No Smart Growth

Corporate sponsorship is not a problem, in and of itself. Green technology is not a problem, except in that you have to watch pretty closely what gets a green label stuck on it, who pockets the tax break, the profit, and leaves the environment to take the hit they hadn't told you about. However, pretending that money can create more of somethinbg that's already run out is a problem.

Another proble from your quote: Sez there, in NH, 17 new people took up 45 units of previously unspoiled natural area; in Chicago, 4 people took a whopping 46 units and in LA, 46 people filled up 300 units of space (and this one is a real killer, because the space in question was desert, which also placed an enormous burden on the aquafer). So, each new group of human residents destroys a hugely disproportionate amount of nature and takes a hugely disproportionate toll on resources. There is not enough unusued land in the urban centers to support a continuing increase in such high-maintenance populations. City cores might be built up more densely for a generation or so, but the space available is finite.

Resources are finite. Food supply is finite. The planet is finite. There is no such thing in nature as sustainable growth.

Trouble is, many if not most of those immigrants are coming from places that are under more stress than Canada and the US - partly or wholly because of political, economic and military decisions taken by the US and Canada. There will be a lot more refugees, too, once the climate-change famines really get going. No way will any northern country be able to seal their borders, big fence, razor wire, helicopters or whatever.

But immigration isn't the only subject public figures are afraid to address: they won't touch reproduction, either, at home or abroad, except maybe to oppose abortion, (birth control, family planning, sex education) under the religious guns.

@ FM

Yes you are right in terms of the cause, but the fact is if our cities did not have the symptom of increasing population there would be no pressure for urban sprawl. There are factors beyond poor-planning and car culture though:

Our increasing population  (largely through immigration) is part of a vicious cycle which we see as necessary because of the needs of our aging population. 

But it is also a result of our economic growth being focused on cities, the fact that most planners and governments understand nothing but increasing growth at all costs. On the other side of the equation we have rural communities economies are either dying or seeing people forced out to make room for large-scale business. And people in rural areas around cities get forced out by rising costs, and clashes between urban and agricultural interests.

Given that, it is no wonder there is both migration within Canada from rural areas to cities, and that the majority of newcomers to Canada wind up in urban areas. The people flow to where the jobs and services are.

Plus I don't think all of it is the result of poor planning. It is great planning for developers who want to maximize their profits, and plenty of city governments are more than happy to go along for the ride based on the promise of a larger tax base.

Green Bone wrote:

@Frustrated Mess, 71% of population growth is due to immigration, with 29% coming from the people already here. Thus, the problem is shared, about 7:3, between the people coming here and those already here making babies. The "Canadians aren't having enough babies!" line from everybody, including the Mark Steyn-types, is pure BS. More people means more sprawl (i.e., development of greenfields) and water consumption, landfill use, plain and simple. This isn't idiocy, but a fact. Actually, you can blame the Banks, Real Estate Income Trusts, land speculators, construction companies and developers for this mess. They have everyone by the short 'n' curlies, including supposed environmental groups. Without constant population growth, there is zero need for new housing developments and investments in new infrastructure: no new subdivisions, apartments, sewers, water treatment plants, roads, or mass transit systems. The only surefire way to stop sprawl is to freeze local population growth, either by birth or immigration. We can provide disincentives to large families in Canada, support third world family planning and control immigration volumes. This is doable, but the will just isn't there--everyone's either gutless, or in corporate pockets..

71% of global population growth? And it is unrelated to urban planning. Maybe you're new in this country, but Canada is a nation of immigrants, beginning with settlers who stole the land, and we managed to build villages, towns, and cities, for growing populations, without urban sprawl. So what happened over the last 60 years? Two related things: the automobile and suburban zoning.

We do not have to plan around the automobile. Immigration does not prevent planners from thinking about transit systems, walkable neighbourhoods, and mixed use development. Immigration does not cause developers to plan, and municipal councils to approve, enclave neighbourhoods that cement socio-economic divisions marked by cul-de-sacs for some and row housing for others. Immigrants do not force architects to design the garage as the most prominet feature of a home, with the ass of the house turned toward your neighbours nor does it force developers to approve the designs, councils to approve the applications, and banks to approve the loans.

You have no idea what you're talking about in your effort to demonize immigrants. I have been reading about and following this issue for years and urban guru, Jane Jacobs, if she were still with us, would laugh out loud at such a nonsensicial argument.

absentia wrote:

We can pack people in tighter, but we'll still cut down all the trees and mine all the ore to build houses; we'll still need energy to heat and light them. There still isn't going to be any new farmland without destroying the remaining wilderness, and more intensive agriculture will cause new, catastrophic ecological problems.

Only if urban planning, food production, natural resources, and consumption are parcelled and packaged as separate unrelated issues as they are now. Immigration serves two purposes for the status quo: upward pressure on consumer demand; downward pressure on wages.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

Yes you are right in terms of the cause, but the fact is if our cities did not have the symptom of increasing population there would be no pressure for urban sprawl. There are factors beyond poor-planning and car culture though:

Bullshit. Urban sprawl is driven by developers who have commodified housing. If housing is a product requiring inputs, what is the most expensive input? Land! So developers expand outward to exploit lower cost unserviced land to which services, soft and hard, must be extended. That cost is two-fold. First, all taxpayers pay for the cost of extending services. For police, as one example, it costs more to police far flung subdivisions than the same number of households within city blocks. But added to that, is roads, pipes, sewers, utilities, libraries, schools, hospitals, etc ..., etc ..., etc ... Second, sprawl has been fed as much, or more-so, through existing inner-city home owners moving out and the result is what? Built infrastructure, roads, pipes, police, etc ..., that must be maintained without a resident tax base. That means higher taxes for everyone. From a purely cost perspective, sprawl is nuts.

BUT ....

Our consumer economy is wholly dependent on spending. And what drives our consumer economy? Homes and cars. When a person buys a new home they decorate it, renovate it, and garden it. When they buy a car they buy power washers, and music players and DVD players and GPSes and whatever else has sustained Canadian Tire for a generation. The only way to make housing as lucrative as autos is to treat them the same way: commodofy them and market them as consumer, lifestyle choices with built in obsolesence and shorter product lifecycles. Meanwhile, the whole thing is driven by debt.

Once more, conflating urban sprawl with immigration and population is a product of ignorance.

ETA: There is no more smart growth than there is a healthy cancer.

Frustrated Mess wrote:

6079_Smith_W wrote:

Yes you are right in terms of the cause, but the fact is if our cities did not have the symptom of increasing population there would be no pressure for urban sprawl. There are factors beyond poor-planning and car culture though:

Bullshit. Urban sprawl is driven by developers who have commodified housing.

Why the gratuitous potty talk? After the quote you snipped I went on to say exactly the same thing as you do above.

But developers are only one part of a more complex equation, part of which is businesses that put profits and growth above people (as I also explained). And maybe it has nothing to do with it, but for some strange reason we have a lot more people in our city than we did 10 years ago, and a vacancy rate of below 0.5 percent.

After all, there's not much point in building those houses without a means of herding enough people in to fill them

absentia wrote:

Frustrated Mess,

you're really confusing me now. On the one hand, you seem to be saying that we can sustain indefinite growth, as long as we plan it properly, co-ordinating various aspects of the economy, and leaving cars out of it. Yet the last line negates all that you said up to this point and agrees the original premise.

Really? Where did I argue "that we can sustain indefinite growth, as long as we plan it properly, co-ordinating various aspects of the economy, and leaving cars out of it"? Point it out to me.

absentia wrote:

Urban sprawl is not the problem - it's a symptom. It doesn't matter how compact a city, how well-designed...

Uh, who is designing these cities, who is building them, when will they be ready, and what do we do with all the bad cities we already have? Think we can mine the suburbs for building material, or just remove the toxic cleaning products and leave the doors open for wildlife? Are all the money interests going to some other planet? Will all the yuppies stop wanting more and more?  

...with a garden and wind generator on top of every skyscraper and a grey-water reclamation plant in the basement of every apartment block, with work-places and schools across the street and tunnels to get there, is still full of people who need food.

Even with the best possible management and technology, there is not going to be more food, but less. A lot less, as equatorial regions turn to desert and the deserts grow north- and southward.

Smart is possible. Not likely, given our track-record, but possible. Growth is not.

Urban sprawl is a big part of the problem. I have argued consistently over the years that there cannot be a sustainable, even remotely, society without addressing land use which also must, by definition, address transportation.

A well designed city can produce most of its own food. That's what cities are supposed to do. How do you think people fed themselves in the Great War? have you heard of victory gardens? What do you think they did in Havana when the oil stopped flowing? Here is a link: http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php

Green Bone wrote:

Frustrated Mess wrote:

71% of global population growth?

I was referring to Canada's population growth, which the Steynians and business funded pundits pretend isn't happening. And there is nothing else that causes urban sprawl other than population growth, most of which comes from immigration. Who do you think is buying all those new homes, renting all those apartments and driving all those cars--ghosts?

You do not live in the real world. You live in some little corner of bigotry surrounded by self-imposed ignorance. There is nothing factual nor truthful in your comments. And change your alias. It is people like you who create the impression environmentalists are mostly white, rich, bigots.

@ Green Bone

Though I disagree about reducing immigration. For one thing, it would screw us up big time in the short term because we have an aging population. You can't just put the brakes on when the livelihood of 35 million people is at stake.

And besides, there is plenty of room here. I don't know about down east, but there are places out west (and I am sure on the east coast) which are empty. What we need is to develop resources that will encourage people to move somewhere other than Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.

(though frankly, if I were to think of the epitome of urban sprawl in Canada, Calgary would come to mind right away)

But denying immigration is a failure of equity.

The bad news is that we cannot cope with an exponentially growing world population, the good news is that a lot of the world population is no longer exponentially growing.  The cheap way to get to this state is to educate young women.  An increasing standard of living helps a lot too.

The question is not what happens at infinity, the question is can we cope with the actual world peak population.  An open question at the moment.  World wide income equity would help a lot.  That would imply that no group could use up more than their fair share of resources.

The other wild card is conservative religions, they all generate large families.

Can a city really produce it's own food?  You can't grow crops on any scale inside a city, and the waste alone from livestock would get out of hand pretty quick.  I mean, we can supplement our food by growing gardens or tending chickens etc but 100% self sustaining?

  I can't see a city like NYC/LA/TOR/MTL being able to produce enough food to feed the millions that live there.  Also since space is now such an expensive commodity inside a city, wouldn't the food be prohibitively expensive?

maybe i'm misinterpreting?

cruisin_turtle wrote:

Dismantle the home building and development industry and shift the growth to the "defense" industry instead? We need something to pickup the growth, you know, if we want to avoid stagnation and a lower standard of living so what will give?

But that's exactly the problem. We desparately need to lower the standard of living. No, not lower, but redefine what we mean by a standard of living. Who really needs one and a half bathrooms all to hemself? Or half an acre of lawn that exists only to be mowed and watered? What most people want and need is pretty simple, easily produced and maintained - for the present population. After we've deported the 25 richest families and seized their property, there is no reason everyone shouldn't be able to have safe, comfortable shelter, warm clothes, enough food and medical care to stay healthy, an education, a community, useful work and some fun. The luxuries, the things that look good and seem desirable, the public spectacles and caloric treats, pall very quickly and have to be replaced by new shiny things, fresh indulgence, to fill the psychological hole left by meaningless drudgery and social isolation.

Stagnation is not a bad thing; we've just been trained to think so. Replace the word with stability and see if it conjures up a happier world than the roller-coaster of uncertain employment, speculation, boom, bust and bailout, inflation, recession, month-by-month interest rate, dollar value and tax adjustments. Do we really need constant anxiety to feel alive? Or could we channel that energy into participation art, exploration, sport and entertainment? Find a balance that works, manage it for a century or so, then review. 

I'm not going back to the self-maintaining city in detail: we already know that wartime rations didn't satisfy anyone and there was a good deal of black marketeering. The Cuban solution is hardly reproducible in Edmonton or Montreal. Vegetables in windowboxes, sure; apple trees in the park, by all means; cows, no. We have to give up cattle altogether, both for meat and milk: their ecological price it too high. Wheat, too. But soybeans, sunflowers, potatoes and barley also require more space, deeper soil, rotation, sowing and harvesting equipment.... not ideal intensive city crops.

As for immigration, it's a moot point. By 2030, the bulk of people coming into Canada will be from the US, as population pressure from Mexico, coupled with tornadoes and draught (?and oil spillage) force the hungry northward. That border is indefensible and so are the coasts, no matter how many billions Mr. Harper spends on airplanes.

Canada doesn't exist in isolation; can't act just for itself, though we should certainly take a leading role and set an example. (No, not by giving the banks another horsey ride!) The plan, if there were to be one, must be global, drastic and immediate. If human resolve can't come up with a solution, economic collapse, pandemic and climate change will.

Now, if we just did away with all the non- and counter-productive enterprises, imagine the lovely housing, classrooms, laboratory and hydroponic space that would liberate! May i landscape the TD Centre?

The figure of 71% of population growth (being from immigrants) has been mentioned a few times.  Has no one thought to look into what the actual rate of population growth is?

Canada's population growth is [url=http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/91-003-x/2007001/4129907-eng.htm]1% a year[/url].  Currently there are 33  million people in Canada.  Statics Canada estimates there will be 45.6 million by 2056.

Yes, immigrants are the largest contributers to that 1% annual population growth...that is because Canadians have a negative birth rate.  That is not to say our population is actually growing by a huge amount.

Population growth is a pressure, yes.  But it is not the reason for (as Frustrated Mess and others pointed out) suburban zoning, and auto-centric urban planning.

The question is not the current absolute level of population growth but what is the nature of the function, is it exponential or not?

An extra 12 million people is pretty significant.

OTOH the world population growth rate is looking more reasonable in the future.  The UN figures the world fertility rate will drop to replacement levels before 2050.  With luck this will be in time to head off disaster.

The key thing will be equality of income.  With that, resouce allocation is pretty straightforward, absent that, there are likely problems.

Green Bone wrote:

Immigrants aren't the only source of population growth--'native' Canadians have to accept some responsability (29%? LOL), too. While baby boomer and Gen-Xers tended to have smaller families, this trend seems to be reversing. But there is no escaping the fact that adding over a quarter million people annually from outside the country, plus countless 'temporary' visas, isn't helping. Population is the pressure on urban boundary growth, as well as water use and landfill space.

And pedestrian-centric/New Urbanist planning just slows growth and annexation of agricultural land, rather than stopping it...or, rather, it allows developers to parcell the same amount of land into more units, increasing profits. Nor does it solve the water problem. Places like Southern Alberta are already dangerously overpopulated, beyond what local water supplies can accomodate. The progressive denials of overpopulation are pretty strange, and as bad as the same coming from right wingers and business lobbies. I can understand the reluctance to criticize immigration, in terms of social justice and racism, but it's the volume of immigration, rather than the immigrants themselves, that is the problem. This is not something progressives and environmentalists should avoid talking about. One might as well avoid criticizing the coal, nuclear, auto and petroleum industries, because they employ unionized workers.

Housing industry beefcake posterboy Milke Holmes is the latest Sustainable Housing faddist:

http://nocalgaryveto.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/councillors-oppose-holmes-...

You are almost starting to get it. Let's start with the positive part. If you want to argue that population leads to larger cities, you're right. Can't disagree. No argument here. Where you're wrong is when you conflate population and immigration with sprawl which is an issue of land use and planning.

When you speak of water use and resource depletion, you should really investigate and read up a little. The largest user of water, bar none, is industry. Not people. Care about water depletion in Alberta? Fight the tar sands and the frackers and leave the immigrants alone.

In Ontario at the present time, the Ontario Municipal Board is the single largest impediment to rational planning and limitation of sprawl.  In Cambridge, the lands surrounding the town held by developers are "expected" to be developed and opposition considered hopeless because they'd just apply to the OMB"   Toronto's planners and the most progressive architects see the OMB as a barrier, but there is no grassroots movement underway to terminate the thing.

Is this much the same in other jurisdictions across Canada...an agency constructed by the building/land development industry to fend off any rational attempt to create cities that look more like their European counterparts than those in Texas?

And speaking of Europe...how have they managed control beyond the factor of land and building costs?   Can we hope to begin warning people soon about the approaching spiralling cost of light and heat?  The condo dwellers of downtown Toronto know what the poor rubes in the burbs will face.  Their stockbroker has told them.

Agriculture in Alberta consumes far more water than the tar sands, I suspect.  I'd have to look up a link, but I'd bet my sweet corn earnings on my hunch. 

There are huge gains to be made with conservation and smart growth in agricultural production.  And to feed the current population - and it is possible to feed them all, I believe - sustainable or *smart* growth must occur.

GB:  "Not only are there severe environmental issues here, but also social ones. The costs in terms of crime and other problems, along with rental and construction costs, are socialized in order for developers and REITs to make piles of money."

You're right about REITs, and there again, we'll have to jump on the finance capital sector (and maybe convince the Christian investor that it's usury in the Biblical sense to treat tenants as income on this scale). :)

I don't think we rate that highly in the grand scheme, FM.  Windshield of this sector of the Milky Way Galaxy, perhaps.

Farmpunk wrote:

There's a need for smart growth, FM.  There's little chance of simply turning off the machinery and overturning the system in a human lifetime.  The *smart* thing to do is nudge and develop and slowly evolve on a human scale... which in terms of the planet is short term, though the effects of climate change are certainly obvious and growing. 

Agriculture alters the hydrological cycle.  Alberta pulls from aquifers that change the ground water.  A couple thunderstorms don't restore those reserves, which we don't understand fully the function they play.  Sucking water from the Bow River, or any of the other rivers or watercourses, alters the down river environment.  Colorado River, anyone?  Attempting to grow food in semi-arid landscapes (California, Idaho, Alberta) is bound to cause some sort of environmental degradation due to industrial land use.

Growth should maybe be replaced by "evolve" or "adapt".  We shouldn't always tie potentially beneficial change over time to a continual critique of the economic system.  Outsmart the system or provide concrete steps towards a healthier future.   

That would have been true circa the middle of last century, when scientists began seriously warning us about overpopulation and industrial pollution and agri-business. Not only did we not listen then, but we went on to horrors they hadn't even dreamt of, like bottled water and deep sea oil-drilling. Now, it's far too late for evolution to work. The next step is adaptation to drastically changed circumstances. Only radical measures could do any good - but what we'll get is feeble gestures, much too late. (Look what happened to Obama's candy-assed environmental protection initiative.) Population will decrease all right, but we won't be controlling how, where or why.

Bein' close to nature has to be nicer in Southern Ontario this summer, FM.  Does that perhaps nudge you toward a more optimistic, philosophical frame of mind than we millenarians?  Pragmatism is indeed the way out, but do we really hve the time...given the prospects for other agricultural areas of the world lately?   I always think we're spoiled rotten by this Great Lakes microclimate. But then that's from the son of a farm labourer, someone who has only turned all of his back yard to vegetables and flowers, not the back 50.

There's nothing wrong with your ideas, absentia.  Well, other than cattle = bad.  Totally grass fed cattle, and the recreation of vast pasturelands, would create "free food", so to speak, while the grass acts as a carbon sink.

But there has to be some gradual implementation.  There's really no other way, short of the world's power structures being taken over by benevolent environmentalists, for a snap of the fingers type action.  Gradual growth towards specific goals is realistic.  And in the short term, I believe that such change must take place within the current structures.  Otherwise, nothing will happen.

GV, were you speaking to me?  Nature is neither nice or nasty.  It just is.  And if anything farming puts me in a grim state of mind, because it's increasingly difficult to make a living at it, never mind the growth of local food, slow food, organics, etc.  

Southern Ontario, and the great lakes basin, should realistically be what California is today.  Why it isn't I'll allow someone else to explain because I'm stumped.