How can we fix North American cities?

Joe Fish Have you ever taken a trip abroad to Europe or Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and been impressed by their cities? Was your mind blown by their size and density, their streetscapes teaming with people congregating at coffee shops or going about their daily business? Then how did it feel to come back to Canada? What did you think as the plane made its descent towards the tarmac, watching through the window as the wilderness gave way to an endless sea of suburban sprawl? Well, if you’re like me, you might have thought something along the lines of ‘how did we mess this up so badly’? Today we’re going to try to answer that question by taking a closer look at one municipality in particular that’s the city of London, Ontario, which happens to be the birthplace of today’s guest. We’re going to talk about how North American cities remade themselves to accommodate the rise of the car. Why aren’t our cities as vibrant as places like, say, Rome or Hanoi? If suburban development doesn’t work for the people living there, then who does it work for? And what can we do now to fix it?

I’m Joe Fish, sitting in for Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Jason Slaughter is the creator of the YouTube channel, Not Just Bikes , which focuses on responsible urbanism. Hey, Jason.

Jason Hi, Joe. Thanks for having me on.

Joe Oh, no problem at all, it’s a pleasure to have you. So right off the bat, I know you’re a native of London, Ontario, and recognizing that you’re not a professional urban planner, but somebody who’s spent a whole lot of time kind of writing about and thinking about the built world: to start with, I’d like to ask you to play the role of city doctor. So with the utmost respect to the city and people of London, Ontario, from an urban planning perspective, I want you to kind of diagnose what in your eyes is sort of wrong with the city and how, if at all, it could be improved.

Jason Oh, that’s a good one. You’re throwing me right into the deep end here with the first question.

Joe Well, that’s what we do at The Big Story.

Jason Well, I guess I would say the problems in London, Ontario are not unique in any way, shape or form. They’re the same problems that almost every city and town in the US and Canada have. That is to say that it was originally a compact, walkable city and just as good as those that you would find anywhere else in the world. But then things drastically changed after World War Two with this era of what Strong Towns calls the suburban experiment, where the city basically gave up on its walkable downtown core and sprawled out into the suburbs with infrastructure that was completely car dependent. And throughout the 40s 50s 60s, that was generally seen as the way of the future.

The city bulldozed most of its downtown, most of the original buildings and walkable shops and everything else are gone, and the downtown hollowed out. And the problem that has happened here after that suburban experiment is that we’re starting to learn that we actually gave up quite a lot by bulldozing those downtowns. It wasn’t full of just a bunch of old, useless buildings. And London is running into all the problems that suburbanization runs into, which is to say, poor transportation options, lots of traffic, actually an insane amount of traffic for a city of its size. It has completely nonfunctional public transportation. You can’t get around in any other way but with a car.

And the city is starting to hit all of the issues that happen with the financing of those suburban neighborhoods as well, because you’re starting to get the situation where the city is, quite frankly, spending all of its money to keep up this suburbanization. Now the infrastructure 30, 40 years ago is starting to come due, and the city is running into financial issues.

Now, it’s not as much of an issue for London as it is for some other places in North America because London is still growing again. And so this is the typical issue with financing the suburbs is that they fundamentally don’t collect enough tax revenue to pay for the maintenance of their infrastructure.

Joe Right. And you made a video for Strong Towns where you went a bit further, and you actually referred to suburban sprawl as a Ponzi scheme.

Jason Yes. And it really is. It does meet the definition of a Ponzi scheme fairly well. I mean, it’s not an intentional thing that people are doing, but it has that effect because ultimately, if you’ve built these car-centric suburban places where you do not collect enough tax revenue to pay for the ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure, in particular, the replacement cost of the infrastructure that being the streets and roads, the electrical lines, the water lines, the sewage lines. If you’re not collecting enough money, then you’ve got to get it from somewhere. And where these suburban places get it from is new growth. So you bring in new growth, you bring in new taxpayers. But to be clear that new growth on the periphery of the city is not covering its own infrastructure that’s being built today, you’re using the tax revenue you’re bringing in from these newcomers to pay for the inner ring suburbs that would otherwise be completely bankrupt.

And what cities should do about this is a fairly long involved question, and it really depends on what parts of the city you’re talking about. Certainly, one thing that cities in North America really have to do is they have to stop growing outwards. There is so much space in London, Ontario, that could be used to make more dense walkable neighborhoods to bring back the missing middle, everything in between the single family home and the apartment building. And there’s so much that could be done. But honestly, I don’t even know where to start with that. So I think we’d need to break it down into different pieces of the problem.

Joe Sure. Well, let’s start with government, and it’s sort of ethos towards urban planning and development. You know, you mentioned that a lot of these cities that are focused on suburban sprawl are kind of locked into this sort of self defeating cycle where they need to keep expanding in order to make up for the shortfalls that have been caused by the mistakes of the past. So are governments sort of waking up to this at all, or are they just sort of locked into this kind of death spiral?

Jason Well, it’s really interesting to see, because again, when your city is growing, it’s really easy to ignore the problem. When governments start to take a look at it is when there’s a lull, when there’s a time when things aren’t going so well. Suddenly you don’t have those new taxpayers coming in. You may even be losing people, but that doesn’t change the infrastructure liabilities, the bills coming due from developments made 30, 40 years ago.

But some governments are waking up to this. If you look at the improvements that they’ve made to Dundas Street in London, I don’t know if you’ve been down there.

Joe Haven’t had the pleasure yet.

Jason If anybody in London goes downtown these days, you see massive changes that are happening. They’ve widened the sidewalks and narrowed the roads. They’ve changed the way the parking works. And they’ve really improved that street because there is a segment of government that knows full well that this is an issue.

It’s politically difficult because you’re basically trying to tell your wealthiest residents that they’re being subsidized. But it’s the truth. And the way that they’re looking at this is saying, well, in these walkable core neighborhoods that we’ve had for 100 years, sometimes more, there is wealth potential there. And I think this is the big message of Strong Towns, too, is to say a small improvement to lots of those traditional neighborhoods will have a much bigger impact on future wealth creation than anything you could do in the periphery. There’s already infrastructure there. There’s already neighborhoods there, and they just need to be improved. And I think that’s exactly why you see these downtown renewal projects.

And not the downtown renewal that was done in the past. Like, for instance, in London, Ontario, huge amounts of downtown were bulldozed so that they could build Galleria Mall, which when I was a kid, Galleria Mall was the new shiny mall downtown. And it was a flash in the pan, and then it disappeared because there was still this thought around it that you’re going to build this infrastructure, these new shops that you’re going to revitalize downtown. But you’re going to do it by convincing people in the suburbs to drive into downtown.

Joe If you build it, they will come.

Jason Yeah. But that never works, because if you’re talking about somebody who lives out in a suburb, like what’s their real incentive to come downtown as opposed to driving to any of the other malls in the periphery, it doesn’t make sense. And I think what smart cities are starting to realize is that you should be building downtown for the people who live downtown. And you should be making it more appealing for people to live in these walkable neighborhoods because it is more financially productive for the city.

And I think right now is an interesting opportunity because over the last about 20 years, the opinions of people have changed quite substantially with respect to living in traditional walkable neighborhoods. I mean, if you looked back, say, 40 years, you’d be hard pressed to find somebody who wanted this. It was very much that people wanted the suburbs. But when you look at younger generation and I hear this literally every day from people who watch my channel, they’re like, yes, this is what I’ve been looking for, and I didn’t even know it. I knew that there was something wrong with the suburbs. I knew I didn’t like having to drive everywhere. I knew I hated growing up without any independence and being trapped in this suburban neighborhood, but I didn’t know what the alternative was.

And I think the wise thing for cities to do is to take advantage of that changing preference of people towards more traditional walkable neighborhoods, towards missing middle housing and all of that and using that to revitalize these places that are more financially productive, these downtown walkable neighborhoods and take that to their advantage and start changing things because it’s never going to be easier than when there’s a huge pent up demand for exactly this kind of way of living.

Joe Right. Of course. And you mentioned that sort of feeling of being trapped in the suburbs and so much of that as you kind of alluded to is due to car dependency. The fact that you need to get in your car to get anywhere and do anything in so much of the city. Well, many North American cities, in fact, and your videos really do kind of hone in and focus on this idea of the perils of car dependent infrastructure. And one of the things I love about your videos is that they kind of give name to the sort of day to day things that annoy us all, but that we never really think about too closely. And on that note, would you mind telling me a little bit about ‘Stroads’ and what they are?

Jason Yeah, sure. Stroads is a term from Strong Towns that was invented by their founder, Chuck Marohn, who was a traffic engineer who used to build streets and roads. He started to realize that there was a fundamental problem with the way that we design roads in North America, in the US and Canada and in other places, too, like Australia.

You can kind of break it down into two things. You either want a street or you want a road. So a road, I mean, it’s like a railroad. It’s a way to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. This is desirable because it can move large amounts of traffic from point A to point B very quickly and efficiently. Whether that be by car on a car road or a train on a railroad, roads are useful. But a road is not a street. A street is where the stuff is. A street is the destination. It’s not the thoroughfare. So the street is the place that your house is on. The street is the place that the shops are on. That is a street. And if you try to mix those things as is done so often in US and Canadian traffic engineering, you get a bad performing road, and you get a bad performing street, too.

And that’s why they came up with this term, the portmanteau between the two of them called a Stroad, which is a purposefully, terrible sounding word because they’re a terrible thing. But once you learn about Stroads, you see them everywhere throughout every city in Canada. London, Ontario is a city of stroads. They never built a highway system for better or for worse. And the entire city is built of stroads. So a stroad is a street that’s designed to a highway standard. So you’ll take a Street, let’s say five lanes, wide lanes of car traffic. But then you also have a whole bunch of driveways to businesses and side streets and all of this stuff. And so a stroad just doesn’t work well for anybody.

A stroad doesn’t work well as a road, because with all of these side streets, driveways, cars going in and out, slowing down to turn and everything else, you’re not efficiently moving traffic. And it doesn’t work well as a street because a street is the place where ultimately your wealth is in your city. That’s where you need your productive businesses. But when you’ve designed the street for high speed traffic, nobody wants to walk along there. It’s incredibly unpleasant to walk next to all of these cars and high speed cars. You end up having to park all of the vehicles, which is where you get the seas of asphalt for parking lots around things, which makes it completely inhospitable to anybody who’s not in a car.

What a business needs is not cars. It needs foot traffic, it needs people. People buy things, not cars. And that’s part of the reason why in these cities that are full of stroads, you don’t see an awful lot of small businesses. You tend to see the big chain stores, right? The ones that have enough clout to put up their big sign. And people know who the McDonald’s is. They know who the Starbucks is. You’re not going to find the mesh of small businesses that you’ll see in walkable places. And the issue that Strong Towns brings up is that the stroad really devalues the street. It really just brings property values down significantly. It requires so much more infrastructure to service those small number of stores left, because now you need much longer water pipes to go across the longer distances. You need much more asphalt everywhere. That all needs to be maintained for a small number of shops. And ultimately, by building everything based on this stroad, you’ve totally devalued your city. There is no wealth left there.

Joe Another sort of effect of these stroads that you touch on quite a lot is the decline in this kind of nebulous thing called vibrancy. And you talk a lot about Vibrancy and Livability as well. And I’m just wondering this word vibrant. We like to think that it means different things to different people. But what does it mean to you? And why does it matter?

Jason Well, it’s funny. I hear from so many people in the US or Canada. They’ll go on vacation to Asia, they’ll go on vacation to Europe, and they’ll come back saying, oh, it was so lovely. There was just these great streets, and we sat out on this patio and we watched the world go by. And it was so wonderful. And there was this really cool place just around the corner from our hotel, and we walked over there, and then they come home and they don’t realize that all of those wonderful things are because you have a traditional mixed-use walkable neighborhood. That’s what you were in.

And I think what people missed then coming back to their asphalt covered stroadville, is that we used to have that, too. We used to have that exact same thing, but we bulldozed it for parking lots. I think anybody who has traveled to Europe or even most places in Asia, or maybe even to like a traditional walkable neighborhood that’s still around in the United States, like in Washington DC or in New York or Boston. I think people know what this is like when you have life on the street. When you have lots of people walking around, you have lots of activities. You’ll have lots of small shops. The city is alive with people. And there isn’t that liveliness that exists in Canadian cities because we’ve hollowed out our downtowns.

Another example, I was in a town called Sneek in the Netherlands, a very small town. It actually has almost identical population to St. Thomas. Looking at this city where they had this pedestrian area in the city center. And these places weren’t always pedestrianized. People think, oh, these medieval streets in Europe. It’s not like that at all. These places had cars and the cars were removed. And this was a beautiful small town that had all this really wonderful life going on in the city center. And we all agreed you’re never going to see this in St. Thomas. And if you look at downtown St. Thomas, it has a big wide stroad cutting right through the center of it. The Tim Hortons and the McDonald’s and everything else. I mean, there’s nothing there. There’s no reason to be there. And if you had looked at St. Thomas 100 years ago, compared to Sneek or anywhere else in the Netherlands, I don’t think they would have been that different. And that’s really what we’ve lost.

Joe Right. And I think there are people who would hear your ideas, and I think they would wholly agree with them, and they would recognize the sort of value of them. But they might counter that, ‘well, sometime in the past, for better or for worse, here in Canada, we chose the car. And to remedy that mistake, it would take too much time and too much money to ever really be feasible.’ And I’m just wondering, is there a good counterargument to that line of reasoning? Because I can’t necessarily think of one.

Jason Well, the fundamental issue is that car dependency is not financially sustainable. This is what Strong Towns has proven. So you can say all you want about it being expensive. We are literally bankrupting our cities by continuing to sprawl out with car dependency. So it’s only a matter of time before the current period of growth stops. And everybody who’s left is going to be holding the bag for the maintenance obligations of the things that we built. The thing is, traditional walkability is not expensive. It’s the cheapest thing you can build. I mean, if you looked at any city 100, 200 years ago, they were all around the world pretty much built the same way. They were mixed use. They were walkable. They may have been built around a train station.

I mean, you look at Canada, the US, the entire country was built around trains. On the East Coast, it was boats and then everything after that, it was trains. This is literally the cheapest thing that has been done for thousands of years. The issue we have is that when we made this decision to go with car dependent places, we made it illegal to build anything else because one of these other myths is quite persistent in North America is that, oh, well, people like this, they’ve chosen this. So let’s just respect their choice. And the truth is, we can’t choose anything else. There is no other choice. There is a dwindling number of nice walkable neighborhoods in Canada, and since it’s effectively illegal to build anymore, they are a constantly declining percentage of the housing stock.

When we have things such as… the biggest one being exclusionary zoning. So in most of North America, this is slowly changing in certain places, but with exceptions that I’ll get to. In most of North America, it’s illegal to build, say, shops next to houses. You have an area that is zoned for residential and that’s only going to be residential. You’ll have another area that’s zoned for commercial and that’s only going to be commercial. Another for offices and everything else. That fundamentally makes walkable urbanism impossible, because there can only be a small number of people who happen to be jutted up against the commercial area that could feasibly walk there. That is, if they didn’t have to cross a six lane stroad to get there, which nobody wants to do.

So when you have things like exclusionary zoning, when you have minimum parking requirements. This is the other thing that destroyed a lot of our cities is that when you build a house, an apartment or shop, you need to have a minimum number of parking spaces. And these are completely arbitrary. It’s actually staggering how stupidly minimum parking requirements are decided. And I was looking at the minimum parking requirements for London, Ontario the other week. And, for instance, if you build a bar or a Tavern, it’s called a Tavern in the law because it’s that old. But if you build a Tavern, you need to build at least one parking spot for every 6 m² of floor space. Why? Because they said so. It is impossible to build a bar that doesn’t have a bunch of parking around it. And that goes for every other possible kind of use you could imagine.

Joe And if there’s one kind of business that you don’t want people driving to, it’s probably a bar.

Jason Which is exactly why I looked that one up, because I’m like, this is ludicrous. So this is exactly what destroyed our downtowns because you had this situation where after World War II, the whole world was recovering in a sense. And a lot of our downtowns could use some work. But when you put in minimum parking requirements and say, okay, there’s this building that could use some renovation and could be leased out, let’s say a restaurant. People weren’t allowed to do that because they had to provide off street parking. That totally destroys the fabric of a city. You no longer have a city anymore, you have a sea of parking lots with the occasional buildings sprinkled in it. And that’s exactly how we’ve destroyed the wealth in our cities.

So where I was going with this is that we were talking about how it’s not possible to do this anymore. And even if we wanted to build these financially productive areas, it’s not an issue of cost in building them. We can do this financially, but we can’t do it legally because of all of these regulations that have been put in place that enforce a car dependent view of the world.

There are moves towards this. This is not new information. It’s not like I’m coming up with this for the first time. This is well known by urban planners. Some cities in Canada are starting to do better. Actually, a city like Oakville is doing fairly well in this regard. But again, it’s only small areas here and there that they’re doing this on. And if it’s not a cohesive whole, then what you’re going to end up with is a situation where you’ve got a row of townhouses, but everybody still needs to drive everywhere.

Joe Gotcha. So we’ve touched on solutions a little bit, but mostly what we’ve done in this conversation is really kind of articulated what the problems are in North America. And I guess where I want to end it is you, as I mentioned, off the top, are now living in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands or Holland. I want to ask you without putting you on the spot too hard. What’s sort of one approach to urban planning that Canada could adopt from its Dutch counterparts that might immediately sort of improve the day to day lives of Canadian citizens?

Jason Well, I’m not even sure that it needs to be something that you learn from the Dutch. There’s a lot of things that the Dutch do correctly, which is why we live here because their cities are just better. And I think it’s almost like I don’t want people to think that they need to import these solutions from Europe or Asia or anywhere else. I think what they really need to do is open a history book. It’s not that long ago. You can go back to the way we built things even as late as 1930 and things will significantly improve. This is not some kind of like newfangled urbanism invented by the Dutch or something like that. This is literally just go back to what we were doing before we screwed it all up. It’s really as simple as that. It’s get rid of this restrictive zoning, get rid of these minimum parking requirements, allow people to build cities as they were built for thousands of years, make it easier to build good, productive, walkable, livable urban spaces, make it legal again, and make it easier than building into the suburbs.

Because there will always be some people who want to live in a big single family home and drive, and that’s fine provided they actually pay for it. But we’ve built a situation now where it’s harder to build good, financially productive places than it is to sprawl out on the edge of town. And so I think that’s what we need to do. We need to make it easier to build the places we used to build and harder to build the places we can’t afford.

Joe Right. Here’s to a future of Canada that’s stroad free.

Jason That would be an improvement.

Joe Jason, thank you so much for this.

Jason Yeah. Thank you so much for your time.

Joe Jason Slaughter creator of the YouTube channel, Not Just Bikes. And that was The Big Story. If you’d like to check out past episodes, you can find them all at thebigstorypodcast.ca. If you want to communicate with us directly, you can find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN or shoot us an email at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]

And if you liked this episode, please be sure to like subscribe or follow us in your favorite podcast player. Thanks for listening. Again, I’m Joe Fish filling in for Jordan Heath Rawlings, who don’t worry, will be back on Monday. Have yourself a nice weekend. Back to top of page