Single-Family House Fixation

North America has a single-family house fixation – an abusive use of land needed for agriculture and nature. The resulting urban sprawl requires extended road, sewer, water, and utilities infrastructure. The outcome –  more land cost and infrastructure cost per housing unit equals less upfront affordability. And, extended infrastructure networks saddle communities with additional municipal and utility maintenance costs.  

I have wanted to write about this for some time now, but sourcing empirical data has proven difficult – too many variables across too many jurisdictions. So, I have based this article on a walk up my street in Pointe-Claire. As such, it is anecdotal and directionally accurate, even if not precise. 

The west side of my street runs for approximately 1000 feet without any intersections. It backs onto a neighbouring street, also contiguous for the same 1000 feet. Forty-one single family houses  straddle these 2000 feet of street frontage. So, each lot  has a width of about 50 feet. The average liveable area per house runs around 2000 square feet (“sf”), not including basements.

Re-Imagined

Imagine instead a street lined with townhomes built in pairs and sharing 50 feet of frontage.  Each home is:

• Only 16 feet wide but
• Has 2000 sf of living space on two floor plus
• An accessory dwelling unit (ADU) of about 700 sf with a private balcony or patio 

This results in:

• Fourty houses either side of the street – eighty in total
• Each with an ADU so
• One hundred and sixty homes in total or
• Four times  the number of homes using the same amount of land for 41 single family homes.

This very modest approach to densification quadruples available homes on the same amount of land.

Only the Necessary Math!

While I am trying really hard to keep the mathematics simple, I have to do this:

• In my Pointe-Claire neighborhood, a lot for a single-.family house sells for about $600,000. Therefore, 41 lots on a 1000-foot street have an aggregate value of $24.6 million
• Land cost per livable sf when developed as a single family house: $24,600,000 / (41 houses x 2000 sf) = $300 sf
• Versus the Townhouse development: The same $24,600,000 / ( (80 townhomes x 2000 sf) + (80 ADUs x 700 sf) ) = $114 per buildable square foot.

Initial infrastructure costs get spread out over 160 houses versus the 41 single family homes. The same applies to municipal and utility maintenance costs, which in our Québec climate includes snow removal.

The additional cost of the required square footage of land for single family housing and the cost of infrastructure is four times higher than in the townhouse example. Plus, there is an embedded maintenance cost for every additional foot of required infrastructure.

A simplistic example? Certainly! But it demonstrates that our single family house fixation has a real cost. Increasing the development of single family tract housing  does nothing for affordability.