City-Splitting: Can De-Centralization Help The Affordable Housing Crisis?

The complicated, water-intersected sprawl of Sydney, Australia.

Twenty years ago, The Province of Ontario merged the City of Toronto with 5 other municipalities to create one mega-city, now the heart of the fourth largest metropolitan area in North America. The amalgamation was the latest in a historic trend of mergers in the Toronto region.

Twenty years on, as far as housing solutions are concerned, the city is far from amalgamated. Rooming houses, a useful form of legal low income housing, are permitted in some parts of the city and continue to be illegal in others.

Toronto is also witnessing a trend observed in many North American cities, where the poor are being displaced from older housing and pushed outward, into the suburbs. For more on this displacement, try: Suburbia: Unaffordable Downtown Housing Eats at the Heart of the American Dream.

On the other side of the world, an astonishing urban planning proposal has appeared on the scene. Sydney Australia, is considering splitting into three different cities.

From an affordable housing perspective, if nothing else the proposal with its three urban centres promises to make employment and services more accessible for the poor who are being pressured outwards into more and more remote suburbs.

Read more in The Guardian: The radical plan to split Sydney into three

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