this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
255 points (94.4% liked)
CanadaPolitics
1893 readers
5 users here now
Placeholder for any r/CanadaPolitics refugees
Rules:
All of Lemmy.ca's rules apply
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No porn.
- No Ads / Spamming.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Most Walmarts are in suburbs. They actually don't do as well in heavily urbanized areas. At the very least, I've never seen one in downtown Toronto. The taxes for the amount of land they need alone destroys their profits, but in the suburbs they can take an entire block at next to zero cost and serve a good 10-20km radius because who cares about going an extra km if you can do all your shopping in one trip than two, whereas if everything is in walking distance, who cares about walking an extra block to get one little thing while you're out doing something else like working.
I'm talking about being against suburbia and for high density urbanization. Did you know that bike lanes actually increase profits of small local businesses compared to increasing the lanes of roads? You can't have bikes in suburbia because everything is too far away to bike to. But in high density urban environments, biking is far preferred to cars.
And also, you argue tents for cost, but did you know the average home in downtown Tokyo is only $300k? Few places are denser than Tokyo, yet some of the best parts of it you can buy four detached houses for the cost of a house in Toronto. I know I'm going all over the place, but frankly speaking, all the problems we're dealing with in Canada with housing and life affordability are things that have been solved in other places, and we can easily learn from if there was the political will to do so.
Laughable. Tokyo only has 6,000 people per square kilometre. Slightly less farmer field than Toronto, but only just. In fact, fewer places are more sprawling than Tokyo. Have you not seen how much land it wastes?
Kowloon Walled City has 1,346,000 people per square kilometre. Now that's a city! Manila has 70,000 people per square kilometre. Small town numbers, but at least respectable.
4-6,000 people? You're not even in the running. That is only just slightly more populated than a rural area.
I was talking about Tokyo city. Not the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, or the Tokyo District. They're pretty different things, and is like talking about the GTA or Southern Ontario when talking about Toronto.
And Kowloon Walled City was a dystopia caused by people not being allowed to leave for generations. That, and it doesn't exist anymore. There's no point on using it as an example when it makes every other high density city look like farmland in comparison. And being the single only example in the same ballpark.
Anyways, of all the things to respond to, you chose that. How reductive.
Seems its most dense parts top out at around 15,000 people per. Still amateur hour compared to most reasonably dense communities, which, as I said before, have more like 40,000 people.
Right, I think we can all agree that nobody actually wants to live in a city. City population densities have actually shrunk considerably over the years as people long for more and more space. Rural living is clearly considered the ideal by the masses, but with the pitfall of there being essentially no wealth inequality. As such, we seek some kind of middle ground of slightly more density than a farmer's field to enable that.
But if you want to embrace city life, you may as well go for it. Why pussyfoot around with such low densities?
I'm sorry, but using a city that the living conditions are actually worse than in any dystopian movie is not something you should be using as an example for modern living conditions.
But if you want to embrace city life, you may as well go for it. Why pussyfoot around with such low densities?> And yes, I don't pussyfoot for such low densities. I keep championing mixed use mid-rise buildings to replace all low density housing within our cities. Separated individual houses are a waste if you live within 10km of a major city's downtown. And if you want to live in a giant personal box in the middle of nowhere, you should properly pay for it instead of having half its costs subsidized by those who live where its cheaper to have your utilities installed.