VANCOUVER — In the midst of a housing crisis, infrastructure costs are used increasingly as an excuse for restrictive zoning policies in BC, which effectively ban apartments on most residential land and reserve it exclusively for low-density options like detached houses, new research by Alex Hemingway and Danny Oleksiuk shows.
Yet it’s far cheaper to build and maintain public infrastructure to service denser forms of housing than it is to service low-density sprawl, Hemingway and Oleksiuk write, citing municipal, national and international research.
“Imagine the infrastructure needed to service 100 homes in an apartment building compared to 100 houses in a low-density suburban development,” says Hemingway, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, BC office.
“When homes are farther apart, they require longer pipes, wires and roads to connect them, raising costs. And homes that are farther from important services and amenities increase demands on transit and roads,” he adds.
Municipalities throughout BC need to invest more in public infrastructure both to replace aging assets like sewers, power lines, roads, schools and hospitals, and to support new construction to alleviate housing shortages, explain Hemingway and Oleksiuk, a fellow with the Sightline Institute and co-founder of Abundant Housing Vancouver.
But they note that housing density is not the problem. Rather by imposing low-density zoning, cities make paying for infrastructure harder, not easier.
When cities use restrictive zoning to block apartments on most land, they disproportionately steer new housing into low-density suburban development that has higher infrastructure costs. And, the well-known infrastructure cost savings of density still aren’t reflected in the land use planning policies enforced by Metro Vancouver cities, they add.
To address the housing crisis, research shows ending apartment bans, allowing denser housing and building the necessary supporting infrastructure, are critical.
Hemingway and Oleksiuk cite a Metro Vancouver report that shows public infrastructure costs for apartments were five to nine times cheaper than for houses, measured on a per-capita or per-unit basis. This is especially important as Canada has a widely recognized infrastructure deficit, estimated at $150 billion to $1 trillion, and the Union of BC Municipalities estimates that over $24 billion in BC infrastructure needs to be replaced within the next 10 years.
Infrastructure is generally paid for through a mix of property tax revenue, debt financing, fees levied on new housing construction, and municipal, provincial and federal funding.
Provincial and federal governments should increase infrastructure funding to help close the gap, with conditions on the funding that would require cities to end long-standing apartment bans, they recommend.
For more information and to arrange interviews, please contact Jean Kavanagh at 604-802-5729, [email protected]
