[URBAN NOTE] "A Walking Tour of Toronto"

[rfmcdonald]

Hamutal Dotan's Torontoist post summarizing recent research on the health effects of walkable neighbourhoods isn't that surprising. Neighbourhoods designed for walkability--neighbourhoods where it's easy to get around on foot to accomplish quotidian things--tend to have healthier populations than neighbourhoods that don't, but neighbourhoods that are walkable tend by virtue of their living costs not to be open to people on relatively low incomes, who in turn experience significant health issues that--presumably--are only aggravated by the lack of walkable neighbourhoods open to people on low incomes. The circularity of this situation is apparent, and worrying. I'm willing to bet that walkable neighbourhoods also aren't neighbourhoods that are particularly well-suited for cycling, either. And, I'm willing to bet that the low density associated with non-walkability doesn't do much to make subways viable, either.

Toronto is broken. Saying, as suggested in the interview Dotan posts with Toronto's Medical Officer of Health David McKeown, that urban planning needs to be much better is only a restatement of the problem. What prospects are there for this all to change? Torontoist's questions are in bold.

One of the study’s findings is that people who don’t currently live in walkable neighbourhoods often wish they did. Another finding is that there is significant overlap between neighbourhoods with low walkability scores and those with low-income residents. Could you describe the correlation between walkability and affordability, and is there some sort of necessary connection between the two?

We certainly do see a pattern. We know that people who live with a low income have poorer health—lots of previous work has documented that. It’s apparent that in addition to all of the other impacts that having a low income has, it also means you are more likely to be living in a neighbourhood which is not very walkable. I would mention previous work by the United Way looking at the prevalence of poverty in high rise buildings in the inner suburbs as an example of places where a lot of low-income people are living, particularly newcomers to the city, which are not very walkable at all. They’re not walkable in terms of the proximity of services that people would need to get to; they’re not walkable in terms of street patterns—all of the features that make a neighbourhood walkable.

Is there a necessary connection? I don’t think there is a necessary connection, but there is an unhealthy correlation between low income and low walkability urban form.

I suppose that leads to what I’ll call the gentrification question. Features that make a neighbourhood walkable also tend to make it more attractive, and neighbourhoods that are more attractive also tend to become more expensive. How do we enhance neighbourhood features that increase walkability without pricing lower-income residents out of those neighbourhoods?

Clearly affordability is a clear issue—in fact, respondents said that affordability was one of the key issues in their choices of where they were able to and wanted to live. But when we asked people about trade-offs—we asked “for the same price, would you prefer to live in a neighbourhood with larger lots and larger houses and quieter streets or would you prefer to live in a neighbourhood in which all of the things you do every day are closer, so that you can walk to them, even if it means that you have a smaller house, or maybe not a house but an apartment, and less property?”—in a way the differences in affordability were factored into the way in which we asked people about their preferences. Even taking into account the impact of less affordability, people still had a strong preference for more walkability.

There’s been a recent upsurge of downtown vs. suburbs rhetoric in Toronto politics. The study shows that while Torontonians in every part of the city value walkability, it ranks higher the closer you get to the urban core. How do you avoid the charge that this is yet another case of urbanites telling suburban residents how to live?

I think what you’re seeing is a preference for walkability in neighbourhoods that are more walkable. Really that’s just an expression of people living where they want to live, and actually the majority of people living in low-walkability neighbourhoods, the majority were quite happy, and they valued different things: they valued larger homes and quieter streets and that’s fine. But what the study shows is that it does have an impact on their health—there is a health impact of urban form despite preferences.

This study is not trying to tell anyone what to think, but it is trying to point out that there is a relationship between the kind of neighbourhood you live in and certain important aspects of your health that affect chronic disease—and that’s something that we should think about not only as we plan neighbourhoods but as we choose neighbourhoods.