With so many living in cities it seems there’s plenty of appetite for urban living.
But it’s not for everyone. There’s also a solid subset that’s willing to swap a reasonable commute to jobs in the city for the pastoral countryside.
As our Alexis Stockford documented, there’s been substantial demand for new housing here in Manitoba, and much of it in smaller bedroom communities outside larger population centres.
Read Also
Introducing the purple tomato
Health Canada has approved bioengineered The Purple Tomato (TM), maybe leading to new culinary uses and health benefits?
But that can translate into new rural residents who aren’t familiar with rural ways, as she found out in her second report on this subject in the latest issue of the Co-operator.
Newcomers to what had predominantly been agricultural areas are sometimes suddenly shocked to find out that farming goes on out in the countryside, with predictable results.
In my own social media this fall I got to see an exchange between a new resident of rural Manitoba and a longtime resident, when the new arrival complained about the noise of late-night harvesting operations near their acreage.
“Newcomer moves to country, discovers he hates country,” was longtime rural dweller’s reply to the complaints. And while that might have elicited a good chuckle at the time, it didn’t make the ongoing tensions between these groups go away.
With Canada’s growing population, there’s clearly a strong and stable demand for housing at this time.
Take Winnipeg as a microcosm for this growing demand. In 2005, according to figures reported by the CBC, the average house price was $137,062. Just a decade later, in 2015, it was $278,220, a 103 per cent leap in a decade, according to the same dataset.
That trend hasn’t slowed, with the average house price hitting $318,400 this September, which represented an 11.5 per cent rise year over year.
This isn’t just a Canadian thing either. House prices have been rising in many parts of the world, prompting some drastic actions by other governments.
New Zealand is one location with a property market even further out of the affordable zone, and its federal government has put in place a radical new set of rules.
New Zealanders may now develop up to half of their land — 50 square metres of a 100-square-metre parcel, for example, and build up to three storeys without consent from their municipal authorities.
They’ve also made it simpler to subdivide urban lots and build more houses closer together.
All these rules were aimed at kick-starting development in urban centres and that’s a good start when it comes to limiting the impact on rural areas. But there will always be those who seek the countryside, and that’s going to have to be managed.
A solution that might work is one that comes from decades ago, in postwar Britain.
In 1946 Britain was digging itself out from the rubble of the Second World War.
Many of its largest population centres had been heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe during the conflict and what substandard housing was available was bursting at its seams.
Prime Minister Clement Attlee, leading the U.K.’s first majority labour government, responded in part with the New Towns Act.
As one might expect, the intent of the act was in the name, and its aim was to create new towns dotting the English countryside, relieving overcrowding and congestion in larger historic cities.
Soon construction sites were everywhere such as at Milton Keynes, north of London, East Kilbride, south of Glasgow and Newton Aycliff, south of Newcastle- Upon-Tyne.
Just over 50 years later more than two million Britons were living in a total of 27 new towns.
They were attracted to these new communities for many practical reasons. The housing was modern and well built, the communities were carefully planned and featured many amenities and, perhaps crucially, they were outside the crush of the teeming cities.
There’s little doubt that Manitoba faces many of the same pressures, with the vast majority of the province’s population shoehorned into a single sprawling metropolitan area.
Building outward, or even densifying, this existing community can only go so far.
Perhaps it’s time to consider, as those planners of postwar Britain did, starting with a clean slate.
Doing so could prevent the permeation of urban attitudes throughout rural Manitoba, and the accompanying predictable conflicts with farming operations in the area.
With a little careful planning it should be possible to steer most of the development into areas where it would be lower risk to impact established farming operations.
For example, development in areas with established high-density livestock operations could be discouraged, and areas with land less suited to agriculture could find themselves home to planned towns.
It might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea. But Manitoba’s growing population needs places to live, and it seems hard to picture how the need will be met within our existing communities.
