In a new essay, two researchers argue that infrastructure for denser housing, such as apartments, costs far less per capita and per unit, and that embracing density can help solve 小蓝视频’s infrastructure deficit by making investment more impactful.
A Jan. 15 paper by Alex Hemingway and Danny Oleksiuk contends that some 小蓝视频 municipalities are “passing the infrastructure buck” to other communities by citing a lack of capacity to absorb new density, resulting in costly urban sprawl.
Hemingway is a senior economist with the 小蓝视频 office for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives think tank, and Oleksiuk is a fellow with the Sightline Institute think tank and co-founder of Abundant Housing Vancouver.
Pushing back against the narrative from density-averse municipalities, the authors claim that housing density is not the problem, and that by imposing low-density zoning, cities have been making the challenge of paying for infrastructure harder, not easier.
“The costs of public infrastructure are becoming the go-to excuse for restrictive zoning policies in British Columbia,” they wrote. “These policies effectively ban apartments on most residential land and reserve it exclusively for low-density housing like detached houses.”
Hemingway and Oleksiuk gave the example of building 100 homes in an apartment building versus building 100 detached homes. When homes are farther apart, this requires longer pipes, wires and roads to connect them, raising costs. And spreading out homes farther from important services and amenities increases demands on transit and roads.
The authors acknowledged the province’s and country’s infrastructure woes, but said density may be the solution rather than the problem.
“The reality is that allowing denser housing makes it easier to tackle infrastructure challenges, not harder,” they wrote.
“Metro Vancouver cities have been digging a budgetary hole with inefficient sprawl for decades. It’s time to stop digging, stop banning apartments on most of the land and start building the homes people need.”
Hemingway and Oleksiuk also called for a “collective” approach to tackle infrastructure and housing woes in the region, involving collaboration between the private sector and all levels of government.
“A collective approach across city limits, along with new local, regional, and federal funding programs, would help cities embrace the apartments they should legalize anyway while ensuring a strong infrastructure to support the entire urban fabric,” they said.
Cities typically pay for their infrastructure investments through a mix of property tax revenue, debt financing, funding from senior governments and increasingly higher fees levied on new housing construction.
“The provincial and federal governments can play an important role by providing more funding to close the infrastructure gap and promote efficient urban housing creation. This funding should require an end to apartment bans, especially in expensive central cities like Vancouver,” Hemingway and Oleksiuk wrote.
Their paper, Worried About Infrastructure Costs? Then End the Apartment Ban, cites numerous sources including news reports, academic articles and public research.
