Places to Sprawl

[matix]

it all comes down to the mind set of the average person and family in ontario.

developers and home builders are not the cause of sprawl. they may deliver the product. but they are simply responding to demand. it's what people want.

the province also has to realize they can't really stop sprawl with policy documents.

if the average person and family starts buying into the idea of density, builders and developers will no doubt be the first to respond and deliver more of the product.. but until then.. it'll be status quo.

 

[lead82]

Most people I talk to at work who grew up in the suburbs don't want to raise a family in the city. The main reason they site is congestion and lack of green-space. I tend to argue that the suburbs, especially new ones barely have any green space (since they replaced green space with the subdivision).

The bottom line is cost of housing. Buying a condo for a family is super expensive. The 3br condos being built would be enough for say 1-2 kids, but they cost upward of $600K in newer buildings. For that money you could get a nice townhouse for 2x the size, or move to suburbs and get a huge house that is 4x the size. Yes, you have to commute and drive everywhere, but the commuting costs are nowhere near the spatial costs. Families need space to store stuff (especially for small kids, things like strollers and carriages take up lots of space). I live in a condo right now, but when I start a family, that condo will not be big enough for more than 1 small kid. If they built bigger sized units at affordable prices, I think there would be a good demand for buyers.

Most families making average Canadian income of about $60K can't afford to live in the city unless they rent. At $500K-$600K, a townhouse or house in the city is not affordable.

I'm hoping that we will soon see a trend towards family sized condos. There are already many families that live in older condos where a 3br can be 1500sq ft, and have lots of closet space. These are the types of units we should be building in the city, and making them more affordable. If we had more kids in the city we wouldn't have to close down some of those half-empty schools.

 

[salvius]

the province also has to realize they can't really stop sprawl with policy
documents.

if the average person and family starts buying into the idea of density, builders and developers will no doubt be the first to respond and deliver more of the product.. but until then.. it'll be status quo.

Suburban home ownership is still artificially cheap, and although I far from buy the idea of suburbs all imploding on themselves in the future, there is no doubt that the cost of living for such areas is likely to increase drastically, partly because maintenance taxation for infrastructure (particularly on the municipal level) is often artificially low in booming towns and cities, and also because transportation costs certainly won't decrease with time. An average person or family is not interested in those eventualities, they're interested in how much something costs now. Ironically, if you look at the actual polling, most people are concerned about urban sprawl.

So policy documents should work; since the plans are legally enforceable, it'd be wise of the Government of Ontario to take petulant municipalities to court.

 

[Northern Light]

Costly Condos

In respect of the cost of condos there are 2 things at work here.

First is location.

Typically condos are being built downtown and secondarily in areas like NYCC.

In such areas land values are generally at their peak, and often developers overpay for properties based on the assumption they will get vastly inflated height/density (which they often do).

Obviously this has the effect of forcing up prices, and any fair comparison of condos in downtown Toronto is made to the cost of a single-family home in the same location.

Of course, for the most part, there is no such home with which to compare it.

But were there, you can be sure the price would be 700k+++

When comparing a suburban home price, you must compare to a theoretical condo in the same location.

***

That said, there are other price factors at work, which are resolvable.

Parking is a classic, even today, in downtown Toronto, minimum parking requirements typically work out to just under 1 space per unit.

Assuming parking entirely underground, this has a cost-impact of between $15,000 - $30,000 per unit. Sometimes these are price out separately from the units, but not always, and their is definitely a subsidy from the non-parker to the parker in this context.

I'm not suggesting a prohibition on parking, but rather eliminating the minimum and allow developers to determine what they need to make the market work.

Doing the same for apartments, using a 20 year amortization, could mean reducing rents in new rental construction by $125.00 per month.

We also generally impose a raft of other costs on developers. Nowadays, we must have a party room and 'x' square footage of indoor amenity space and outdoor amenity space. This never used to be the case and people didn't suffer.

Let upmarket developers include all the bells and whistles they want, but let others build with virtually none. The impact of being able to shave out the swimming pool and the spa, and party room and the guest suite would allow for a further reduction in unit cost of $10,000 or more on most developments.

Then we tack on all the development charges. Don't get me wrong development charges make sense for greenfield developments where the new subdivision imposes the need for a whole new school and a whole new park and fire hall and so on....

But when building in an established area, most of which are rich in parkland and public services and have plenty of room to spare in their local schools, these charges should be kept to a minimum.

Wave them would save a typical large development more than $3,000,000 and possibly more than that.

And of course developers use the same market pricing as most other businesss. Sale price is a factor of raw cost + a standard mark-up.

The higher the wholesale cost, the larger the profit markup is too!

IF we could trim all the detritus out of the price of condos (or new rental) we could easily trim total prices by $50,000 or more on new units and rents by $200.00 a month.

***

As a further note, renters in this City continue to face an inordinate property tax burden as well. Were the rate on multi-res housing reduced to the same rates as single family residential (which would invariable have to come up) you would see a saving on rent (or condo fees) equivalent to no less than $50.00 a month, and possibly double that.

These are the fixes we need to promote density and to make housing more affordable.

 

[MuchoGrande]

Has anyone found a copy or a link to the report?

 

[W. K. Lis]

The problem with the suburbs for children is that they have to be chauffeured everywhere. They are discouraged from using public transit because of the long waits. Can't walk, because of the long distances between home and whatever. There are communities in the states where students are not permitted to take their bikes to school, or even walk to school.

 

[waterloowarrior]

The problem with the suburbs for children is that they have to be chauffeured everywhere. They are discouraged from using public transit because of the long waits. Can't walk, because of the long distances between home and whatever. There are communities in the states where students are not permitted to take their bikes to school, or even walk to school.

suburbs don't have to be that way though...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n_znwWroGM&feature=video_response
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUaTETIJkIQ&feature=related

 

[adma]

The problem with the suburbs for children is that they have to be chauffeured everywhere. They are discouraged from using public transit because of the long waits. Can't walk, because of the long distances between home and whatever. There are communities in the states where students are not permitted to take their bikes to school, or even walk to school.

Yet the funny thing is: 30, 40, 50 years ago, a lot of those same distances from home to school were deemed "walkable". I don't think it's so much a matter of long distances, as of guilt (esp. in affluent neighbourhoods) about being viewed as impoverished and/or irresponsible...

 

[doady]

The problem with the suburbs for children is that they have to be chauffeured everywhere.

I grew up in the suburbs and I always walked to school when I was a child. I walked more as a child than I do now. In the suburbs, it is actually far easier (and far more common) for children walk to school than it is for adults to walk to work (or to school).

 

[GenerationW]

I grew up in the suburbs and I always walked to school when I was a child. I walked more as a child than I do now. In the suburbs, it is actually far easier (and far more common) for children walk to school than it is for adults to walk to work (or to school).

I had the same experience. I even walked to high school, which was 20 minutes away. In the years I had a double lunch, I usually went home, so that was 80 minutes walking per day.

 

[bleeepbluuup]

I grew up in the suburbs and I always walked to school when I was a child. I walked more as a child than I do now. In the suburbs, it is actually far easier (and far more common) for children walk to school than it is for adults to walk to work (or to school).

Same here. At my elementary school, the boundaries were such that no student lived more than a 10 minute walk away. For me it was something like 5 minutes. High school was about 25 minutes away. And TONS of kids took transit there.

 

[afransen]

I was about 4.5 hrs walk from my high school.

 

[Whoaccio]

Northern Light makes some really good points about the additional costs put on most condo projects by superfluous amenities. When you add up all the costs of things like super-lobbies that look like they were lifted from some hotel in Dubai, the totally unnecessary party and guest rooms, oversized gyms and large common gardens (esp. roof terraces), it must add at least a few bucks onto the average condo price. Not to mention the ongoing maintenance costs. This might sell to the typical condo buyer, almost exclusively childless singles and couples, who think it is luxurious. If you need to warehouse three babies the last thing most people consider is how nice the lobby is though. These are real and serous costs that encourage many families to just look at more traditional living arrangements.

There are other costs too. Economists like Ed Glaeser have done research on the average costs of housing in the USA. They tend to show that for most of the US's history homes tended to cost essentially what it cost to build them and generally tracked inflation in appreciation. Around the 1970s though, construction costs as a portion of home prices began declining in urban areas like Boston or San Fran and housing costs began to accelerate much more quickly than inflation. The conclusion being that many coastal cities adapted stricter zoning rules and have made it progressively more difficult to add new housing stock, artificially raising prices beyond what their long term norms would be. I think he made the point that more housing had been added to Manhattan in the 1920s than since after the 1970s, despite the later period having far higher population growth. I imagine trends are similar in Toronto, I know housing costs tended to track population growth for much of the 20th century until outstripping population growth in the 1970s.

That isn't a result of density per se. It has more to do with just weird zoning, a lot of which actually encourages sprawl (i.e. minimum lot sizes or bans on basement apartments). If you look at the official growth plan, the goal is to have almost all development in the 416 occur along a few avenues and growth areas while 90% of the City remains "stable." If we try to force everyone to live in the Yonge corridor, the costs will undoubtedly rise beyond their norms and many will relocate to areas like Mississauga. On the other hand, if we stop densification in "stable areas", many of which are quite desirable as is, land values will be equally unaffordable to all but the richest. Then there are all the bizarre rules we have with rental apartments which further reduce the housing supply and encourage sprawl (i.e. why shouldn't someone be able to build and rent out a laneway house if they want to?). All of this just encourages people to move to more flexible jurisdictions like Milton where you can buy a house for closer to what it costs to build.

Unrelated is also the lack of decent schools in "urban areas." You can look at the Fraser Institute's school performance rankings and there is a clear trend of public schools in urban areas under performing suburban counterparts. Badly. Eastern Commerce barely ever scores above a 1/10 for the love of god and almost a quarter of it is special needs. Central is over 30% special needs and barely ever scores more than 1/10, and the houses around it cost a fortune. Why on earth would any sensible family spend a half million dollars and send their kids there? Unsurprisingly, parents are more keen to have their kids go to schools like North Toronto, Earl Haig, Lawrence Park or Michael Power/St. Joseph. One easy way to make the downtown more attractive to parents would be to drastically improve the quality of local schools so parents don't have to rely on going out of district or private schools.

 

[TJ O'Pootertoot]

The full report can be read here, by the way...

http://environmentaldefence.ca/reports/pdf/PlacesToSprawl.pdf

 

[Glen]

Suburban home ownership is still artificially cheap, and although I far from buy the idea of suburbs all imploding on themselves in the future, there is no doubt that the cost of living for such areas is likely to increase drastically, partly because maintenance taxation for infrastructure (particularly on the municipal level) is often artificially low in booming towns and cities, and also because transportation costs certainly won't decrease with time. An average person or family is not interested in those eventualities, they're interested in how much something costs now. Ironically, if you look at the actual polling, most people are concerned about urban sprawl.

How do you figure that? Toronto certainly does not have much, if any, cost advantage in supplying infrastructure over neighboring municipalities. Besides those cost are increasingly a small portion of municipal expenditures.