Raise the Hammer

The Jamesville Townhouse complex is not massive or horribly wasted ... unless you mean that of all the rest of the low-density housing in the lower city (i.e. detached and semi-detached housing).

Do some analysis. I live three blocks to the east of the complex ... my block has 27 dwelling units per hectare and about 2.2 people per dwelling unit, which adds up to 5850 people per square km. My block is mostly 100 year-old single-detached houses on narrow lots with some semis. Not high density, but not 1950s suburbia either. Certainly dense enough to support transit and be walkable, etc.

The Jamesville complex by comparison clocks in at 31.58 dwelling units per hectare and 4.22 people per dwelling unit, which adds up to 13,324 people per square km. It has surface parking lots because that's cheap/low-cost and because the designer opted to separate parking from the individual units.

I'm not defending the architecture or form of the Jamesville complex ... it is very typical of low-rise public housing design from its era 1950s/60s. And I certainly wouldn't recommend we return to the clean-sweep sort of renewal thinking that led to its construction. But we do need to attend to certain biases when talking about it.

Density doesn't simply equal height of buildings. In fact you can achieve livability and walkable, transit-supportive density with a mix of low-rise detached, semi-detached, and row-housing ... certain blocks with the narrow short lots in the Keith neighbourhood reach into the 35+ units per hectare and 10,000 people per square km range with this mix.

We use height and hyper-intensification for other reasons. Generally, because we wish to preserve the character of other less intensely used land nearby ... or to create architecturally distinctive buildings, or to maximize ROI on land development (sweat the land as they used to say).

Comment edited by RobF on 2015-11-05 10:59:54