Is the reason for this twitch by any chance an unavoidable temptation to preface this phrase with “she had enormous…”?
No, never!
Isn’t this going to depend on transport technology at the time the city is growing? If the city is growing when your choice is, basically, horse-drawn or foot, it will grow upwards. Introduce rail transport, and it will start to grow outwards. Introduce (affordable, accessible) private motoring and it will grow outwards faster, and at a lower density.
And of course you also have to factor in developments in building technology. Until you can erect high-rise buildings, served by reliable elevators, there’s a limit to upward growth. Solve that problem (and change nothing else) and you expect a reduction in outward growth and an increase in upward growth.
So it depends on how old your city is, and when it grew.
Nope, didn’t think so. Don’t know why I even asked, really.
I wonder how global warming will effect Canada’s population?
If areas get warmer will more people be comfortable living there?
The flys will love it. And the mosquitoes.
By “Minneapolis,” you would be referring to the city that has the most important navigable river in America running through it and which is surrounded by high-yield farmland? Gosh, I can’t imagine why a big city would be THERE.
Canadians do not agree with you.
Nobody in Canada is prevented from moving from, say, Toronto to… I dunno, let’s say Dundalk. There is absolutely no barrier to that at all. Dundalk is not surrounded by inviolable Crown land preventing you from building a house. Go there tomorrow and you’ll find lots of space there to live.
Canadians aren’t moving to Dundalk because with the exception of the 2000 people who live there, they do not want to. (Similarly, people in Minneapolis don’t seem to want to move to Sunburg.)
Why is this hard to understand?
In Ontario we have a couple of thousand miles of winter/ice roads that are the only way 31 communities can connect by land with the outside world. Usually it is cold enough to keep these roads open for two and a half months, but in warm seasons less than two months, sometimes resulting in the full year’s worth of supplies not reaching communities. When a warm winter is forecasted, trucking companies lease more trucks, so the problem can somewhat be mitigated in advance if the forecasters get it right. Another problem with warmer winters is that there are more thaws throughout the winter, which wreaks havoc with the winter/ice roads. On the big scale of things, this is not a big thing.
On a macro scale, various climate zones will creep north, so in the long run, there will be longer growing seasons in the south, a transition to farming on the boundaries between farming and timber zones, and a movement north on the upper limit of timber zones. On the big scale of things, this is not a big thing.
Communities built at the southern end of permafrost will be fucked, sinking into the mire, but of far greater significance, the world will be fucked by a massive increase in in the rate of global warming as the methane of the thawing and rotting permafrost is released into the atmosphere. On the big scale of things, this is a very, very big thing.
One of my friends recently moved from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Toronto, and is loving it, transitioning from one world class conurbation to another of twice the population. Now the thing is, the world is his oyster (he’s an astrophysics doctoral student who had his choice of schools) but he chose Toronto. That’s the sort of thing that LC simply does not recognize – people move where they want to, and Toronto is one of those places that is such a good place to live that a lot of people move to live there. If it were not, people would not move there, and those already there would move elsewhere, for there are a lot of perfectly good elsewheres (including Minneapolis/St. Paul) where folk can and do chose to live. It really is that simple – live wherever you please, but LC . . . just . . . doesn’t . . . get . . . the . . . concept.
How many fully detached homes with yards are there in Manhattan? How can kids there have a wholesome Leave it to Beaver life if their father cannot afford a fully detached home with a yard in Manhattan? Something needs to be done because government land elsewhere is hurting families in Manhattan.
Free the Bundies!
Yes, it’s every Canadian’s childhood dream to live in some overpriced house in a small lot in lovely Hamilton. That’s why they all do it, it’s paradise on earth.
FFS it sounds like many Canadians have NO IDEA what a crappy deal they’re getting on real estate compared to Americans. Maybe Canada’s the place that most needs a Donald Trump.
Enjoy the medieval feudal system.
Again, your ignorance of economics is astounding.
Traditionally, your housing prices were slightly higher than housing prices in Canada, but if you’ll be so kind as to remember, you fucked up your economy, whereas Canada did not (we have a more conservative banking system, particularly when it comes to residential real estate), so our housing prices held whereas your housing prices tanked. The reason that housing prices these days tend to be lower in the USA is that little thing we like to call the American Great Recession.
I have some news for you that will find very hard to take: it was your poorly regulated economy and it’s pathetic excuse for a banking system that caused the difference in housing prices between Canada and the USA, and not our Crown land up in the Barrens or the Rockies.
You haven’t shown yet that Canadians, collectively, are getting a crappy deal compared to Americans. The really desirable American cities (New York, Boston, San Francisco, etc.) have home prices fully equal to anything the GTA can show. [E.g., the median home price in San Francisco is now north of a million dollars.] New York City’s average home price is higher than Toronto’s. Average apartment rents are higher in Kansas City than in Ottawa or Hamilton.
How, exactly and precisely, are Canadians forbidden from moving to cheaper areas such as Fredericton, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, etc., etc., etc. For example, you are apparently Canadian; in what city do you live, and what is precluding you from moving to Timmins?
Who is “you”? I spent most of my life in Canada and 100% of my observations are based on the time I lived there.
I see you’re also now admitting prices are too high, which is progress. It’s not really productive to do the typical Canadian thing and point fingers at the U.S. whenever there’s a problem.
You’re refusing to compare apples to apples. As has been pointed out to you, like dozens of times now, Toronto’s housing prices are on par, or even lower than, many other major cities around the world of similar stature. That’s what happens when lots of people want to live in a particular area. The way you get cheaper housing? Move to where it’s cheaper, which you apparently regard as akin to death, because they don’t have the things that big cities inevitably have. And if you built another city like Toronto - guess what - the housing prices would rise to approximate Toronto’s, because lots of people would want to live there.
Well, to be fair, some off the grid homesteader once complained in some blog somewhere he couldn’t find free land here, so Canada must have a system akin to medieval feudalism. 
Wake up, sheeple!
You know, Oakville had a chicken farm on 9th Line a couple of hundred meters from the lake. Now there are homes there that LC’s friends could never afford.
I guess that’s proof that Crown land in the sub-arctic has resulted in homeless chickens in Ontario and BC.
Actually, there are some corporations that already own millions of acres that are essentially landbanked. For example, Plum Creek Timber owns about 6.5 million acres in the U.S.; some of it is actively being logged, and some of it is simply held for future development. Land far from cities isn’t terribly valuable, so the taxes are very low.
I don’t know what the laws are like in Canada, but here in Kansas, e.g., land that is being used as farmland must be taxed as farmland, even if the city rezones it. Vacant land in the middle of town, in an area where houses are going up all around, may have greatly increased market value, but yes, it is still taxed like a farm out in the boonies, meaning the carrying costs are quite low.
For example, one tract in the middle of Overland Park (a thriving suburb of Kansas City) was appraised at nearly $440,000 in 2003; the owners planted a hay crop and the appraisal for tax purposes dropped to $120. Not one hundred and twenty thousand, but just one hundred and twenty dollars. As you might imagine, the property taxes on a property legally worth $120 are negligible.
In Ontario at least, land taxes are set by the municipality, unless it is located in an unincorporated municipality. Needless to say, such loopholes are not encouraged, as property taxes are the main source of municipal funding.