suburbs for the sole purpose of BBQing hot dogs on their backyard patio, or whatever. Objectively looking at the criteria most people apply to their housing decisions though, suburbs tend to have quite noticeable advantages over the quaint house in the Beaches.
