What can Calgary learn from Mexico City?
A glance outside the urbanist anglo bubble
A dense urban environment has many benefits, from increasing vibrancy and walkability, to supporting a more efficient use of land, infrastructure, and our tax dollars.
Ensuring more equitable access to housing, however, is not one of them; neither is the protection of our right to housing.
If this were true, residents of cities that never implemented exclusionary policies, and where denser building forms weren’t outlawed, would be less likely to experience socio-spatial segregation. (An argument could be made that any zoning is exclusionary by nature, but i would prefer not to go there.)
In the anglo bubble, these cities don’t seem to exist, but they do.
One of these cities is Mexico City.
With a population density four and a half times higher than Calgary, Mexico City houses most of its 9.2 million residents in a variety of apartment configurations, as well as attached single-family dwellings. A key reason for this difference is culture.
In Mexico, most urban dwellers don’t believe they have a right to live in isolation from others. Only the affluent aspire to a single-detached home surrounded by the privacy and quiet afforded by a lawn. For the middle and working classes, sharing a double wall with a neighbour is the norm.
You can see this at play in neighbourhoods such as Condesa and Roma, in CDMX, whose charm and vibrancy have been rediscovered by the hordes of digital nomads from the U.S. and Canada who’ve flocked to Mexico looking for a lifestyle that’s become unattainable at home.
Strangely, these young professionals don’t seem too bothered by the limited privacy a ‘cramped’ built form creates — at least not yet.
For less than $3,000 per month, newcomers can rent an art déco apartment built in the early 1900s, and walk along the pedestrianized boulevards lined with Jacaranda and Fresno trees in the Roma-Condesa area. They can also use North America’s second largest rapid transit system, or rent out a bike from Ecobici, a public bike-share program, to access services and amenities akin to those available in any other world-class city.
You’d think Mexico City has done things right, and in many ways, it has. But the existence of flexible zoning bylaws that allow for a variety of uses and building forms to coexist has done little to ameliorate displacement. In Mexico City, residents are as segregated by income (and class) as we are in Calgary.
The Condesa and Roma neighbourhoods in CMDX may have twice as many dwellings per square kilometre than Sunnyside, in Calgary — but they’re as out of reach for the average peso-earning chilango as Sunnyside is for most of our city’s moderate income earners.
Some, of course, have suggested that supply is also the problem in Mexico City. But how much more supply can you add in a city where 92% of urban land is already built out, and where the population density surpasses 6,000 people per square kilometre?
Just because the effect of density in Mexico City doesn’t seem to have a significant impact on affordability, however, it doesn’t mean that increasing density in Calgary is a pointless endeavour.
We need to densify the shit out of our city, mostly for environmental reasons. As we all know, a compact urban form reduces the need for owning a private vehicle, and allows active modes of transportation to flourish — and that’s a good thing.
It would be great if more Calgarians could afford to choose to live in an well-connected neighbourhood like Sunnyside. I would certainly prefer not to drive, nor to live in a car-dependent neighbourhood where large front lawns devoid of activity act as a stand-in for the very nature their existence helps undermine.
But the market won’t build it; at least not at the price-point half of Calgary’s households can afford. (University District is a great example of this: it’s dense, it’s walkable, it’s central. It’s also out of reach for moderate income Calgarians.)
It’s important to recognize that we have two different problems at hand: affordability and climate change. Zoning reform can help mitigate the latter, but as nice as it would be if it could also address the former, it probably won’t.
Let’s take look at Mexico City again.
To counteract the effects of gentrification in high-demand neighbourhoods, in 2019 the Mexico City government created a generous incentive for developers to build up to 10,000 affordable homes by 2024.
Only 253 have been built.
A reason for this is that the proformas didn’t seem yo pencil out for private developers. There’s more money to be made elsewhere.
Market-driven development — dense or not — will continue to occur where there’s a profit to be turned. Building housing for low- and moderate-income earners isn’t a great businesses (except for exploitative landlords, but that’s beyond the scope of this thing).
A failure to understand this will continue to reproduce the same inequities that exclusionary zoning has helped perpetuate, and produce a denser, more efficient environment that’s available only to the few, at the expense of the many.
Should city council vote to increase density across Calgary? Absolutely.
Will this improve the prospects of the 84,600 households experiencing housing precarity within a reasonable timeframe? Nope.
To address the latter we need initiatives that decommodify our housing stock and effectively protect our right to housing, such as building public housing and non-equity co-ops in well-served, well-connected neighbourhoods.
Unfortunately, we can’t rely on businesses (developers, builders) to do this.
The federal government must take the lead, like it did in the post-war period.
But we won’t get this until zoning reform fails to deliver the kinds of housing lower income households need — so let’s get it going.
Reluctantly yours,
Ximena.
Stuff i’ve written since last time
Calgary tenants shocked by heavy rent increases
The Globe and Mail
‘Save the Buffalo, Shoot the Dene’
The Tyee
A New Typology Shapes Mexico’s Pacific Tourism
Azure
Calgary Homeowners Reap the Rewards of a Rising Market
The Globe and Mail