Population and Housing

[ijmorlan]

Or stop micro-managing zoning. Just have a residential zone that excludes noisy commercial/industrial but allows everything from single-family up to 4-story apartment buildings. Let individual landowners decide what to build, and allow the neighbourhoods to evolve naturally over time.

I like the theory, but that would almost certainly result in exclusively single detached homes. We don't split up the land and then let individual landowners build what they want, single developers buy acres and subdivide them in to lots. Most buyers want nothing but single family homes, and developers would be all too happy to provide.

Unless we appropriately price the externalities of cars, which we're nowhere close to doing, leaving it to the free market would be terrible. 

I'd certainly rather we fix the car externality problem, but I see it as much less feasible.

I agree about pricing the externalities of cars (both the desireability and the political difficulty), but I think there is empirical evidence against the idea that developers would just build detached homes everywhere. Remember, we are constantly seeing developers asking for more floors on their developments. In other words, they’re asking to build more than is allowed by zoning. Why would eliminating the rules cause them to stop wanting to build larger?

From a more theoretical point of view, suppose I have a plot of land. I can fit 4 detached houses on it with big yards all around, or 8 with much less yard space, or 16 townhouses, or 50 apartments in a low rise, or 200 in a highrise (suppose). Which one makes more sense to build will depend on the market — for how much do I think I can sell or rent those various options? For the 4 detached houses to make sense compared to the 200 highrise apartments, there has to be very low demand for highrise apartments in that location. Now obviously there are locations where the detached houses will be built, not the apartment, but anywhere there is a housing shortage I don’t see how the detached houses get built.

There is another advantage to relaxing the zoning restrictions: years after initial development, the neighbourhood can evolve for new circumstances. How many lawyer and doctor offices are in old mansions downtown? Conversions of this sort are now illegal in most of our residential areas. Or consider Northdale: the single-family houses gradually turned into student rentals, with extra bedrooms packed into every basement corner and garage. Why? Because it was illegal to build more appropriate small apartment buildings. When the City finally changed the rules, almost the entire neighbourhood was razed and rebuilt as apartments over a period of maybe 20 years (process still ongoing). Before they changed the rules, all sorts of problems occurred because it was illegal to build appropriate housing for the demand.