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---
title: "Can we just build walkable towns?"
date: "2025-04-08"
last_edit: "2025-04-08"
status: 2
cover_image: "/assets/build_a_town/pdlc_1.jpg"
categories: urbanism
---
For the last year I've been living in the small city of Puerto de la Cruz (PDLC) in Tenerife. PDLC is an interesting place for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that fact that it's not very big. The city has a population of ~30k people in an area of 8.73 km² according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_de_la_Cruz). Because of this, its really not that hard to walk around the city, as long as you avoid walking in the extremely hilly areas. Although I've been loving living here, my wife has been very home sick and longing to move back to Canada and be closer to family. So lately we've been looking at areas in KW, Ottawa, and Montréal to move back to. During this search I've found it increasingly depressing to evaluate places in Canada against my beloved PDLC. Even ignoring things like transit it seems very difficult to find walkable neighbourhoods or towns where you don't have to cross a big stroad just to get to a grocery store.
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This got me thinking, if PDLC is so small and walkable, couldn't we just do the same thing in Canada? Why do I have to move to big city to have a walkable community where I can easily access anything I need. Not to mention everyone in Canada moving to the big cities is contributing to the housing crisis in those cities and helping make them less affordable to everyone. I think the biggest problem with this approach is NIMBYs, but what if we said screw that and just made our own town or neighbourhood?
I sort of lied before about PDLC being 8.73 km². I meant that's the actual area of the city, but I hardly go anywhere in the city that is up hill from the center. If I go to google maps and measure out the area of the city I'm going to regularly its actually slightly smaller than 0.5 km². Looking at more detailed population breakdown from the 2024 census, this area also only has a population of 8000-10,000 people. In that space I can go to multiple grocery stores, my doctor, the bus station, a couple electronic stores, a couple co-working spaces, multiple pharmacies, a couple hardware store, and countless cafés and restaurants. If we had kids right now, in that same area there would be the elementary school and high school, and they would likely be able to walk to them on their own as there are pedestrian paths to both schools. There is also a small shopping mall with some chain clothing stores. Looking these numbers up really surprised. The area by the ocean I'm talking about here also has two smaller waste water treatment plants. Basically in an area of less than a kilometer by a kilometer you can access everything you need, and fit enough people to have the area be economically viable to sustain the people living there, and have utilities to ensure that people can actually live there.
Now what do people in PDLC do for work? Well they either work in town, in one of the surrounding towns or commute to the bigger cities of La Laguna or Santa Cruz to work. Fortunately for PDLC there is a decent tourism sector given the natural beauty of the area and the nice weather year round, thankfully for me and the residents its not a big as the tourism in the south of the island. For people who commute there is a bus available every ~1 hour or so to get to La Laguna or Santa Cruz. People in PDLC do own cars but from the people I know most don't need to use their cars on a regularly basis. Everything here is not "super cramped" either, you don't need to live in a shoe box. We're able to rent a ~1200 sqft 3 bedroom apartment that's all of one floor in a low rise building of 4 apartments for less than what we payed in Canada to rent an ~800 sqft 1 bedroom condo in uptown Waterloo.
Just for laughs, here is the area of PDLC overlaid on the experimental farm in Ottawa. 0.5km² is
tiny! Its about the size of a neighbourhood in Ottawa.
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With the thought of having to move from PDLC, I've been dreading the idea of moving back to somewhere in Canada where I need to drive to do most of my daily errands. In Canada its normal to hear about people wanting to break free from the "grind". Saving up money, buying an acre or two of land in the country and living the rural life. This got me thinking, what if someone wanted to get away from the commute and the traffic, get an acre or two and build a walkable neighbourhood? What would that cost, what would it look like? Unable to get this thought out of my head I decided to try and answer these questions.
Depending on where you're looking you can find a number of different prices, but I found a nice 3/4 acre lot in Ottawa and got to work. I tried to find a housing design that would be more space efficient but pleasant to live in, and I found this [paper](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378778811005883?via%3Dihub) that has the below town house design. This design would give you around ~1200 sqft per town house would be a very livable amount of space and would give small families enough space to live there as well. I made little model to see what things would look like and I think you could realistically fit around ~18 of these town houses on the footprint of the plot. Of course with a space this small I think you'd still need room for parking, because let's not kid ourselves, this lot is in the middle of nowhere and I have serious doubts you could sustain a doctors office, grocery store, and other amenities in a neighbourhood of only 18 people. Also fitting the lot with 18 houses doesn't leave a lot of room for there to be businesses, meaning that this would also just be a car dependent development. Anyone living there would realistically have to commute for work, the grocery store, the doctors office, etc. Honestly modeling this made me feel a little defeated. Trying to beat the "grind" on a 3/4 acre lot isn't going to cut it.
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So I decided to go back to the drawing board and think a little bigger. After all this is just for fun. Lets see if we could bring PDLC to Canada (without the palm trees of course). Could you buy 0.5 sqkm² in Ontario? How much would it cost? Would it be close to anything or in the middle of nowhere in northern Ontario? Well I took a look, and its a bit harder to find stuff online when you're looking at land this big but I did find an old listing for 130 acres (close to 0.5 sqkm²) near [King, Ontario that sold for ~$4.5 million](https://www.moffatdunlap.com/ontario-real-estate/All-Real-Estate-Listings/130-Acres-King/1053/0). This sounds like a ton of money, and it would be if it was single person buying it, but I want to think bigger. What if we had a whole town of people buy it, what we it cost then? Using PDLC as my reference, lets say that we wanted to build a town of 5000 people. What would it cost then?
Well some quick math shows that each person would need to pay $900 to contribute to the land purchase. Wait only $900? That's wild! For less than the price of an iphone 16 you could be the proud owner of 1/5000th of a town that's just 1 hour north of Toronto. But wait that's just the land, a town would need water, waste treatment, electricity, and a bunch of other stuff. What would that cost? I'll try to look at waste water treatment because I think that might be the most expensive of all the utilities that would need to be sorted out. [Stats Canada says](https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/5814-world-water-day-eh) that on average a person consumes 223 litres of water a day. So with a population of 5000 we could expected somewhere around 1 million litres of waste waster to be produced every day. I'm sure if I was more versed in the subject it would be easier to figure out how much this costs but I see a wide variety of numbers for how much this could cost, with numbers from $600k to $10 million. But whatever lets be conservative and say it costs $10 million to build a waste water treatment plant, that would only be $2000 per person to fund the development of waste water plant! Lets say other utilities like fresh water, electricity hookup, main road hook up are similar expense. In that case you're looking at ~10k per person in a town of 5000 people. This is still within the realm of mere mortals!
Now lets start talking about the elephant in the room, actually building the damn houses. How expensive would that be? Again I think this would be easier if I was more well versed in the topic but online you find numbers all over the place from $200 per sqft all the way up to $500 sqft. For purposes here I'm going to assume its on the lower end of the spectrum for a few reasons. First things are being built densely and close together so there is some economies of scale. Second I imagine to be more economical only a couple of designs could be reused all over meaning their could be bulk purchases of materials and labour could more easily be shared. I'm not a builder or a developer though so I have no idea if that's accurate at all. But assume the price is somewhere around $250 per sqft. If we're building a bunch of ~1200sqft 2,3 bedroom apartments that's around ~$300k per apartment. Now we're getting into the big numbers of the per person investment. But if we try to compare this to [similar listings](https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/28065045/313-32-church-street-king-schomberg-schomberg) in King, Ontario we find that for ~1200 sqft of space the price is double or more! And those homes aren't even in walkable neighbourhoods! Now likely we would build some bigger units for bigger families and smaller units for individuals or young professionals, but lets stick to the $300k on average.
Putting these numbers down feels wild to me. If we add the infrastructure cost and some buffer we're
looking at $350k per home. This is half the average sale price of a home in Ontario! Now I know what you're thinking. This is great and all but what will these people do? No sense in building a community if no one can afford to live there. Well of course there would be some jobs in town. We'd want a grocery store or two, a couple doctors, dentists, hardware store. Basically anything that you might need on a regular basis. These would employ a few people in the community but I imagine this would be the range of ~100s of jobs, nowhere near our community size of 5000. So what will the other ~4900 do? Well King, Ontario is close to Toronto and Barrie, could they work there? Now we start to get to a big problem. How will we have a walkable, affordable community if ~4900 people need to commute outside of town for work? If we stick to the tried and true method in Canada we would just end up building a modern car dependent suburb.
Well let's not give up yet! I recall watching an [old documentary of a suburb in Ottawa in the 70s starting their own private bus line](https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/elskgp/a_bus_for_us_nfb_short_film_1972_frustrated_by_a/) since they got fed up with the state of transit in the capital. Maybe we could do something like that? Run our own commuter buses from the town to Toronto, Barrie, and other nearby communities where the majority of the population have jobs. This isn't a perfect solution as we'd need a lot of buses to transit ~4900 people. A train would be more ideal, but even in my imagination I can't picture that happening. Perhaps the community could tailor itself to the "modern digital worker" who can work from home? That feels like it would be unsustainable. A real town needs some kind of realistic economy to support it. I think the only realistic option would be people commuting to Toronto, Barrier, and other nearby communities either by their own car or by a town run transpiration system. If cars can be kept in under ground garages or dedicated parking structures they shouldn't effect the walkability too much. This would of course be more expensive to build. If we try to keep PDLC as a model, there is some on street parking here, but its perhaps one of the things I like least about the city. Because where it exists the cars go right to the curb and affect the visibility of pedestrians trying to cross the street. Perhaps we can follow modern "daylighting" recommendations and build curbs so cars that park on the street don't block the line of sight of pedestrians and vehicles. I think it would be impossible to have a totally car free community (and I'm not 100% I'd even want one). But if we can keep car ownership down to just those that actually need a car, I think it would help with keeping the community dense, affordable and most importantly walkable. I'm not sure what the car ownership statistics look like for PDLC, but Spain as whole only has [642 cars per 1000 people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_motor_vehicles_per_capita), so maybe we can strive for having ~3000 cars or less in town.
Examples of car ownership in PDLC
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What would this town look like? I imagine like a lot of the old downtowns of other Ontario towns. PDLC doesn't really have huge condo towers with 100s of units. Most buildings are small 3-5 story buildings with typically one whole unit per floor. There are a few towers, but were talking about 10s of towers among a couple thousand low rise buildings. You'll also see that most businesses are in the same buildings just occupying the street level part. There are a few commercial only buildings, but the vast majority of buildings are both residential and commercial. I think if we could replicate these design throughout the whole town without building low density "suburbs" with detached single family homes we could keep the whole town walkable and fit it in the 0.5 sqkm². After all if they could do it in Spain why can't we do it here in Canada?
At the end of the day this is all fantasy, but it feels more realistic that I thought possible. Sadly I don't even have 5000 friends on facebook, let alone how to become a developer, how to build roads, water treatment, infrastructure and housing. But it was interesting to think about. I suspect if you found the right land, and enough people we could be building affordable housing in Canada in the range of ~$350k per house by just building a dense town. Maybe people would even want to live there?
P.S. If you know of a walkable town or neighbourhood somewhere in this area, please tell me about it! You can reach me by [e-mail](mailto:lucas.fryzek@fryzekconcepts.com) or [mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@hazematman). Bonus points if:
- It's not Toronto
- I can easily walk to a grocery store even if its small
- It would be a good place for raising a family
- Price of housing is closer to Ottawa or KW
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