Allowing more homes, in all shapes and sizes, makes it easier and cheaper for communities to tackle infrastructure challenges.
Editor's note: Sightline Institute is co-publishing this article with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. View its version here.
The costs of public infrastructure are becoming the go-to excuse for restrictive zoning policies in British Columbia. These policies effectively ban apartments on most residential land and reserve it exclusively for low-density housing like detached houses.
As one newspaper headline put it, "Density is coming to BC municipalities. Leaders don't know how they'll pay for it." On its surface, the objection to density on infrastructure grounds may sound reasonable, but it gets things backwards.
As researchers and good planners have long understood, it's far cheaper to build and maintain public infrastructure to service denser forms of housing than it is to service low-density sprawl. It's one of those intuitive truths that is also borne out by decades of research.
Imagine the infrastructure needed to service 100 homes in an apartment building compared to 100 houses in a low-density suburban development. When homes are farther apart, they require longer pipes, wires, and roads to connect them, raising costs. And spreading out homes farther from important services and amenities increases the demand on transit and roads.
British Columbia undoubtedly needs to invest more in public infrastructure both to replace aging assets and to support new construction that alleviates existing housing shortages. This includes investments in new and upgraded sewers, water pipes, power lines, rapid transit, roads, libraries, schools, and hospitals, which both cities and senior governments must contribute to funding.
But housing density is not the problem. Indeed, by imposing low-density zoning, cities have been making the challenge of paying for infrastructure harder, not easier.
Infrastructure concerns: The new exclusionary zoning?
The well-known infrastructure cost savings of density still aren't reflected in the land use planning policies enforced by cities in Metro Vancouver. In fact, since the provincial government enacted legislation prodding municipalities to reform zoning and allow more housing, some municipalities and housing opponents have claimed that more density would add to their infrastructure woes.
In the lead-up to the October provincial election, the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) warned that, in light of provincial housing legislation, "costly upgrades to water, sewer, and roads are required to expand capacity and enable the creation of new high-density housing."
What new housing opponents don't say is that when cities use restrictive zoning to block apartments on most of their land, they steer new housing disproportionately into low-density suburban development - with higher infrastructure costs.
Others have warned against new housing on the premise that we have a shortage of schools and teachers for the next generation. This could be an excellent argument to hire more teachers or to build more schools, but it is a dubious argument against much-needed housing. Some may simply be disguising an argument against population growth as an argument against density.
The infrastructure gap is real, but apartment bans make it worse
Cities are flagging a real issue when they raise infrastructure concerns. Canada has a widely recognized infrastructure deficit owing to decades of underinvestment. At the low end, it's estimated that Canada has an accumulated infrastructure gap of $150 billion; at the higher end, up to $1 trillion. In British Columbia, UBCM estimates that "over $24 billion in core infrastructure alone needs to be replaced within the next ten years."
But to tackle that infrastructure deficit and address the housing shortage, ending apartment bans and allowing denser housing is a critical part of the solution, including cost-effectively building out the necessary s...

Ver todos los episodios