Like abstract art, perhaps we need admit our ‘solutions’ to housing and traffic problems have been 100 per cent wrong from the very start
It’s a news story that sounds like the set-up for a joke your cranky uncle would crack about abstract art: “A painting by abstract Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down in various museums since it was first put on display 75 years ago, an art historian has found,” arecently read, about an art piece made of intersecting and parallel coloured tape lines by a 20th-century giant of abstract art.
After careful study, we realize we’ve been looking at something the wrong way around for decades. But the problems caused by looking at it that way make us worried about changing our perspective. So we resolve not to change our perspective. We’re looking at it the wrong way. You “solve” that problem by making it so people don’t have to sit in traffic — by making it easier to live near where they work or shop or play, and making transit and cycling and walking really attractive alternatives. If anything, you’d “solve” congestion by making driving less attractive , not by trying to make it easier.
Or take how we’ve long approached making home ownership viable — in Toronto, but also across Canada and North America. Through lower and lower interest rates, and also through lower minimum down payment percentages, longer amortization periods and other measures, we have made it possible for people to get a bigger loan than they ever could before, and still be able to carry the monthly payments. This has driven housing prices astronomically higher.
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