Quote:
Originally Posted by Cirrus
Those differences matter, but they're not the only ones. Throughout the entire 2nd half of the 20th Century, Canada and the other 1st world anglosphere countries did far less damage to their central cities than the US: - They built highways, but not as many. So their urban neighborhoods were never as chopped up and cut-off from one another as many of ours. At the extreme ends, US cities like Dallas and Kansas City have downtown-surrounding loops that completely cut off their cores from their neighborhoods, while cities like Vancouver have no highways anywhere near the central city at all.
- There was less racial tension (and no mass migration of rural southern blacks into northern cities), which reduced fear-based white flight relative to the US, and made redlining less common.
- Urban renewal never went as far, destroying fewer and smaller central city areas.
- Was there a national-level program underwriting mortgages for suburban houses in other countries? I'm not sure.
- Fewer gigantic military bases driving growth outside traditional urban centers. (I wonder what Colorado Springs would have ever become, if the US Air Force had not jump-started its economy.)
I'm sure the list could go on if anybody put serious thought into it.
But that's all historical. US cities are now generally healthy and happy again. It's looking like our biggest problem over the next generation is going to affordability. Our zoning system has made it impossible for the supply of development in cities to keep up with demand. Canada has zoning and NIMBYs too, but clearly something is different there that renders them less effective at strangling new development. Toronto's amazing boom isn't so surprising on its own terms, it's only surprising because no US city is duplicating it, even though plenty of US cities have enough economic energy and demand to do so.
So the important question for today is: Why don't Canadian zoning and NIMBYs strangle development there the way they do in the US? I don't have an answer. |
During my lifetime, the single greatest motivator for NIMBYism has been fear. This fear in the US is very old, and largely relates to race and ethnicity triggered fears, with smaller religious and class components. While people can discuss these issues with venom, with self-righteousness, with "science," and with naivety, discussion does not remove that reality that NIMBYism is largely related to racial and ethnic fears.
A Canadian told me sometime back, that, in his opinion, the major differences between Canada and the US related to how different the history of social violence has been between the two countries.
A) The Canadians never experienced anything like the Civil War (the friction between the Quebecuois and the Anglo in Canada has been very civil). And this is not just in the historical sense, but, in the living, current consequences of that war in terms of the North/South Divide as reflected for example in how the Federal Government is viewed across this divide.
B) The Canadians never owned slaves, en mass. The Canadians have not had to face the multigenerational consequences of integrating a racially defined subculture that are the desendants of slaves.
C) The Canadians have had far less violence with the First Peoples (there are serious social problems between the First Nationals and the rest of Canadian culture, true. Crime rates on Reserves can be at US levels, and, First National concentrations in cities such as Winnipeg have higher than statistical average crime rates.)
D) The Canadians- realizing the threat of migration from the US and disturbed by talk of annexation by brain dead US politicians following the Civil War, have refused to accept in mass legal or illegal migration from their Southern neighbor.* Immigration in Canada, has been and continues to be legal, and, sourced worldwide, consequently there is no single huge immigration component (Toronto is filled with immigrants and their children of all races, ethnicities and religions, with no one immigrant group dominant. Toronto, not NYC or LA, is now the most racially and ethnically diverse city in the world.
E) The Canadians never enshrined the Right to Bear Arms within their Constitutional Framework (the Canadian crime rate, particularly murder, is much lower than in the US. While cites like Toronto do have gun violence, rates are far lower).
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You are right on the money concerning the relative lack of freeway construction in part, although the freeway density between Windsor, ON, and Quebec City, QC, is surprisingly intense. Both Toronto and Quebec have freeway grids as dense as 2nd tier US cities, such as the Twin Cities and Seattle.
The difference between the larger cities in Canada and the US with regards to freeway construction is that the big Canadian cities seemed to evolve past the freeway mantra earlier than in the US, and, consequently built huge steel rail systems starting with Toronto, in the late 50s.
You can move this to the Microbrew etc., blog if you wish, Cirrus.
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*While BRITAIN and the US fought during the War of 1812, there has been no significant lose of territory by either Canada (when it was British) or US to the other. Canada and the US have no equivalent of the Republic of Texas Wars, or the War of 1848, both of which cause Mexico to loose a lot of territory.
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