How do they build as much housing as they want without land and utilities to support that? Are you suggesting some sort of libertarian slum that grows without support from the government?
More density is great, I’m not against that. Making the government support that is also a good idea (via transit and utility build out). But after it’s done, Toronto will probably only be as affordable as Hong Kong where that’s already done, where even a substandard cafe will set you back. Or maybe Tokyo, which is more sane (you can get a 2 tatami unheated room for $500/month, FYI I would love to live in Tokyo).
Hong Kong has very little land. Toronto has plenty.
There are all sorts of reasons we might want to coordinate infrastructure with building, and I invite smart urban planners to focus on exactly that, on equitable ways to do that, rather than aligning with anti-city forces to block hauling that people want to live in.
Very little of today’s zoning was design to align housing with infrastructure. Most if it was simply designed to exclude and to keep housing expensive.
But OP talks about unrestricted building in specific neighborhoods, not in a sprawling Houston-like flat land (where SFHs are still common).
I’m still for it (I personally like living in dense cities), but I don’t think it will help housing affordability. It’s like expanding a highway to reduce traffic, but it doesn’t because it induces more demand instead (I’m not the only one who likes living in dense cities).
IMO the point is not for OP or me or anyone to dictate where buildings should go. If a lot of people want to live in Shaughnessy then there will be a strong incentive for Shaughnessy property owners to build. Ofc not everyone will build and that’s fine too. In other areas whether fewer people want to live there be little or no incentive to build, which is also fine imo. Sfh, whether in Houston or Toronto are also fine imo, so long as they are voluntary. It’s the mandatory ones I’m concerned with.
Re: housing and freeways - this only works up to a point. Cars and freeways have strong negative externalities - they destroy the very notion of what a city is, they make it miserable, noisy, unsafe, and expensive. Buildings don’t do any of that, they just sit there quietly, so there’s much less reason to try to keep the supply of buildings small, unlike freeway infrastructure.
Ofc some ppl who dislike cities may suggest that a single small apartment building destroys the thing they like most - the lack of people, which is understandable to a certain extent, but difficult to defend. If we are go there then we just end up with an endless circle of people pointing at each other saying, “I’m allowed to live here but you aren’t”
Overbuilding is a huge problem: buildings don’t just sit there quietly if they are empty, they rot. I’ve seen plenty of abandoned buildings in China to be against going that route. They will eventually be torn down if unused, which is why Buffalo has a housing crisis right now even if it has half the population it used to have. But that isn’t the problem for Seattle or San Francisco.
There is something to be said for a city with extra housing as well as desirability at the same time, like Berlin a decade or two ago. But that never lasts, and eventually an equilibrium is reached, equilibriums always occur in the long run.
An equilibrium would be great. Status quo zoning rules in Toronto and other cities in North America are designed to guarantee a shortage well below any kind of equilibrium.
They create equilibriums for the constraints involved, so now relax some of those constraints (zoning, utility infrastructure, schools, transit) to raise them.
Hong Kong has plenty of undeveloped land[1]. New development is intentionally restricted by the government, which owns most of the land, with the full support of a large part of the (home owning) middle class.
Yes ofc, but by any measure, Toronto faces fewer constraints on raw land than HK. HK’s total area, including water, is 1100 sq km. Greater Toronto is 7,123. Beyond HK boundaries there is only the sea, beyond Greater Toronto boundaries there is room for dozens or hundreds more Torontos. TBC I am not arguing for sprawl or for actually using all that land - as per your oringal pint, we should link infra with building - but simply that “lack of land” won’t be a binding constraint in any Canadian city for hundreds of years if ever.
More density is great, I’m not against that. Making the government support that is also a good idea (via transit and utility build out). But after it’s done, Toronto will probably only be as affordable as Hong Kong where that’s already done, where even a substandard cafe will set you back. Or maybe Tokyo, which is more sane (you can get a 2 tatami unheated room for $500/month, FYI I would love to live in Tokyo).