By Helen LuiWe constantly hear about the problems with density: tiny shoeboxes in the sky, looming towers and their shadows, traffic congestion, and overcrowding. But despite popular discourse, denser living can actually be good for us and our communities.Density as healthDensity brings public services, transit, parks, and amenities closer together. When we can walk our
Feels like a bit of a disingenuous article when it won’t openly talk about the downsides of density. The downtown core of Toronto got denser and it got completely soulless. It’s tower after tower that block daylight from reaching street level, leaving no sunlight but for those living at the top, and endless stretches of shoebox apartments where you’re lucky if you get a balcony. There’s no independent shops left and all the real estate is owned by massive corporations and banks that are always trying to extract as much money as possible from their tenants.
Their solution of bowling over all single family housing to replace with midrise apartments is also not exactly going to be popular.
I get that we need to density and we need land reform but your proposal is going to have a real hard time gaining traction if it boils down to “let’s tear down everything here that all the existing residents chose and replace it with something else that we think is more logical”.
This feels like a dishonest interpretation that misses a lot of the nuance presented in the article.
Density shouldn’t be big tower. It should be 4-5 story building very close together.
Sorry kid. You can’t have space AND fit people as well. Since every rooftop needs to be a garden, at least that’s a nice place to hang out.
You can’t solve it by mid-ride or low-boys, either – you need the economies of scale and minimal-density to save on infrastructure; and get better transit that is sufficient on property taxes before the user-pay system and road-tax ideas both die. Because no one’s paying for the absolute shit Translink pulled these last few years. You need the high density to create and maintain the shared greenspace between the clusters, so it doesn’t end up looking like Detroit or Jersey. You need the high densite to get that land BACK, as well as pull people out of the delta where we NEED that land for responsible local farming. (didn’t think of that in your mid-rise plan, did you?)
Sorry. Towers are the reality if you want to live in the cities – just, if we do it right, with greenways of sanity to break up the tower clusters and cool things down… Kitimat’s nice, though.