O’Toole, the Fool

Not my headline – it’s the one in 24 Hours, where Ian King nails it ….

June 22, 2007

O’Toole the fool

By IAN KING

Does the cost of housing have you worried? Sick of all those mountain views and Fraser Valley farms crowding up the landscape? Had it with drinking water from the North Shore? Randal O’Toole has a solution for you!

O’Toole, an economist and veteran think-tanker who’s held several university chairs funded by conservative foundations, has a recipe for Greater Vancouver and its space and housing crunch: Get out of the way.

Fire the planners, strip cities of land-use authority, leave zoning decisions to local covenants and let a thousand subdivisions bloom.

Build on a mountainside with several feet of snowpack above? Go ahead, and take the risk. Build into the water supply area? Be his guest, as long as you can appear to mitigate contamination. Agricultural land? Build those farms somewhere else. They’re too heavily subsidized.

It was a free-market fantasy with the odd highlight – like charging developers for all the improvements they’d need, and bringing back toll roads – but seemed out of place even within the august boardroom of the Fraser Institute.

O’Toole’s problem was that he was preaching a one-size-fits-all message for Anytown U.S.A. rather than Vancouver.

In Anytown U.S.A., the number of cars are up and transit use is stagnant or falling. When new houses are built, people overwhelmingly prefer the big house with a big yard in a car-centric subdivision.

Vancouver’s not Anytown U.S.A., as a bit of cursory research would show. App- arently, the veteran think-tanker didn’t look beyond regional research from roughly 1973 before passing judgment on Vancouver.

True, there are more cars in the region. In the city of Vancouver, though, the number of cars has plateaued according to ICBC while the city gains six or seven thousand people a year.

Per-capita transit use is up over 20 per cent in the last decade. SkyTrain, whose “little trains” O’Toole mocked in his presentation, carries more than 220,000 trips a day and its lines can carry twice that without having to annex one square foot of land.

People might not be moving to allegedly obsolete mixed-use areas in Anytown, but Vancouver is different. Just take a walk through downtown, Mount Pleasant, or even New Westminster and see how many places are being sold before ground is broken. Buyers could choose a traditional place in outer suburbia, but didn’t.

O’Toole claimed that Houston, where the city has no planning and no zoning authority, was a far freer model, and one that the people of Houston preferred. Good for Houston. Greater Vancouver’s gone down a different path – and if we like it, why shouldn’t we be free to choose our own destiny rather than forcing everyone into buying the American dream?

Even at the Fraser Institute, where O’Toole should have found a friendly crowd, he got a rough ride from city urbanists who are more familiar with the situation on the ground, and who generally agreed that O’Toole hadn’t a clue about the region he was busily criticizing.

Fortunately, in a city where conservative politicians are as fervent believers as anyone in denser, mixed development, O’Toole’s theories don’t stand a chance of taking hold.