Last week, a Facebook friend observed that Ottawa was missing family-sized units in the apartment and condo market:
“I don’t know why it isn’t normal to build 3-bedroom apartments and condos along with detached and semi-detached homes? Montreal has many of these.”
Why we don’t build more family-sized condos and apartment units is a good question with a range of answers from history to zoning. When pressed at committee, Ottawa developers tell us that there is no demand for them. That families prefer moving to Carleton Place and Arnprior rather than live in an apartment with their children. This may have been true until 2020 but people like me – with unstable low-paid employment and caregiving obligations – can no longer afford to buy anywhere within driving distance of Ottawa and can’t afford a vehicle either. “People like me” are a rapidly growing segment of the population.
The podcast Odd Lots has an excellent episode on family-sized apartments: Why We Don’t Build More Apartments for Families (link to Spotify).
If you prefer to read about it, one of the guests interviewed on Odd Lots put it in writing, with the floor plans graphics: Why we can’t build apartments for families in North America.
While you are there, Odd Lots also has an excellent episode on the broken care work industry, which I indirectly wrote about in my post about caregiver accommodations: Care Work in the United States Has Been Broken for Years (link to Spotify).
That said, I have been reflecting on the last part of my friend’s observation: “Montreal has many of these” or, in question form, “Why can’t we be more like Montreal?”
Last Wednesday, I drove to Montreal with my daughter Marie. Marie was getting a tattoo in the Plateau. She provided the vehicle and the playlist, I provided the driving in Montreal and the food.
I have been reading “Saving the City” by Daniel Sanger, a chronicle of the creation and rise of Projet Montreal, the party led by Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante. Projet Montreal’s first significant electoral victory came in 2009 when it swept the Plateau Mont Royal. The Plateau became the test case for the implementation of the party’s center-left policies, especially in matters of traffic calming and urbanism. It was a perfect day to explore the Plateau and see how things had changed since I was at McGill in 2006-2008.
I didn’t have an itinerary but the tattoo studio was right off Mont Royal Avenue, one of the main characters in the story of Projet Montreal. The attempt to increase the parking meter rates along Mont Royal Avenue was Projet Montreal’s first head-on collision (pun!) with the area’s business owners. In “Saving the City”, the Plateau’s new mayor Luc Ferrandez abandons the idea of closing off Mont Royal Avenue to car traffic in the aftermath of the conflict around parking meter rates. Today, the burrough is preparing to close the street to traffic for the third summer in a row, adding cross street Duluth to the party.
The street closures are not minor operations. I took a picture of the information handout left in mailboxes on Mont Royal. I was struck by how much the city expects from its residents and business owners. The street closures change the directionality of two one-way streets to accommodate re-routed transit. Store owners must take their garbage to pre-established collection points to avoid sending garbage trucks down the closed street. Deliveries are constrained to certain hours. Businesses and residents are supportive of the closures, with some exceptions.
As a lifelong resident of Ottawa, it’s hard to come to Montreal and not wonder how they can push through this much change. Why can’t we build “missing middle” housing? Family-sized apartments? Why can’t we close down streets and add bike lanes? Why can’t we turn vacant industrial land into parks? Are Montréalers just “built different” as the memes would have it?
There is a tendency to think of European cities (and Montreal) as more collectivist than North American cities, as if collectivism was found in nature. Are Europeans and Montrealers genetically-inclined to be more progressive? This led me down a reflection on leadership and the use of space as I made my way to Parc Lafontaine to meet my brother.
When my older children were little, we went on a road trip to PEI and spent a night camping in Valcartier. The campground was loud and boisterous, serving families and groups visiting the nearby water park. Glancing at the variety of camping accommodations, my husband made an observation that “money buys you privacy.” From a cheap tent to a motorized RV, money buys you space, space buys you privacy. Humans tend to occupy as much space as they can afford.
The value of space increases as its supply decreases. The reason why my family could afford 74 acres in Lanark in 2011 but not downtown Toronto is simple economics: space comes at a premium in Toronto and is plentiful in Lanark. As the cost of space increases, those who wish to live in the city start compromising with each other: we can’t afford a private backyard by ourselves anymore, but together we can afford a park; we can’t afford a car and a garage by ourselves, but together we can afford transit; and so on. The reason why European and Asian cities are more advanced in matters of transit and public spaces is because they lost the luxury of cheap, plentiful, space a long time ago.
When people ask “why can’t we have nice things like Montreal?” the answer lies not in what we don’t have but what we choose to have instead: a backyard, a front yard, a driveway, a garage, on-street parking, wider roads, and so forth. The city is a geometry problem: every bit of space claimed for something is unusable for something else. Most of Montreal’s “missing middle” housing has no front yard, no driveway and no free on-street parking. Some have rear-access yards turned into parking spots, foregoing a backyard. You can have one or the other. As available space in Ottawa rarifies and gains value, as more people are unable to purchase their bit of it, we too will turn to our collective power to get the amenities we can no longer afford on our own.
Ottawa still has enough relatively cheap space and relatively high incomes to allow enough people to afford a private driveway, free curb parking, and a backyard. We envy Montreal and Paris’ urban parks and public amenities but we are not yet able to offer the tradeoff: the loss of private, individual space. The results of the last mayoral election in Ottawa mapped the decrease of affordable space and the turn to collective action very accurately: the core of the city voted predominantly for progressive candidate Catherine McKenney and the suburbs, where space is still affordable, voted for Mark Sutcliffe’s cautious and conservative approach. However, unaffordability spreads like liquid on a paper napkin. As it reaches the middle class, we will inevitably see a turn to collective political action and the make-up of our City Council will reflect it.
Montreal is able to take decisive action disregarding individual preferences in favour of a collective benefit (for instance by eliminating free parking for 100 cars to create a bike lane that serves 1000 cyclists) because it has a clear mandate to do so. It also has a history of successes in pushing individuals out of their comfort zone, creating a better city for everyone.
Ottawa has not yet received a clear mandate to cause individual pain in favour of collective gain. Our city still tries to serve the individual desires of 1 million residents, to be everything to everyone. This leads to half measures such as painted bike lanes that are confusing to motorists and unsafe for cyclists. It leads to infrequent transit routes that serve low density suburban neighbouhoods while some areas teether on the cusp of being truly walkable. It leads to a light rail system that is built even slower than our housing supply, allowing our suburbs to continue developing as completely car-dependent communities. In trying to be everything to everyone, Ottawa is not enough to anyone.
Leadership in matters of affordable housing, active transportation, transit, and public realm gets easier with time, as success builds on success. Our current City Council doesn’t yet have the appetite for bold, decisive action. Leadership is hard when we are at a tipping point, but that’s when it is the most rewarding.