The Problem of “Neighborhood Character” 

Yeah. But that doesn't mean we should dismiss all misgivings just like that. While many are not valid, some might be. So a discussion should always be allowed to take place and everyone should be given a chance to make their reservation heard, before we do it anyway.

This is why building permits should be shall-issue with no input from the "community" allowed to get in the way. If a developer follows the zoning rules and building codes, they should get the permit. Living in a city has many perks but also some drawbacks; one of those "drawbacks" is that neighborhoods are not hermetically sealed dioramas that stay exactly the same until the end of time.

yeah, if you dont want the landscape around your property to change, buy it

@@jceess I find it very interesting how people in the neighbourhood have a say in updagrading a house to a triplex in North America (according to what I've watched in YT), for example.

@@jceess And gun permits should be shall-issue as well. Yeehaw!

What's interesting about this is, while the neighbourhoods around Central Tech have become lower density, it's not like that can't be rectified. In fact, the Cityplace neighbourhood (about 10 minutes away by streetcar) is multiple orders of magnitude denser than the Annex, and parents there had to wait years for either the public or Catholic school boards to build a school (which ended up being co-located anyway with one another when it was finally built), resulting in elementary aged children having to commute for years to schools further away. Even now, almost every time a new development of any kind happens in Toronto, notices from the school boards are posted that the children may need to go to a school that is out of catchment as a result of capacity issues at local schools. The empty schools problem is most acute in the neighbourhoods with - wait for it - the most single family zoning.

Without neighbourhood character, they could and would build 33 tower condos on either side of a single dwelling.

@@figgerhead 33 tower condos exist because of neighbourhood character and single family zoning. Developers build as much as they can on one spot to cover the costs and make a profit. By restricting the areas where middle density housing can be built to accommodate the population, developers are instead forced to build extremes- either single family housing or giant condos clustered in specific areas instead of more even housing throughout the area to meet demand.

@@figgerhead "Neighbourhood character" isn't about building a building that is too tall or about traffic - it's about keeping people out and keeping house prices high. The argument is the same if it's a triplex or a condo tower. There's a reason we have the missing middle...

Neighborhood character has nothing to do with buildings. It is about keeping people out because as French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote "Hell is other people." People are jerks for the most part so the less people you have around you the better. I don't blame anyone for wanting for wanting to preserve neighborhood character.

@@nunyabidness3075 property value != character of neighbourhood.

Still even with out any life character remains.

It's difficult to change the perception of worthless cities and their people when most people don't have a grasp of the finances of their local economy. The vast majority of Americans believe urban areas and their people are welfare cases sucking up tax revenue when in reality urban areas subsidize suburban areas.

@@nunyabidness3075 The tax revenue and expense ratio broken down by every city block is straightforward to compute. There's nothing difficult, mysterious, nor hidden about that information, and may I direct you to the Urban 3 research NGO that makes said information mapped to GIS so you can make up your own mind.

@@nunyabidness3075 I worked for several years making GIS maps based on FIPS codes for every county in the US for the Missouri finance division (tax revenue and expenses), and I presently work for the Alabama department of finance. So I would say I have a pretty good handle (along with all my coworkers) as to what and where our expenses are. To be specific, the infrastructure cost of providing urban service (multifamily housing) to suburban area (single family detached housing) is financially unsustainable. To wit, the cost of water, sewage, electricity, and road should be less than the tax revenue generated in those area. And we have a very good idea of how much all those services costs (and never mind services such as schools, police, fire, etc...)...they cost about $30,000 per 20 years per household, adjustable of course by inflation. Hence, the tax revenue should equal that...and it does in urban areas, and but in the suburban areas the ratio of taxes to infrastructure is about 1:30. The cost to provide infrastructure goes up by area covered; it should be very obvious to you that the cost to run 10 blocks of sewage and water is 10 times more expensive to run 1 block. Hence, urban vs suburban arguments should always be reduced to a geometry problem; the cost of providing service to a certain number of taxpayers scales by density. So as your city financial advisor I cannot in good conscious provide you with a sustainable business plan to keep your suburban areas afloat because your costs greatly exceeds your tax revenue. Whereas a suburban area might bring in 200 families paying $600 each per year, their infrastructure initial cost and maintenance cost with be several thousand per year. In contrast, a single dilapidated city block with a crappy slumlord apartment will bring in half a million per year while costing almost nothing in infrastructure (it's already been built), while several mid and high rises will bring in several million of tax revenue per year. However, all this is pointless because you said "higher crime". It is not possible to convince the white suburban man to live, work beside, or in any way interact with people who don't think or look like him. It is, indeed, impossible to even show that his heavily subsidized suburban lifestyle is even subsidized. Ask him what a bad neighborhood is, and he'll automatically think "black people". At some point there will be a financial outcome whereby your suburban area becomes insolvent due to its high debt to revenue ratio.

"People are not going to reconsider their view points if they feel attacked." YES! I mean, many will feel attacked anyways, but the tone helps to ease things out, no doubt.

Oh yeah I know who you're talking about.

@@jellybeansi right I get that. Some channels are best suited to keeping the fire started while this one can help light more.

I agree this channel is the best urban planning channel I've come across. I would argue they are not being neutral, but they are being objective. Neutral is when you give both sides equal weight. This is what corporate media does when they talk about climate change. Clearly the side that says there is no climate change is just denying mountains of evidence, but corporate media gives it equal weight anyways. Objective is when you tell the truth. Like when independent media says climate change is real regardless of what the oil barons say. This channel tells the truth, whether people like it or not. The way they deliver it is thoughtful and convincing, which is probably what you meant, sorry to nitpick.

Well said!

I think that urbanists and architects are partly/mostly to blame outside of historical districts, because new housing often has artistic features that are ugly..and attract even more car traffic.

I've often wondered this myself. Suburb-lovers rave about yards, but what is it actually useful for? You almost never see anyone using their yard. Don't think about the one time someone threw a bbq party... 1/365 isn't a good score. :) It's literally people hoarding precious land so prices skyrocket, while making public transport untenable, and wasting precious water and resources to create the most bland and insipid landscape possible.

There is no reason suburbs in desert areas like Phoenix and Las Vegas should have the same lawns as in the northeast. Yet ppl waste tons of water to make it all look the same no matter where you go.

@@machtmann2881 yeah front yards in these areas should have desertscapes imo.

@@HallsofAsgard96 I feel like those would look much prettier as well.

@@ChasmChaos The interesting thing about grass lawns is that they were originally just a way for rich people to flex how rich they were.

I haven't touched a SamTrans schedule in months. Last I checked, there was one bus every hour, and only between 8 and 8.

I know right lmao It was lobbied for in many parts by the auto industry sadly.

Meanwhile, Asian auto powerhouses, mainly Japan and Korea, have very walkable neighborhoods. Shops are nearby, streets are quite narrow, yet everything is still fine.

You just described my home growing up… and 10 of millions of North Americans. Can’t wait for your next vid btw. -cheers from Cleveland!

@@NamelessProducts "at least we're not detroit!" Hehehe

I was just thinking about you. A few comments praised the good faith approach by otu, and I thought "yeah, but when I hear our government says it's against speed limits because the agreed to be against speed limits I need some alan fisher rage". Thanks to you all!

Would it still apply to historic neighborhoods?

'Allo monsieur Fisher

NIMBYS: "I hate HOAs telling me what to do with my property. That's why I bought a detached SFH." Also NIMBYS: "You can't build that here (even though it's not my property)"

it's crazy because they dont even own the properties, if there was no zoning laws nimbys could not excersice control over OTHER people's property

For some reason they have that fear that any apartment near them will turn into the "Projects" (a euphemism for slums and non-whites), not realizing it was their parents' racist and smug attitudes that caused all of that in the first place.

You can maintain an architectural style and still allow new development. A facade can easily be made to match the existing style in an area

I literally had someone in my local area argue that it's child abuse to raise a kid in something other than a single family home, as an argument for why homes in their area needed to stay the same. I always bring up how our neighborhoods were different before WW2, but they believe that perfected housing came about in the 50s. Doesn't help that here in the west coast USA, so many still hold on to racist redlining practices by trying to make those who they don't want feel unwelcome.

North Americans have this weird idea in our heads that density just automatically means slums or the densest parts of Hong Kong. If we actually tried more density, it would most likely look more like Europe, which we already love to vacation to because it's so easy to get around for some totally unexplainable reason...

@@machtmann2881 "Wow, I love these beautiful, mid raise buildings and the awesome transit that takes me literally everywhere I want! And I don't even have to drive to get groceries?? This is the best!" "We plan on making your city just like that" "Nooo! I don't want that! Nooo! The shadows might eat the children! Or the trams might ring a bell that's made not to be disruptive to your general way of life!"

@@KyurekiHana You could argue that kids had better childhoods in more dense areas because they can travel on their own to where all the fun is, instead of playing in the front yard with their day once a decade and mostly sit indoors playing video games or watching TV since they have to depend on their parents to take them literally anywhere by car Of course, this isn't universal and single family homes aren't terrible on their own, but it's the norm and that's no good

@@highlyconfused6493 Well lots of parents move out to the suburbs to give their kids a better childhood in their mind's eye. They do tend to be rated higher in the suburbs (to the extent that you can trust school ratings in the first place). I think parents have better peace of mind in the suburbs with young kids and can keep an eye on them. But once those kids grow up to become more independent, suburbs become a limiting weight on them. Can't practice independence when you have to ask your parents for a car ride every time you want to do something. Part of the reason Dutch children are the happiest in the world is because they can actually practice independence.

true. we cant just make more density by making the whole suburbs into a little town and ignoring any high-density development. you need mid-density too but there's a reason why we have towers

Shaughnessy as an example at the end was because you mentioned it!

No, sorry, only anti-zoning arguments allowed. Obviously the only solution to the housing crisis is to raze entire neighbourhoods to the ground, send all the waste to landfill, then use up *new* materials to build new denser housing. It's not like all those front and backyards absorb rainwater or the trees and bushes provide habitat for local animal species. They're useless! They've got to go. And it's not like there is already a global sand crisis that further demand for concrete will only exacerbate. If *everybody* can't have a fully-detached house with a yard, then *nobody* gets one.

Fine, but if you are middle class remember the rich (and powerful) hate you too. The middle class way of life is threatened more by them than by the poor.

@@HweolRidda I dunno, sounds like we've got a lot in common.

@@artstsym with the poor? Yes. We're just permitted slightly better life styles because we've been deemed valuable

@@Joesolo13 Don't be gross.

Thanks!

Which metro? I'd love to move there.

Isn't Sydney the 2nd most unaffordable city now?

Unsure of whether non-American spellings might confuse the RU-vid algorithm

"Homeowners are not children and we're not playing finders keepers. You own your home but we have to share the city." I want to hear more sick roasts of NIMBYS.

Or even more old fashioned. Nobody will get mad about a 3-story triplex if it has enough marble ornamentation on it.

@@bootmii98 Some ppl would, bc they don't want a fairer society or falsely believe thay more homes mean more traffic (it deepens).

We want to allow housing to be built where there's demand.

@@OhTheUrbanity I hate to say this - in North America there is huge demand for suburbia.

@@markplain2555 kinda but there's also even huger demand for mid-density housing. anybody can move out and buy a single family home. well, not anybody, you have to have enough money, but nobody cares about those people. but no, yeah, you're not wrong, it's just most of that demand has already been filled. there's not more demand coming in anymore.

If you don't want to see apartment buildings near you, you should live in rural or remote areas far from cities. (By the way, HOAs are rare in Canada.)

@@OhTheUrbanity they're extremely common in the US. And I thought they were a horrible idea. But now I know why they're so successful. People do not want to invest in a home and risk losing the zoning

Specifically excluding blacks, Asians, and Hispanics (while not absolving them of their tax burden to subsidize infrastructure to such places) was written into all homeowners association as a condition of subsidized federal housing loans. It’s no coincidence poor neighborhoods pay the highest of all tax rates even today while getting the fewer tax dollars.

I think that is a bigger motivation than people are willing to accept, especially those who don't want to think of themselves as racist but still are NYMBIS or support these policies.

"People shouldnt be allowed to have ethnically segregated neighbourhoods" - ever been to chinatown or a native reserve?

@@someguy710 Those places were originally created as one of the few places they could own land in the US.

@@langhamp8912 I didn't sufficiently acknowledge that part of history. I was trying to allude to it, but I didn't clearly enough. I was trying to say it was first explicit, as you point out, but now that white supremacy is no longer the explicit NIMBY motivation and now it is "home value", it doesn't actually matter if housing segregation is explicit or not because it is still unjust now anyway. In other words, people don't have to be white supremacists to participate in the institutionalized, tacit white supremacy that is baked into our current housing market.

We're living in the end result of decades of stagnated density many places. "Sudden" change is needed in many cities. That doesn't necessarily mean 30 story apartments but at least row homes with less of a arbitrarily large set back. A lot of houses are on lots that'd allow pretty large one story flats on each floor(even if there's just 4 or 5 of them)

looks like Blenheim St & W 6th Ave

It's more let the city grow naturally and caring less about specific aesthetic features in general. If the market demands single family homes in an area then by all means. But what we care most about is giving the most people possible the opportunity to live in cities, and that means being more flexible with what types of units you will accept in a neigbourhood.

Protecting the "character" by banning denser housing means that existing residents are using the power of the government to exclude their fellow citizens from moving to their neighbourhood. I don't think that's OK. And legalizing density doesn't mean that all neighbourhoods will become higher density, only the ones in high-demand locations, like neighbourhoods in cities with access to jobs. There are lots of smaller towns and cities that are naturally low density and where legalizing more density wouldn't change them that much.

@@OhTheUrbanity The nature of any high demand market is exclusionary, as is the nature of any zoning law. In fact its the entire point, and that isn't a bad thing as long as its not overused so that alternatives are not available. People want a lifestyle to be possible, so we protect it and allow it to remain a possible, however expensive way to live. Is it over used? maybe, I'm not sure. But being conceptually against it also puts you at odds with many other zoning laws that serve the same purpose.

Prewar built suburban towns have character. Usually because they were built around or near a rail station. The Town of St Lambert in the south shore of Montreal is a good example. There's a town square and walkable tree lined streets. Compare that to Brossard a couple of km away that was built around car infrastructure in the late 50s. It's mainly stroads and sprawl. There's an attempt to build a downtown around the new REM station but we'll see how it turns out

IMO things can have negative character and most post 1960 suburbs have lots of it. (People often say postwar suburbs are bad, but it wasn't really until early 60s before almost all were terrible.)

@@HweolRidda yea I live in a postwar suburb in a old factory town Walkability isn't terrible because it was built near the old main street(which has some mild density to it), but it also isn't a priority with many sidewalks in ill repair Also was better when there was a short line passenger train and later a more frequent trolley(which helped kill said train) than the now hourly bus line which replaced it

Yeah, it's a tricky thing, and I think the background of that home value concern goes into wealth generation/savings in the US (I can't speak to Canada, but it probably has some similarities here). Because interest rates have been so low for decades, putting money in a savings account is a long term loss of money against inflation. And in general, pensions and retirement plans are far worse and less stable for the employee than they were 30-70 years ago. This leaves home ownership/home value as the most reliable form of wealth generation/savings for families. I'd suspect that the relatively high rate of home ownership and importance of that home ownership to financial stability in the US (vs. Europe, for example) ends up exacerbating NIMBYism.

@@yossarian6743 Yeah, our wealth generation avenues have narrowed in the US so that people are incentivized to stock much of their worth away in housing. Stock/bonds are more diversified (and location independent, unlike housing) but most people don't understand them as well. This results in perverse outcomes though as people are now encouraged to become NIMBYs and prevent others from getting into homeownership anywhere near them because less supply = higher home value and the thinking is that even though that doesn't benefit you, it benefits me. People believe this is all natural but it's the result of deliberate government choices and incentives. Homeownership for all wasn't a big push until the 30 year mortgage was invented and especially after the GI Bill after WWII. In reality, it's all been a big experiment and we are now living in the result of a decades long experiment.

Probably an unfortunate consequence of the fact that Ottawa is the easiest place for us to film! There's lots we like about the city though

I've never heard of a bigger non-problem. "There I was, just walking along a public area. Out of nowhere, this building had the gall to cast a shadow on me!"

As long as there's gaps there's going to be plenty of sunlight. Without some buildings like that you might've been walking in a highway anyway

That goes into our point that if you force the buildings to stay the same then you limit supply under demand, making existing residents compete against new ones for the same houses.

Thank you or dignifying my sliver of an argument with a response. Just be responsable when upscaling I guess, but that's usually too much to ask for

@@pawsindmeinlieblingsfach3518 Good they should stay out of toronto

@@pawsindmeinlieblingsfach3518 I thought they live in Montreal.

Legalize denser housing and let people themselves decide whether they want to live there. It shouldn't be up to us to force people into far-flung suburbs because we think they should be living in detached homes. See our video on the topic: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-z8qKNOIYsCg.html

I assure you, there are definitely people who do prefer apartments or townhouses to detached houses. (Me, for one.)

@@OhTheUrbanity Legalize higher density living and it will be built thus causing a scarcity of low density housing and increasing the price and forcing people into high density living

MMM yummy condo developer propaganda you enjoy eating this crap up?

@@ralphlauren7393 lol yea sure. Let’s make people live 30 miles from their job because you don’t want anymore housing🙄

@@ralphlauren7393 found the NIMBY

Gentrification is an extremely complex phenomenon that isn't as succinctly explained by the reason you cited. If I am a computer programmer, I would welcome a new Google office next door to me. But if all of my neighbours are construction workers, they will not benefit from Google opening an office and instead, will get priced out when Google developers move into that neighbourhood. The neighbourhood would get an injection of wealth, but the residents there wouldn't (unless they colluded to increase the value of their houses by collective bargaining before selling and moving, but not everyone wants that or can do that). What's good for a neighbourhood isn't always good for the people living there. This is what led to the pushback against Amazon's HQ2 in Queens, New York. The residents there righty came to the conclusion that they would end up getting Amazon warehouse jobs (minimum wage), not Amazon software engineering jobs ($$$$$), while getting priced out by the Amazon software engineers that move there. Regarding "homogenization", do you see the irony in using that term for people who are asking for diversity and options for housing?

@@ChasmChaos No, because folks like "Urbanity" don't like the idea of diversity *in neighborhoods*. That is, the possibility that one neighborhood could be working-class while another neighborhood is upscale and yet a third neighborhood might be populated by the military families of the military base next door. Instead, he'll look at a neighborhood and decide it has too much of THIS and not enough of THAT for his taste, and therefore the neighborhood should be rebuilt to make him feel it's worthwhile. What really set me off was when he said "Why not build a LOT of two- and three-story apartment buildings in what was a neighborhood of single-family homes? The residents may learn to like it!" Whether the residents resist such a proposal is irrelevant to HIM. The arrogance of this kind of force-fit urban planning is obvious. Do us all a favor and stop trying to play SimCity with real neighborhoods, real cities, and real people.

@@stevenlitvintchouk3131 you cite "working class neighborhoods" and "upscale" neighborhoods while failing to realize that those places came up organically without any NIMBYism. Do you think a working class family went to a HOA meeting and tried to stop someone from moving in? Do you think an upscale neighborhood said no to anyone who could afford that place (outside of obviously racist cases)? You want a neighborhood? Buy the entire damn area. You do not get to decide what other people do with their own property.

@@ChasmChaos Actually, yes, and I was there. In the 1970s, LOWER-middle-class families protested strongly against implanting public-housing projects in their stable neighborhoods, because they had already seen what had happened in places like Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green: Those projects became high-rise slums, populated by drug addicts, prostitutes and pimps, and other undesirables. Liberals called them "racists"--but black families protested too. I remember what one black family told us: "We don't want to live next door to those people. They're lowlifes!" That's the problem. A neighborhood takes many years to grow organically. But folks like "Urbanity" and you just can't leave well enough alone. You're compelled to shoe-horn it into an alternative vision of society. Of course, any conflict, or urban decay, or flight of the middle class to the suburbs, that results, is not your problem, is it? No, you'll just go on to the next neighborhood and start fiddling with it too. You want to experiment with urban planning? Buy Cities Skylines. And LEAVE US ALONE.

@@stevenlitvintchouk3131 great, so a guy looking to build a 2 floor house in the suburb would naturally end up with a drug addiction, thus inconveniencing the neighbours. Impeccable logic right there!

That's exactly what they've always done. Artistic and beautiful buildings were seldom the norm. They were just the ones preserved (sometimes)

@@Joesolo13 It doesn't have to be that artistic or beautiful, just not imposing and ugly as sin. There's plenty of very plain 2-3 story tall apartment blocks near me that are quite nice, then there are the modern 8-20 story buildings which are unpleasant to look at and because of the wind they generate at ground level, very uncomfortable to be near.