Population and Housing

[the_conestoga_guy]

I realize that this is very idealistic and not a scalable long-term solution compared to ripping out old homes in favour of mid-rise developments. But the house we bought is in a neighbourhood that likely will never experience a zoning change to permit those kinds of builds. And to be perfectly clear, I'm an advocate for allowing mid-rise buildings in my neighbourhood - I'd be very happy to see all of my neighbours turn into 3-storey walkups!

As long as fundamentalist accessabilitarians don’t prevent the construction of such housing! I’m pretty sure we had a discussion here where somebody said that both units of a duplex should be required to be accessible…I’m hoping I was misunderstanding them.

I'm definitely not qualified to talk about accessibility as it pertains to housing, other than opining "it's important." But I've always liked the utilitarian appeal of a 3 or 4-storey walkup, with the ground floor designed and reserved for those with accessibility concerns, mainly because elevators are expensive and always have the potential to fail. 

I really do wonder if developers and small-scale land owners would be attracted to building more infill walkups if the zoning rules were relaxed, and if they didn't need to waste land/resources on parking spaces. Or is there something else holding them back? I'm new to this game, so I apologise if this is an obvious question.