﻿We talk a lot about zoning regulations on this channel that make housing more
expensive and contribute to urban sprawl and bad city design. The worst is zoning that bans
most types of housing (duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, mid-rise apartments, and so on)
and only allows single-family detached homes. In most North American cities, this type of zoning
applies to the majority of residential land. These policies codify into law the idea that
single-family homes are the default proper type of housing and everything else is an aberration that
has to be carefully limited and managed. Whenever we mention single-family zoning in
our videos, we get people defending it with one common response: “well, that’s just the kind of
housing that people want.” Ok, let’s hear them out. “People want a large basement and garage
for their hobbies; they want extra bedrooms in case they have family or friends visiting;
they want a large private backyard with a pool for their kids to play in; they don’t want to share
walls or yard space with neighbours and in general they don’t like dealing with other people.”
This isn’t entirely wrong. It’s common and understandable to prefer having a backyard
over no backyard, an extra room over no extra room, and your own walls over shared walls.
The issue is that people care about other things too, people’s preferences often conflict with
each other, and housing, like everything, involves trade-offs. This should be obvious when you think
through the following question: if a detached home is obviously the best choice for everyone,
why would anyone buy or rent anything else? When you allow denser housing, like multiplexes or
apartments, people do choose to live there. People want more rooms and a backyard and
their own walls—but they also want housing at a reasonable price so they can have money left over
for other expenses, they want to live within a reasonable distance of work, and they want to live
close to other amenities too, like transportation, parks, and services. Detached homes optimize for
space at the expense of affordability and location because desirable locations will only fit so many
of them, especially the large homes with prominent yards that we tend to build in North America.
Low density housing, by definition, just doesn’t house many people.
Consider Montreal, a North American city that, for historic and cultural reasons,
doesn’t have that many detached houses. Most people live in some form of multiplex or low-rise
apartment, although there are high-rises too. If you replaced all Montreal’s denser housing with
single-family detached homes, by our calculations over 1 million people would not be able to live in
their current neighbourhoods because there just wouldn’t be room for them. They’d have to move
somewhere else, whether the suburban fringes of Montreal or another city entirely. Would that be
good for those people or for the city overall? Each person would probably get more space,
maybe a detached home, but that would come at a big cost. Instead of being, for example,
an easy metro ride to downtown, they’re now in a far-flung suburb or another city entirely,
probably much further from their job and with fewer transportation options and other amenities.
Is that trade-off worth it? For some people it is, but those people probably already moved to
the suburbs because that option already exists. People who decided against moving to the suburbs
and instead accepted a smaller space in return for a more central location and other advantages
clearly think there’s some value in that. You don’t even have to be an urbanist who
cares about walkability or other quality-of-life benefits of density. Any real estate agent could
tell you that there’s a trade-off between the size, location, and price of a home.
The problem with advocating for single-family zoning and other related policies with “well,
people want space” is that space doesn’t come for free. It has costs and trade-offs. If you mandate
spacious homes then you force people to accept a loss on cost or location or both. An extreme
example is the San Francisco Bay area, where we’ve heard people defend single-family zoning
for the same reason we’ve been discussing: “a single family home is just what people want”.
The Bay Area is one of the wealthiest metro areas in the world with incredible job opportunities,
but it’s also one of the most expensive and least accessible. You have to be crazy to not think that
lots of people would happily give up a detached home elsewhere in the U.S. to live in a smaller
space in the San Francisco Bay Area. There’s absolutely no lack of demand for smaller or
denser housing, at least in desirable cities. Some people will respond to this by saying that
it’s just about the money. “Maybe people would accept a smaller living space to be able to live
in a desirable city, but they’d prefer a detached home in those cities if they could afford it.”
This is true to some extent but irrelevant. You can’t plan a city around what people would choose
if they had unlimited money because, well, most people don’t actually have unlimited money. Also,
it really isn’t only about money. There just isn’t enough land close enough to San Francisco,
New York, Toronto, or Vancouver for everyone who wants a detached home there to have one.
The government could give everyone a $10 million cheque and it wouldn’t solve the
problem that low density homes just don’t house very many people.
We’re not arguing that detached homes are inherently bad or that people shouldn’t care about
space. Caring about space, especially space you actually use, is entirely understandable. When we
lived in Montreal we were happy that our apartment had room for an office and now in Ottawa we’re
happy that we have basement space for a barbell and weights. We do think that North American
housing culture tends to focus on space and size disproportionately, especially when it comes to
our cultural fixation on things like large front yards that are more ornamental than functional,
but the real problem is in the rules we make about what kind of housing to allow.
When we restrict land to only single-family homes under the guise that “well, people want space”,
we ignore the fact that space, like other features, has costs and trade-offs.
Flexibility in what type of housing can be built is even more important when we
consider that households are shrinking in size because people are having fewer children
and they’re also living longer after their children move out. A full 63% of households
in Ontario are actually “over-housed” with more bedrooms than they need for the number
of people who live there. Too much space that you don’t use really can be a liability,
not just for cost but also cleaning, yard work, and other maintenance.
Having one extra bedroom isn’t too noteworthy, maybe it’s used as an office or something,
but 400,000 households in Ontario have three or more empty bedrooms. As you’d expect,
there’s a correlation between over-housing and neighbourhoods zoned only for detached homes.
If someone wants to buy or maintain a house that has three more bedrooms than they actually need,
that can be their choice—but it shouldn’t be a government policy goal pushed through zoning.
This is especially true because low-density housing costs governments more to service.
This block of detached homes in Ottawa has more than five times more road per person than this
denser block of low-rise multiplexes in Montreal near where we used to live. Those infrastructure
costs are often hidden from residents—one Ottawa study found that low-density development on new
land costs more to service than it provides in property taxes, by about $500 per person per year,
while higher-density development within the city provides a surplus of $600 per person per year.
It’s easier to say that you prefer a large detached house in the suburbs when the city
government eats some of the cost for you. The subsidies aren’t just monetary, either; disruptive
urban highway projects could be seen as a different kind of subsidy. People don’t
consciously think about it like this, but it is easier to say that you prefer a large detached
house in the suburbs if your speed and access getting downtown is prioritized over the safety,
comfort, and health of urban residents. Thanks for watching through to the end of the
video. A special thanks to our supporters on Patreon and for everyone else,
don’t forget to think of housing through the lens of costs and trade-offs…. And subscribe.