Dominique O'Rourke: Part Five
Why Can't We Have More Downtowns?
In this last part of my series about my conversation with Dominique O’Rourke, I am referring to an extremely startling image that some consultants created for the city. It shows the huge difference density can have on the long-term economic viability of the city. I don’t know which consulting firm originally created it, but I first saw it at an open house conducted by the city planning department.
The argument is that what the new urbanists call “walkability” is more than just about how pleasant a location can be, or that how much more affordable it can be if you can live without a car in a denser neighbourhood, or about how many units of CO2 emissions you save. In addition to all those good things, there’s also an increase in city revenue if you can increase the number of tax-payers you have per square unit of serviced area. The above map shows that the most walkable part of the city—downtown—is also the place where the city gets the greatest amount of net tax revenue.
I also mentioned a short video from the YouTube (and Nebula—$5/month—I recommend this service highly) channel Not Just Bikes. It spells out the argument for higher density based on city revenue. Incidentally, it mentions Guelph as a good case study—but I would suggest that we shouldn’t rest on our laurels because we could do a whole lot better if Council wanted (and homeowners would let them).
Dominique suggested that the city is building new downtowns and used the example of Clair and Gordon streets. I had a hard time understanding what she was talking about, as I see that area is being just another example of the ‘happy motoring’ way of doing things.
Take a look at a satellite photo of Clair and Gordon from 2020 that I downloaded from Google Earth Pro. (There is a more recent image from 2022, but it had recently snowed and it was harder to parse-out building and parking lots on it. As far as I can tell from careful scrutiny, there is little difference between the two.)
Now let’s look at the downtown image I got from Google Earth Pro that had been shot on 2020.
Having looked at the video from Not Just Bikes and decades of consuming New Urbanist media, I’m more than a little surprised that Councillor O’Rourke would suggest that there is any similarity at all between the downtown and the corner of Clair and Gordon.
The first and obvious difference is the density. Clair and Gordon is mostly composed of big box stores. This means that the majority of space used is for parking lots.
The second issue is the way the area is divided into four by the presence of stroads. This word is a portmanteau that combines the words street and roads to describe a roadway that is too wide and encourages speeds too fast to allow pedestrians to easily cross.
The third obvious issue are the set-backs and dispersion of businesses. In walkable communities, foot traffic is encouraged by clustering businesses next to each other and by bringing store fronts right up to the sidewalk. This encourages pedestrians to look into the windows and come in to see what else is going on. This creates a synergy as people either come with a list that involves more than one shop or come to buy one thing but then decide to buy something else in a nearby business because of something they saw in the window or thought of on the way. In contrast, Clair and Gordon is devoted to the concept of ‘destination’ retailing. That’s when people get in their car and make a special trip to get one particular thing—instead of either ‘just browsing’ or coming with a list of items that need purchasing from different shops.
Finally, none of these buildings are permanent, multi-story structures. The downtown is filled with older, multi-story buildings that businesses lease and then adapt to their needs. Retail tends to dominate the first floor, but upper stories and basements also have their own businesses or apartments. Some people may not know this, but the downtown core has businesses that range from yoga studios, forensic labs for police, video studios, computer programmers, dentists, people who will take your fingerprints for immigration, and so on. The downtown not only consists of businesses bunched closer together horizontally, they are also stacked vertically.
In contrast, if you look at Gordon and Clair almost none of the businesses have a second story. That’s because when a large chain sets up a big box store they follow a set of blueprints using a standardized pattern which allows customers to readily recognize and feel at home in them—no matter what part of North America. Because each of these chain stores has their own different style, this means that when one closes down it is usually demolished and replaced by new structure. In effect, Gordon and Clair is composed mostly of thinly spread-out, poorly-constructed, wasteful, ‘disposable’ architecture.
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I was set to wrap things up in the interview, but Dominique went on to say a few things that I found importantly revealing. From my—admittedly eccentric—viewpoint, she made three points:
people will become more willing to get out of their cars once they find it convenient to do so
as this happens, people from the suburbs will be more willing to go downtown
environmentalists have to be more patient with the pace of change
I’ve really had to wrestle this this last article because my gut feeling about Councillor O’Rourke is positive. I think she’s a good person who works hard for the public interest—as she sees it. I don’t want to leave readers with the idea that in any way shape or form I think she is a ‘bad’ person or that she should be considered ‘the enemy’. I’ve had people ask me ‘why did you interview her?’. I did because I think she’s a decent person and she was willing to sit down and give me an serious interview. There are other politicians who won’t I suspect because they consider me a ‘bad’ person who’s ‘the enemy’. I don’t like that sort of polarized way of viewing the world and I don’t think it serves the public interest to give in to these sorts of easy stereotypes.
Having said that, I do think we see the world in fundamentally different ways. Since I’m the person writing and publishing the story, I could just jump all over her. But I have a commitment to civility in politics and also believe in the idea that all ideas should be held provisionally. I not only may be theoretically wrong about something, I often am.
Like everyone, I bring my own set of biases to the table.
Personally, I loathe cars. This might be seen as an odd viewpoint given my background. I pretty much grew up on a tractor seat. I was strongly encouraged to get my license when I turned 16, as this meant I could run errands for the farm in our pickup truck. But for some hard-to-define reason I never felt comfortable driving. It just seemed too inherently dangerous a means of transportation. Perhaps it was because from the age of 13 driving was always a chore instead of something people did for fun. Perhaps it was because of the carnage other people in my age group went through when I was in high school. (Drinking and driving wasn’t an incidental byproduct of socialization—it was the way a lot of country kids spent Saturday night.)
When I got settled in downtown Guelph I found that I could live quite comfortably without an auto. I rented cars. I flirted with motorcycles. But I never owned a four-wheeler and became quite adept with my bicycle and public transit. And eventually I found that I had gone so long without driving, I just let my license lapse. (To be honest, my significant other who recently moved in with me owns a vehicle. But we rarely use the thing. It stays parked for weeks on end. So much so that the car has never worn out a set of tires—the rubber just ages and cracks to the point where it is no longer safe to drive and then we buy a new set.)
From my early 20s a large part of my aversion is based on my belief the earth is dying and we human beings are the cause. And I cannot think of anything more emblematic of the harm we do than the happy motoring society. That alone is enough for me to do away with something like owning a car. Perhaps I’m what Maggie Thatcher would call a ‘wet’, but I do believe in Gandhi’s adage that “To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest”. To that end, I’ve taken something like a personal vow to never own an automobile.
Moreover, I also found there is a very significant practical reason to avoid using cars. One source I found on line suggests that the current average annual cost of owning a car in Canada is $8,800. I’ve never made more than $50,000 a year—and that was only when I was near retirement. All of my life I’ve had blue-collar jobs that while probably better than many, still were never more than lower middle-class in pay. This means that that $8,800/year was a significant amount of money—which I could put towards mortgage, home improvement, and, retirement savings. Over my worklife of 40 years, that money I didn’t spend on a car comes to $352,000. If I’d had that extra cost hanging around my neck, I’d be in a lot worse financial shape than I currently am. (I know that’s a phoney number, but if I could calculate using constant 2022 dollars plus accumulated interest it seems to me that it would be in the same order of magnitude.)
And as I got older and did more reading on the subject, it became obvious to me that beyond the personal savings that I received from not owning a car, there are also significant savings that accrue to a city and a whole civilization from not wasting so much on car-dependency. (Hence the map and discussion above.) If our civilization were able to give up the happy motoring lifestyle, significant savings would be available to do things like adapt to and clean up the damage of climate change. (And if we’d done it earlier, maybe we’d have four day workweeks and no beggars downtown.)
This is why I don’t see walkability as an issue of allowing people to choose to live this way. I don’t want the downtown to become a destination that people go to from their homes in the suburbs. I want the way I live downtown to become the way everyone lives. And that’s because—as the Not Just Bikes video suggests—the suburbs only exist in their present form because they are heavily subsidized. Not just by the walkable parts of the city that have survived from the pre-WWII era, but by future generations of people who will have to deal with changed climate that came from the happy motoring lifestyle.
Of course, my point of view isn’t very popular. Most people don’t go through life thinking about how the world should be, they just see it as it is and adapt. But I would suggest that if it weren’t for people who question the status quo, human civilization would not have advanced much beyond the stage of hunting and gathering. That means to me that an elected leader should try to find some way to balance adapting to the status quo with trying to change it into something better. I’m obviously so far into the “change it” side of the curve that I am unelectable—which is why I am now a writer—but I fear that many of our politicians; federal, provincial, and, municipal; are equally too far on the side of accepting things the way they are. They never seem to want to go fast enough.
And as I see it, most of my life I’ve had to hear politicians say ‘you need to wait’, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, and, ‘it will be up to you young people to make the necessary changes’. I’ve been hearing this for 50 years and I’m fed-up with it. As Greta Thunberg says “The world is on fire!”—and yet they keep telling us to be ‘patient’.
What the politicians are saying is that they want the environment to wait on the progress of politics—which is glacially slow unless prodded into action because of outside circumstances. The problem with this, however, is that physics has it’s own time table. It doesn’t give a fig about politicians, their careers, etc. Right now we are seeing just the beginnings of the wild weather in store for us because of climate change. The cost of adaptation and clean-up is going to totally dwarf the cost of prevention that politicians have fought tooth and nail against my entire life.
And yet I refuse to cast dirt on Council member Dominique O’Rourke. She was elected. That means that the largest fraction of voters in her ward agree with her assessment of the situation. That’s the nub of the issue. These people need to change their minds and either allow her to change hers or replace her with someone who does. And that change will come from one of two possible sources: they will learn about the complexities of society and come to the same conclusions I did years ago, or, the horrible catastrophes coming down the pipeline will rub their noses in the dirt until they can no longer refuse to admit the obvious.
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And, of course, there is a third option. I could be wrong and decades from now we will all have electric cars and live in happy motoring suburbs far into the future. I don’t believe anyone who looks at the problem honestly believes that this will happen, but— as one of the precepts my life is built around—this is ultimately a provisional statement. Come up with a good argument, based on sound evidence, and I will (I hope) change my mind. If you think you have one, tell my readers and me about it in the comments section below.