The author is a consultant in land use planning and sustainable mobility
Tell me where you live, and I’ll tell you how you get around.
If you live in the central districts, you may pay a lot for housing, but you have the chance to pedal to work, and your children can walk to school.
If your new townhouse is located in a suburb with a transit-oriented development (a transit-oriented developmentor TOD, for friends), it certainly cost you more than the brother-in-law’s single-family home, but you can stop to do your shopping while walking towards the station.
If the pandemic has driven you so far away that your closest neighbors are cows and rabbits, you probably have no choice but to travel by car — even if it’s electric, it costs you a lot of money, and at society too.
The banks, which finance mortgages and car loans, have known this since the car and the suburbs have proliferated: the less you pay for housing, the more you spend on travel. Research also confirms the converse: the more households invest in their mortgage, the less they waste to own a parked vehicle 95% of the time.
However, major cities in North America are grappling with a severe housing affordability crisis. In addition, the pandemic and the inflation that followed have caused land prices and rents to skyrocket. Quebec was not spared. Result: low-income households can no longer afford to live near a train or metro station, and first-time buyers are forced to travel excessive distances to access property.
Forced to drive to go to work, study or go shopping, they buy an additional vehicle and thus spend close to $10,000 a year on a consumer good destined to depreciate at a frantic rate, rather than saving or invest in their property.
Are cars more important than people?
Since the start of the housing crisis some ten years ago, Quebec’s automobile fleet has grown more than twice as fast as the population. Result: greenhouse gas emissions in transport are increasing at the rate at which they should be decreasing.
In short, everyone loses out.
However, in countries where the supply of affordable housing is massively increased in neighborhoods with high accessibility, whether on foot, by bike, by metro or by car, households enjoy a much better quality of life. They thus contribute on a daily basis to reducing the community’s carbon footprint, rather than increasing it in spite of themselves.
The Government of Quebec is about to adopt a National Policy on Architecture and Land Use Planning. This is a golden opportunity to remedy an aberration which it is high time that we tackled collectively. Why do we impose maximum residential density thresholds and minimum parking ratios? Shouldn’t we do the opposite? Unless cars are more important than people…
Let’s remove once and for all the regulatory barriers that prevent us from properly housing our population. Let’s save her in transportation what she will be able to invest in her environment and her quality of life. The back seat of a car will never be a cozy bed.
A first version of this column was published on Unpointfive.ca on April 19, 2021.