We have a confession to make. When we first lived in Toronto almost 10 years ago,
we had an experience that a lot of other people in the city can relate to,
which is coming across a construction site and thinking “oh great, yet another condo tower going
up”. It’s just an easy reaction to have when the city around you is changing in such visible
ways. [Andrea Horwath: “So when these developers are building these ‘monstrosities’ in terms of
huge condominium complexes.] But there’s one really important fact that this knee-jerk
aesthetic response didn’t fully consider at the time: people actually live in these so-called
“monstrosities”. A lot of people. This block houses 2,000 people. This one, 4,000 and a
grocery store. Across Greater Toronto, 1.3 million people call mid-rise and high-rise housing home.
We have our disagreements with Toronto housing policy (why is it so much easier to build new
housing near a noisy and polluted highway than in established neighbourhoods with declining
populations?) but we can’t lose sight of the fact that these tall buildings that everyone loves to
hate are people’s homes. They provide an enormous amount of value just based on that fact alone.
As we covered in a previous video, our relationship with building height is nuanced.
On one hand, we love ground-oriented density: the townhouses, multiplexes, and walk-up apartments
that provide the often forgotten middle-ground between low-density and high-density living.
At the same time, some fans of this type of housing often fall into an unfortunate
snobbery about taller housing. They treat height as a blight on a city and inherently
bad for quality-of-life — and very often they don’t want to allow the construction
of these taller buildings. We think this is wildly out of proportion and blind to the
very real damage you cause to affordability and livability by arbitrarily blocking new housing
that’s economically viable and in-demand. What we didn’t adequately cover in that previous video is
that taller buildings actually do have livability benefits outside of just providing housing supply.
The first livability benefit of taller buildings is accessibility.
Urbanists often praise short buildings for not needing an elevator,
which they see as a win for convenience and low construction costs, but many people have reduced
mobility because of age or disability and taking stairs to a walk-up apartment just isn’t going
to work for them, especially with groceries. If you’re in a wheelchair it’s even worse:
townhouses, multiplexes, and walk-up apartments commonly aren’t even wheelchair accessible on
the first floor. On the other hand, mid-rise and especially high-rise buildings almost
universally have ramps and elevators to access any unit of the building. You don’t even need
to have a disability to benefit — as much as we loved our Montreal walk-up apartment,
having to move our furniture up multiple flights of stairs was kind of a nightmare.
Carrying up a full-sized bike was a hassle too, and it’s partly why we bought folding bikes.
Views — not just a metric that YouTubers obsess over.
They’re also a sought-after feature in housing. Shorter buildings can have good views too,
especially if there’s a natural feature like a mountain or a river to look at,
but taller buildings provide views of the city or surrounding landscape that
shorter buildings usually can’t and they provide these views to a much larger number of people.
In Ottawa we don’t have much of a view and it is actually something we miss. Being able to look out
your window and have an expansive vista on the city is a real quality of life benefit. Views
are usually cited as the reason for the “floor premium”, where units in a taller building tend to
sell for a bit more as you go higher, suggesting that people care quite a lot about views.
Living higher up is good for safety, privacy, and street noise. Not everyone wants the
connection to streetlife that urbanists often praise. Recently we had a wanna-be bike thief
rummaging around in our backyard and it wasn’t the most pleasant thing in the world. It made
us more careful about locking our door and leaving things outside. If we lived higher up,
we wouldn’t have the same concerns. Our outdoor belongings would be on a balcony, too high to be
accessible from the ground, and we’d probably have a secured entrance in between us and the street.
Many buildings have front desk attendants or security guards watching who comes and goes.
Critics call it socially isolating to have these barriers between you and the street,
but livability is all about balancing public and private space.
If you live in a denser city you almost definitely spend time at parks and other public spaces.
Is it really so wrong if your balcony is your own private haven far from the ground?
Apartments even create their own opportunities for interaction. In our Toronto high-rise we met and
chatted with lots of other residents in the lobby and the elevator. It helped that many of them were
retired and chatty but we just don’t believe that tall buildings are inherently isolating.
Quality shared spaces like community gardens and courtyards can add to that.
Bigger residential buildings, including mid-rise but especially high-rise, are a lot more likely to
have amenities like pools and gyms compared to smaller-scale density. We considered a
9-storey building in Ottawa and while we didn’t pick it, the pool was a serious advantage that
tempted us. The gym would have tempted us too if more apartment buildings had real gyms with
barbells and squat racks. That one was for you, Clarence! Other amenities include guest suites,
party rooms, concierge, garbage chutes, and occasionally things like tennis courts.
Noise from other units is one of the main concerns we hear from people about denser living.
Taller buildings are usually made out of concrete, which tends to be
better for noise isolation than the wood-frame structures usually used for shorter buildings.
Tall buildings aren’t for everyone, but they do have livability advantages beyond just providing
housing supply. To learn more about how people prioritize these factors, we conducted a short
survey using an online research platform, asking people to pick their top priority for an apartment
or condo from six options. Three were advantages typically associated with taller buildings
(views, amenities, and accessibility) and three were typically associated with shorter buildings
(easy ground access through stairs, the ability to know most people in your building,
and connection with street life). The result was clear: views and amenities,
advantages usually found in taller buildings, came out on top. These puns write themselves.
We enjoy smaller apartment buildings quite a bit ourselves and were actually surprised
at how few people picked features like quick access to the ground by stairs.
When we asked participants to assume they were going to live in a 30-storey building
and they could pick any floor, there was an interesting pattern:
the very lowest and very highest sections of the building were by far the most popular,
although the lower-middle was more popular than the upper-middle. When we hear people
claim that something along the lines of 5 storeys is the (quote-unquote) “optimal” building height,
that only captures about a third of people’s preferences in our survey.
10 storeys only captures about half. And this doesn’t even get to people who’d prefer the fourth
floor but would accept living on floor 16 if it meant a shorter commute to work, which taller
buildings can in theory provide by maximising use of space in the high-demand central city.
Our closing thought is that we wish people were better at separating their housing
preferences from their housing policy. You don’t have to want to live in a tall building
yourself to believe that other people should have the option. And who knows,
you might even find yourself living in a taller building some day, just maybe on a lower floor.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. Don’t forget to not miss
the forest for the towers, and subscribe. A special thanks to our supporters on Patreon
and all the people who contributed pictures from their high-rise views.