The quality and diversity of emails I’ve been getting for this project is fantastic. Here’s another, this one from Tom Young, an urban planner working for a major consulting company in Edmonton, who calls us to go “back-to-the-future” and plan long streets of integrated retail rather than clumps of shops we drive to. Here’s his primer on density.
“I read your article yesterday on Summerside and other southside communities. In the comments you noted that you were looking to figure out the densities for neighbourhoods like this.
“The planned densities for new neighbourhoods are available on the City’s website if you look at statistics page for each of the approved plans.
“Summerside, for instance, approved in 1999, has a planned density of 42 persons per gross hectare. i.e., if you divide the number of anticipated residents by the total area of the neighbourhood, you would have 42 in each hectare. Most neighbourhoods approved in more recent years, however, use a different measure for density than Summerside does.
“Firstly, they measure by residential units, not by number of residents. This is because the average number of residents per residential unit has been dropping steadily over the last couple of decades. More people are living alone and families are generally smaller than they used to be, so trying to estimate the number of residents has become something of a guessing game.
“And secondly, they measure by net residential area, not the entire neighbourhood. This is because some neighbourhoods have natural areas within them, or they are the locations for regional parks or major infrastructure. So if you measure the density on the area of the entire neighbourhood, the numbers might come out skewed. A neighbourhood that is host to one or several of these sorts of large facilities might appear very low density if you included the entire land area in it, when in fact it could be quite dense within the residential portion.
“Summerside is one of those neighbourhoods that was approved at the tail end of several decades of very low density suburban development. It has approximately 25% multiple family residential (row houses, apartment buildings) and the rest is low density (single detached and duplex houses). This is fairly typical of neighbourhoods approved in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Some neighbourhoods approved in that period had a lot less multiple family residential in them, in fact, because real estate was very inexpensive and most people preferred houses over more dense forms of development. If you look at the inner ring suburbs, the Aspen Gardenses and Rio Terraces of the 1950’s and 1960’s, many of these neighbourhoods have almost no multiple family residential at all. This approach to development just does not fly in our current political environment.
“A major reason for that change is concern over the cost of serving such low density neighbourhoods with schools, roads, transit, police, fire, sewers, etc. With fewer people living in a given area, you have fewer taxpayers footing the bill for services. There was a shift about a decade ago towards more dense neighbourhoods, and the real estate boom that we saw around 2006-2007 just reinforced that interest on the side of developers, who wanted to make sure they kept the lower end purchasers in the market. Houses just weren’t as affordable as they used to be. New neighbourhoods these days will often see up to 50% multiple family residential, sometimes even higher. Only urban neighbourhoods like Oliver or Strathcona have higher densities than neighbourhoods approved in the last ten years, but these are a result of high density redevelopment over time, not single developers creating entire neighbourhoods from scratch.
“Density doesn’t necessarily mean they are sustainable, however. Being so far from the centre of the city and having very little employment within them, new neighbourhoods are difficult to serve effectively with transit. This is also a challenge for walking or cycling. Sure, these areas have trails and bike paths, but do they lead anywhere? Would a resident even think of trying to bike to work?
“Suburbs can function well in the city if they can piggyback on more urban areas that make up for their lack of amenities, jobs and high-quality public transit and if they haven’t strayed too far from the connectivity and continuity that older areas provide. But trying to recreate that sort of connectivity from scratch in a new neighbourhood is very difficult. Density isn’t enough. We have a development model that likes to build everything in chunks, not in corridors and interconnected grids. Consider the intersection of 23 Avenue and Rabbit Hill Road out in the southwest. There is a huge amount of retail and services there. But it is so concentrated and car-focused that unless you live right on the edge of it, you are forced to drive to it.
“An older, more integrated development model would have stretched out all that retail along a main commercial street. Then, instead of massive commercial properties clumped all around one intersection with two massive roads, you could have a multi-block or even completely continuous stretch of commercial corridor that could then connect in with the same sort of commercial area in neighbourhoods further north or south. You see this in older neighbourhoods, even though the vitality of many of their main streets has been sapped by malls and big box developments: Jasper Avenue, Whyte Avenue, 118th Avenue. All of these shopping areas run through multiple neighbourhoods and connect them to each other as a result. This means a lot more people have shopping and services within a short walking distance from home. The walk is also more interesting, as you have lots of people watching and interaction opportunities as your neighbours get out of their cars and walk, too.
“Achieving this requires a fundamental paradigm shift. I guess you could say it would be a back-to-the-future sort of thing. Some people criticize these sorts of suggestions as being old thinking that won’t work nowadays. And it’s true that lifestyles are drastically different today than they were 80-100 years ago. But the simple fact is that if we want to get back to a walking, cycling and transit culture, and we want more people-friendly places, then we should take lessons from the past, back when most people lived carless lifestyles and developers and city builders did that sort of thing well.
“We do car-dependent development extremely well in this city. You might say we’ve got it down to a science. But community building needs art as well as science. Car-dependent development is not attractive, it’s not people-friendly, and it’s not sustainable. Many people are used to it and don’t see any problem with it. But when a hot summer day comes along, where do people flock to? Do they go hang out at South Edmonton Common and meet up with their friends for a gelato to enjoy the people watching? Or do they head down to Whyte Ave?”
