Parsing O'Toole

Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. – a libertarian think tank. IMHO, he’s an apologist for the status quo: the American Way of Sprawl. The Sun was gracious enough to run an article prior to his speech at the Fraser Institute.

So here’s my quick parse of the column.

Wrong way to make a region livable

Randal O’Toole Special to the Sun

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Property owners in the Lower Mainland face some of the strictest land-use regulations in Canada, with more than two-thirds of the region off limits to development. Not coincidentally, Vancouver also has the least affordable housing in Canada.

Almost all of that ‘off-limits’ land consists of the watersheds and parks of the North Shore and the agricultural and flood-plain lands South of the Fraser. (There’s a related article in The Sun on whether Surrey should allow development on flood-prone lands.) O’Toole’s implication is that government has removed developable land from supply for arbitrary reasons, namely to prevent people from pursuing ‘the Canadian dream’.
O’Toole is also suggesting that housing affordability is directly related to land constraints without actually proving it. It is just as likely related to income, interest rates or allowable density, which have as much to do with housing supply as land availability.

TransLink, the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority, is building expensive light-rail and other transit lines, and has given relief of highway congestion the lowest priority for funding.
Not coincidentally, Vancouver shares with Toronto and Montreal the record of most time and fuel wasted per commuter of any urban area in Canada.

Leaving aside the point that TransLink doesn’t control the major highways and bridges (that’s provincial), transportation agencies always have to spend more on transit than roads – for the simple reason that people buy, fuel, maintain and drive their own cars while government has to fund all those aspects of transit.
When dealing with comparisons, one has to know exactly what is being compared. Is “Vancouver” in this case the city or the region? Likewise, what is meant by “Toronto” and “Montreal”? Figures actually show that commuter time in Vancouver is dropping.

In 1995, the provincial government asked the Greater Vancouver Regional District to write a “strategic plan” for the region. The legislature gave planners 14 goals, including maintaining housing affordability, providing efficient transportation and protecting the unique character of communities.
The GVRD responded with its Livable Region Strategic Plan. But rather than meet all 14 goals, this plan focused on just two — “avoiding urban sprawl” and “minimize the use of automobiles.” Unfortunately, achieving these goals meant discarding several of the others.

Simply not true. The LRSP has four major principles: Create a compact metropolitan area, build complete communities, provide transportation choice and maintain a green zone – and there are lots of goals related to each.

To avoid sprawl, the GVRD closed more than 70 per cent of the region’s land to development and mandated that all cities in the region accommodate growth by increasing population densities. The result has been skyrocketing housing prices and, for most families, an end to the great Canadian dream of owning your own single-family home.

Housing prices fell in the 1990s; why wasn’t that a result of regional policies? Housing prices are more related to the health of the economy (in turn affected by international commodity prices) and migration. If abundant amount of land meant a moderation of housing prices, then ‘skyrocketing’ housing prices would not occur in places like Phoenix and Perth, where housing prices have arguably ‘skyrocketed’ – a word never defined.
The ‘great Canadian dream’ of a single-family house (wording from an American who assumes everyone wants to be like them) ended in this region in the late 1980s when the majority of the housing built was multiple-family – well before the LRSP. It’s true, I think, that everyone likes the idea of more space: a bigger house or condo, more land, more wealth. But in a region where the urban-growth boundary is actually a consequence of the Coast Mountains, Pacific Ocean, Fraser River and international boundary, the expectation that we could be like a prairie city and expand infinitely is simply an illusion.

To minimize automobile use, TransLink spends a large share of the region’s limited transportation funds on various forms of rail transit. These expensive projects will not get a significant number of people out of their automobiles.

“A significant number” – I wonder what that means. It’s true that if government provides road space for free, and sends signals that it will build more road space as congestion occurs, and that municipal governments in turn require car-dependent urban form (particularly through zoning and parking bylaws) then transit has no realistic expectation of solving congestion.
Transit provides an alternative – a critical choice for people without the ability to drive or who cannot afford a car or who choose to spend their money on, say, housing. Inherent in O’Toole’s argument is that everyone has the option to drive – and will want to do so (leaving aside age and ability, which of course you can’t actually do). That is probably true for the world he lives in. But when the operation of a car for the average person in Canada is approaching $10,000, that will be less and less the case.

The growing congestion that results will only waste the time of the 90 per cent of people in the region who rely on autos as their main source of transport.

Again, an embedded assumption that government has an obligation to provide more and more road space, regardless of the number of cars purchased.

Meanwhile, the mania for density is destroying the unique character of communities. District planners directed cities and towns to move more of their residents into five-story apartments and condo towers.

The language is so loaded, it’s hard to know where to start. Why is ‘unique character’ synonymous with low density? Does Paris not have character? Do most of the world’s great cities – denser on average than Vancouver – have less unique qualities than the suburban sprawl of Denver or Atlanta?
And what is wrong with a mix, with more housing options, for a diversity of people? Only about a quarter of family formations have children living at home. Many people who have the resources to choose whatever they want are choosing condo towers. Should they not be able to make that choice in their own communities throughout the Lower Mainland?

Cities are also supposed to provide a “jobs-labour balance.” This means cities like Surrey that have almost twice as many workers as jobs are expected to add more than 100,000 new jobs.
Meanwhile, cities like Burnaby that have more jobs than workers are supposed to discourage new businesses. The result will be that everything looks exactly alike.

This just confuses me. Why would this model be any less homogenous than the standard post-war suburban model of separated uses and freeway dominance?

Where will it end? Vancouver is already the densest major city in Canada, 14 per cent denser than Montreal and 27 per cent denser than Toronto and Victoria. The only incorporated Canadian town of any size that is denser than Vancouver (by a mere one per cent) is the Montreal suburb of Westmount.

So long as there is population growth, it doesn’t ‘end.’ The object is to maintain livability, move towards sustainability, provide affordability. And there’s no simple way to do it. Discouraging density is not, however, one way that will.

Vancouver’s Mayor Sam Sullivan says even more density is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This argument is without foundation. Research shows that building, heating, and operating highrise condos emits more greenhouse gases than single-family homes.

Let’s see the research. Because it entirely depends on what’s being measured, and how. Per capita emissions? By area? By total volume?

Density also increases traffic congestion, and cars produce the most pollution and greenhouse gases in congested traffic.

Sorry, Vancouver proves that this statement is just wrong. Both for the downtown and the city as a whole, vehicle movements are dropping, even as the number of people entering the city and the core area are rising. Melbourne is showing a similar trend. So long as density is accompanied by a mix and proximity of uses that allow people to walk, cycle and use frequent transit, density does not necessarily increase traffic congestion.

The region will not reduce carbon emissions by forcing people to waste fuel in stop-and-go traffic.

This is the most disingenous of all the arguments: the one being used by the Province to justify Gateway. Implication: if we build more roads, we’ll get the traffic moving and emissions will drop. That’s not true for nitrogen oxides, and not true in real life. So long as the road is unpriced, it fills up. (Examples, please, of urban regions that have built their way out of congestion.)

Just who decided that “avoiding sprawl” should be the paramount goal of the region’s planners anyway?

For someone like O’Toole, speaking to an audience like the Fraser Institite, it’s hard for them to believe that the pubic processes we use to plan our cities and region reflects this consensus. It’s not so much negatively phrased (i.e. avoiding sprawl) as positively expressed, but it comes down to the four principles mentioned above – which translates into avoiding the wasteful sprawl that assumes an infinite supply of cheap energy to keep it going (and a foreign policy dedicated to that end).

This goal should be laughable in a province that has some of the lowest population densities in the world, all of whose cities, towns, and villages cover less than one-half per cent of British Columbia.

“Laughable”? And yet if people didn’t want to live in complex, high-density environments – what we call cities – why would they be so desirable? God knows, the small towns of Canada would welcome more migrants, and they have the cheap housing to attract them if that were the essential determinant.

Planners have their priorities upside down. In a province such as B.C., which is 99 per cent rural open space, or even a region such as Vancouver, which is more than 70 per cent open space, keeping housing affordable is more important the preserving every last acre of undeveloped land.

“Every last acre”…. Assuming housing affordability could be increased by releasing vast amounts of ‘undeveloped land,’ what do we write off? Watersheds? Flood plains? Agricutural lands? Wildlife reserves? And if those are not taken out, how much land is left for single-family housing? How long would it last? What difference would it really make?

Nearly three out of four Canadians aspire to live in a single-family home with a yard. The yards people want to own are some of the most valuable sources of open space and outdoor recreation a city can have. Denying this goal to most of the region’s residents makes Vancouver less livable, not more.

For those Canadians who do aspire to the yard and single-family home, they have every stake in assuring that as many other Canadians as possible do not aspire to that vision because they have a better choice. There’s no working model I’m aware of that results in a place with as high a livabilty as Vancouver based on just one dominant form of housing and transportation. But for those who want it, the less competition the better.

Discouraging driving is even dumber. Besides being the most convenient form of urban transport ever invented, autos have given Canadians access to better jobs, housing and recreation, and Canadians are not going to give them up.

When everyone uses the car, the car fails. And that would be true of bicycles. As for convenience, transit is often the better choice. And isn’t that the point: choice is what this is about. Curiously, libertarians like O’Toole, when it comes to urban design, get very negative about choice, as though providing different forms of housing and transportation come at the expense of the dominant paradigm.

If driving has problems, such as greenhouse gas emissions, fix those problems. One of the world’s leading alternative fuel research labs is located right in Burnaby, yet planners chose social engineering over technical solutions to pollution.

Always the technical fix. As though putting fuel cells in all the cars would allow us to overlook the land-use consequences of car dominance. The parking lots alone are as destructive of the natural environment as the vehicles parked on them.

Government strategic planning inevitably does more harm than good. The province should break up the GVRD and TransLink into decentralized, user-fee-driven agencies each focusing on a specific mission such as sewers or transit.
Land-use planning should be turned over to the cities, or better yet, private landowners.
Local governments should focus on providing effective urban services, not on changing people’s lifestyles.

There we have it: start with the thesis that government is bad and work backwards. And what do we end up with: the notion that we would all be better off if Vancouver was more like Houston.
Perhaps that’s the choice we should offer our citizens. Vancouver or Houston. You choose.
– – –