[mercy_dude]

I don’t understand the attack on detached family home. We have a lot of land. And enough natural resources to fund enough renewable ventures such as EV adoption and renewable energy production. This seems to be a wider effort by a group of loud mouths to discourage families to single family homes while investors gobble up SFHs in North America at record speed. I mean who do you think are going to own the lions share of multi family housing they espouse?

The authors best argument seems to be well connected public transport but that argument falls pretty quickly if you go outside the core. Suburbs like Laval land Brossard are just as bad and take over an hour to reach downtown. And there is enormous amount of corruption- most of past Montreal mayors have faced corruption charges , it is so ingrained.

[RC_ITR]

>And enough natural resources to fund enough renewable ventures such as EV adoption and renewable energy production.

It's not just cars to move people. It's getting water to each house. And electrical to each house (hope it survives that recent storm!) And groceries to each house. And fire department coverage of each house. And Ambulance coverage to each house. And kids to school from each house. It's just a million things that are all made less efficient by choice.

And honestly, fine! Allow the people who want cars and SFH to have cars and SFH. But the problem that people ignore is that cars and SFH are the only affordable option in most of North America because of intentional policy choices and that is what articles like this are fighting.

[sabjut]

Detached housing increases mean distance between households. This increase leads to increased need for longer roads more infrastructure etc. This is the obvious. What is not obvious is the social impact of this.

As a kid I was able to walk and bike into school. The independence was great and I had lots of adventures on the way home with my friends on the way back from school. Only when we moved to a single family home further away from school I had to rely on the bus that only came once an hour and even more infrequent when its later in the afternoon, I saw my friends less.

This just a stupid anecdote of mine but I do see the pattern: people that live further away, see each other less and do less together. I can walk 5 min to the subway station and be at the front door of any circa 1.5m people in my city within 30 minutes. Not possible with detached housing. Subways only make sense in somewhat denser environments.

This all before talking about energy efficiency. Since I have other tenants left and right of me, I basically don't didn't even need to turn the heating on that much last winter.

Also I can walk to the corner of the city block and get fresh and warm bread from my favorite bakery. It's also right opposite of a very good pizza place. Not possible in suburbia.

If I wanna see some green and meet friends to play volleyball or a picnic I go to the public park instead of my private garden. The park is maintained by professional landscapers and gardeners, I wouldn't even have the time to care about my own garden.

I would suffer horribly in detached home suburbia and also have a far larger environmental footprint, so why do it?

[pandaman]

And I can sleep as long as I want without being awoken by my neighbors throwing stuff at the walls or dropping it on the floor, or slamming doors, or having an animated conversation in front of my door, or having an argument or a party in the courtyard or any other nuisance that people create for each other when living in multi-family buildings. No subway can replace this.

[thebradbain]

> "attack on detached family home"

Single family homes in high-demand/land-constrained cities often make up >66% of the allowed zoning (see San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc); By definition this is not a good allotment of land and resources in high demand areas (you are fitting 1 family where you could fit 2-4 families with little immediate change in the neighborhood).

No one is saying ban building of single family homes, but the amount of land exclusively zoned for single family homes in high demand areas needs to be rebalanced -- if you want the conveniences of a single family home in an urban city, you should be prepared to pay for it (think Upper East Side brownstones), or move further outside the city. But there is no reason that the vast majority of homes in a city MUST be single family homes.

I say this as someone who owns a single family home in Los Angeles, and supported the conversion directly next door to me of a single family home into what is now a four-plex.