﻿So I went out today with my meter wheel to do some fact checking and collect some data.
I’ve been told that the highest density neighbourhoods per capital are these sorts of
medium density things so lets check that out.
When you talk about density there's lots of factors, but if I’m going to pick one,
I typically use the shorthand of height. Obviously height is easier to gauge than
lot coverage say or building form, and I mean, I think it’s a lot more fun.
And it’s always seemed to me that when buildings are tall they tend to use up
the lot they sit on. You know, there’s not a lot of backyards in downtown.
A neighbourhood of 50 story buildings is denser than a neighbourhood of 10
story buildings, which is denser than a neighbourhood of 2 story buildings.
It all seems pretty obvious, but wait, many people say that this isn’t true.
What’s their reasoning? Well sometimes you’ll hear that tall buildings have a diminishing amount of
actual habitable space as they increase in height. Space ends up being almost entirely taken up
by elevators and structural engineering so that they can reach those lofty heights,
kind of like the incredibly thick walls of medieval architecture[1].
Sometimes you’ll hear about streets around them needing
to be so wide that it negates the height as well.
Over the years I have heard this “well actually height is a deception”
line so many times. I have heard the highest density is everything from 3 to 20 stories.
“You don’t even need to go above 10 floors” So I wanted to know. Is it true? Are high rises
not actually high density? The Building Height Lie
So in the skyscraper corner, downtown in Montreal is Square Phillips. It’s a 200 meter skyscraper,
which is the maximum height allowed, and it’s being built on a former 7420
square meter car park.[2][3] So let’s compare that to this nice
nearby medium density neighbourhood. Now, I personally prefer this density,
it’s bang on the middle of medium. No elevators, external stairs, often built right up to the
footpath. On an emotional level, I enjoy being in this neighbourhood, it’s a nice place to be,
it’s near where I live. I choose to live in this sort of a neighbourhood.
So I went and clicked out a 7,420 square meter block.
So 150 meters down this length[4] To see how many units we would get
in the medium density neighbourhood. So that gives us just over 130 units,
I mean there’s some commercial units in there. So 130 units for 7,420 square
meters if you’re using medium density. On that same land area downtown the
skyscraper delivers 498[5] units for sale and 298 purpose built rental units[6]. So, 796 units.
Boom. “Well actually” suck my balls commenters. But hang on, not all units are the same,
theoretically One Square Phillips could be hallways of micro apartments[7] squeezed
in around elevator shafts and pipes of champagne being pumped up to the foreign owned penthouse.
So I did the painstaking task of going through the plans for this tower
floor by floor counting units, bedrooms, and unused space in the building.[8]
Then I went through the neighbourhood with medium density’s buildings using government
GIS data and knocking on doors to check the average floor plans.
Fuck it took me ages to “well actually” back at the “well actuallys”.
At One Square Phillips there was indeed a fair amount of
space at the center of each floor holding elevators and infrastructure.² But, if look at
these walkups. A lot of the setback at the front of the building is holding stairways. The plexes
also usually sacrifice some interior floor space for stairs that go up to the 3rd floor unit.
Square Phillips has the ground, 21st and 50th floor dedicated to non-residential uses by the
looks of things. But where Square Phillips has amenities like a pool, and a lobby and a gym.
The medium density neighbourhood has backyards and a really nice back alley.
So what delivers the highest residential floor area for the land? This 7420
square meter block of land in the medium density neighbourhood gave 12,852m2 of
residential space over 3 floors[9] On that same amount of land,
Square Phillips provides 50,282 square meters of residential floor space.
And there is something I haven’t even mentioned yet, the development is adding another 21 story
324 unit building on the same site[10] and although I can’t get floorplans yet
if we extrapolate from the previous building, that’s another
18,300 square meters of floorspace[11]. So a total downtown of more like 68,000 square meters[12]
So for the medium density buildings here to provide an equivalent residential floor area
they would need to be at least 5 times taller. And of course, at that height
they would also require their own elevators, and machine rooms and basement parking etc.
In fact, they would probably look a lot like this.
This is Les Dauphins sur le parc at 28 floors[13][14] with 417 units[15]
It's a big residential tower. This whole neighbourhood has a pretty
high population density for Canada. But when you break the census down to the block by block level
the densest blocks in the area, time and time again, are the blocks that are lined with
highrises, and the densest of the densest happens to be the block with the highest of the high.
So at what height do we stop being able to get this extra floor area?
The truth is, we don’t know yet. One article I found looked at the space efficiency of
supertall buildings which are about 3 times this height of square phillips and several
were still hitting 80% “space utilization” which is a solid ratio at any height[16].
Australia 108 for example has 115,920m2[17] of usable space on a lot that is significantly
smaller than square phillips[18]. So, what explains this fairly common
belief among “urbanist types” that a high rise building does not actually mean high density?
Well first of all, there are some crazy outliers in the world. Some buildings are
built to be tall and touristy, the CN tower and Burj Khalifa don’t have a high population
densities. Some buildings are also made for billionaires, they’re basically sky mansions.
Although they have very high floor areas they have a relatively low population density.[19]
That same effect occurs in commercial areas. People point to some glass towered section
of Manhattan and say, you know, that area has a lower population density per square
kilometer than some place that I like. There are lots of places in the world where
you can pull this sort of trick. Transport networks traditionally radiate from downtown,
“equidistant from the most workers” and therefore if you’re placing an office,
that’s where it’s traditionally going to go. Rich people, well they take up a lot of space if
it’s in Beverly Hills or on Billionaires row. But even in a skyscraper, there’s still so many more
of them per square kilometer than when they’re in their typical detached single family mansions.
So it means that many famous skylines don’t have very high population density.
But if those were normal residential buildings they absolutely would.
What they’re doing is like pointing at a radio mast and saying,
see people don’t live in tall structures. That’s right, people don’t live in offices.
Good job. Is your mum around?
The other argument you sometimes get is people pointing to an unusually dense neighbourhood that
is basically not viable in a modern city. The highest density neighbourhoods in the
world are slums. You know, people occupy very small units, in cramped conditions.
The other sort of dense low rise neighbourhood is this sort of grandfathered density. It’s what you
see in historic European centers. I mean covered this in a different video if you really want
to know more, but here is the summary. Slums do have very high densities for the
heights of the buildings. But people in, say, Melbourne are not prepared to live in a unit
like the ones in Karachi and would instead take a long commute to wherever to get some space.
But to a lesser extent, the same thing actually happens with Paris.
If a MODERN building has no elevators[20], common laundry, micro kitchens, small rooms
and no parking it doesn’t come across as quaint[21]. Attempts at building like this
happen every once and a while and they often don’t go very well. People call the developer a slumlord
and label it a shoebox apartment. And they they try to legislate that
you can’t build it like that anymore. But you can often find an example of this
sort of density in your own city even if you don’t have slums or historic high density housing.
The highest density blocks in Montreal are actually just along here, on this street,
and you can probably guess why. This is Concordia University, you can have a bunch of people in one
apartment, shared kitchens, shared bathrooms. You can get the density way up without building
super tall, but turns out people don’t want to live like that for their whole life.
The real problem people have with skyscrapers is that a lot of people just don’t like them.
The modern urbanist movement is an uncomfortable marriage between a
few groups of people. And one of them are the lefty-environmental-ecological-community folks.
The cold impersonal nature of many contemporary glass skyscrapers,
their association with the office and the rat race and finance workers, the lack of visible green
space and community stuff. They don’t like it. And if someone comes along and tells them it
doesn’t achieve it’s number one supposed big advantage, well that’s something that they’re
very receptive to hearing. And people hearing what they want to hear, that might be the biggest
issue that our society is grappling with. Now there are issues with skyscrapers, plenty,
the architectural trends for skyscrapers have been needlessly energy inefficient until recently.
But that is all just a regulatory change away from being fixed and we’re finally seeing the return of
energy efficient non-glass skyscrapers. Yes! Because I have had enough of
glass for the rest of my life. So if you don’t like inefficient
skyscrapers, lets ban inefficient skyscrapers, but not all skyscrapers.
That’s like banning hydroponics because some people grow weed.
And when you apply energy efficiency reforms it supercharges skyscrapers for achieving climate
goals because even a glass skyscraper is better than the car dependent suburb
alternative that so many people often live in. Residential skyscrapers are also a boon to
transit infrastructure, they pump tons of money into municipal government for minimal cost.
They are a product of high land values and cost more to build per square meter,
so many of them have expensive units. But they make your city cheaper. That doctor
living in a condo downtown is one less person trying to buy a unit in your neighbourhood.
Empirical research from Finland, who are really on the ball when it comes to housing,
shows that “For each 100 new, centrally located market-rate units, roughly 60 units
are created in the bottom half of neighborhood income distribution through vacancies”[22]
If the fact that it frees up affordable housing isn’t enough for you.
Many condo towers are also full of starter homes themselves. Sure the penthouse on the
top floor is in all the promotional materials, but everyone keeps shitting on these buildings
based on their advertising. “Looks rich, looks fancy”
Reddit, facebook groups, count windows at night man.
The lower floors often have places that are the first rung on the property ladder for people.
Where people can live car-free near work or school and save some cash. Condos are on average
cheaper than equivalent homes in the same area.[23][24][25]
And when it comes to the whole “foreign buyers vacant condos” bullshit. Unlike a plex or a
detached single family home which you can get a cheap mortgage on, land bank and then just
leave vacant. Condos have substantial monthly fees on them. There’s no way around that no
matter what interest rates drop to or how much money you have in the bank.
They also generally lose relative value as they age. That means that owners want them occupied,
they’re a terrible investment if they’re not. It’s like buying a car as an investment and then just
parking it on the street. It also means, yes the new condos can “seem” expensive,
but there usually are much cheaper options in the building from the 70s or 80s. The older
condos in a neighbourhood are typically a lot less expensive than the new ones.
There is no form of property that I would rather see in foreign hands than condos.
Great, you want to subsidize our infrastructure, not actually own any land
and give Garry the maintenance guy a job? Fine. So course in reality, That shit gets rented out,
as we find out every time that we implement a vacancy tax and then realize
that fuck all of it was actually vacant. Because property investors are not morons.
Yeah! I like money though. So, I bike everywhere, and I really don’t enjoy
riding through downtown, it doesn’t “feel” very nice, it’s not a neighbourhood that works for me.
But it works for some people, and maybe the biggest reason that it works for them,
is that it actually exists. There’s a lot of talk about the
sort of housing that we SHOULD build, the sort of neighbourhoods that we SHOULD create, but in
the last 20 years this is the form of housing that has stepped up to the plate and actually supplied
our cities with places for people to live.[26] In Canada last year over 50% of housing built was
“apartment style” up from around 30% in the 1990s. Much of that came in this form. And
this is a pattern seen throughout the world. But high-rise developments for some reason create
real snobs out of otherwise rational pro city people. The problems people have can be solved
with environmental regulations or design standards that make them more pleasant to be around.
Ultimately, no one is forcing you to live in them. High-rises may not create the nicest
neighbourhoods to you, but they have a lot going for them and there is one thing you can say for
sure. “Well actually” they are by far the highest density thing we currently build.