Jan: A lot of people feel priced out of Toronto and other big cities. So can we redesign cities to make life more affordable? Antonio Gomez Palacio is a partner and chair at dialogue, a multidisciplinary design practice, and he joins us in studio. How are you doing, sir?

Antonio Gomez Palacio: I'm doing very well. Jan.

Jan: It's great to have you. Now I want to talk about affordability and how it should be addressed. You believe it should be done holistically. I'll break that down for us. Why do you think that is?

Antonio Gomez Palacio: Sure. You know, I look at it even in the way that my wife and I made decisions over the course of our lives and certainly in the way that most families and kitchen tables are having the discussion. We don't look at it in silos, right? You're trying to make a whole series of bills, you know, ends meet at the end of the day. So you're trying to pay the rent or the mortgage. You're trying to pay for transportation for food and all of these other aspects all together. So whereas absolutely, we need to be looking at affordability of housing, we're also simultaneously have affordable transportation crisis. We have in a crisis on affordability on a number of different fronts. So ideally, we're as policymakers, as city builders, as governments, we actually break out of those silos and start to think about all of the different aspects that affect affordability in the household.

Jan: So break that down for me. And let's talk in practical terms, what does that look like?

Antonio Gomez Palacio: So the average Canadian over their entire lifespan spends 29% of their entire disposable income on their house. At a certain point, that could be 60, 70% when you have a mortgage, but you know, different at different times, but they spend 19% on their car, they spend 11% on just the utilities and running, running the house. So if I, as an architect or as a city builder, can design a place where somebody doesn't need to own a car or own the second car, right? And the utility bills can be diminished. I will have a very direct impact on household income. And all of a sudden, what might have been unaffordable house becomes affordable. So families, as I say, aren't making decisions in silos. So why would we as city builders, start fracturing all the ways in which we think.

Jan: Help us use sort of how cities have been built before, help us inform how we can sort of build better in this case.

Antonio Gomez Palacio: Absolutely. And here is where we actually have some great examples. Frankly, most of the cities where our grandparents and great grandparents came from, right, were walkable. They were able to walk to school. How many kids today walk to school? Right? They went to the groceries and they lived in, in very compact and succinct life forms. Right. And in cities after the Second World War, we invented machines and we had cars and we started to build roads. And, and there was this sense that we could accumulate stuff, right? And we could build our way into all kinds of very luxurious lifestyles. Not surprisingly, that has resulted in unsustainable cities, right? We can't sustain that level of infrastructure. And for households, it's become unaffordable. So we need to bring the pendulum back to more compact, more mixed use, more walkable so that we can have great quality of life and great lifestyles without the need to build so much infrastructure and without the need to accumulate so much stuff.

Jan: Is there a city right now in this country or in this province that you look at that is doing it right, that is doing it like how you are wanting cities to approach things?

Antonio Gomez Palacio: Absolutely. And many of them have the good bones. Toronto, where in Toronto right now, and there's some great bones in there. And when my wife and I arrived here at 28 years ago, we didn't have two pennies to rub together. So we were having to make the tough decisions that many people are making. And after a few years, my son, you know, we were expecting my son is coming along. And, and we discovered that the only way in which we could afford the house where we wanted to live, was if we committed not to owning a car for ten years. And we've been a car free household for 28 years. And you know how much money we have saved. But that was a balancing act. And different families are making different decisions all the time. And we were able to make a great life in Toronto, and we picked where we lived and in these aspects, to be able to have that lifestyle, different people will make different choices. And the city, and this is a great thing about cities can afford to create options for people. The trick is in other parts of the city as well, people don't have options. Public transit is not really an option, right? Being able to walk your kid to school is not really an option. So there's great corners in the city and there's areas that we could definitely improve upon.

Jan: I want to have a better understanding of what have governments gotten wrong over the years. When we talk about sort of, you know, urban sprawl and building better cities, you know, over the past couple of years, we've heard a lot about, you know, the green belt and wanting to develop those places. Those can be costly, as we know, with sort of having to build the infrastructure from the ground up. But what have governments gotten wrong over the years from your view?

Antonio Gomez Palacio: And yeah, in some instances, expediency has gotten in the way of good long term planning, right? Good cities are planned on 100 year or 1000 year type of horizons. Why? Because people made decisions 102 hundred years ago that we're living with the consequences of today. So, for example, carving out chunks of the greenbelt in order to supply more housing, if that comes along with the need to build a tremendous amount of infrastructure to supply that housing out in those areas. And then it creates a lifestyle where people need to drive long distances in order to get there. We may create the illusion of providing affordable housing in the short term. In reality, we're just expanding on a very expensive form of city building and a very expensive lifestyle for people. So yes, many governments have gotten it very wrong in many instances. We're also now building around transit centres. We're building in some key areas. So in the midst of all the wrong, there's also some great things that are taking place.

Jan: Obviously, in the midst of all of this, we do have a housing crisis. We do have a, you know, a cost of living crisis. I want to have a better understanding. How could your approach have an immediate impact? Because I think that's, you know, when we talk about having this long term plan, but people do want results. Now, it doesn't happen necessarily like that. But how could your approach have an immediate impact on people's lives and finances?

Antonio Gomez Palacio: Yeah. So the we need to change the policy. We need to change the way in which we think about cities. We need to be thinking about it in a comprehensive way. And at the same time, we need to help families who are trying to balance all of these things out, right? So if we're trying to do affordable housing, which we absolutely need to do, and at the same time, we're building some affordable means of transportation and creating access to affordable recreation and services in these kinds of things. If we can just make a 5% dent in each one of those and a 10% dent, then we're tackling what those bills that show up at the kitchen table from a variety of different perspectives. So one particular family, we may not be able to tackle the housing, but if we've tackled the transportation or access to healthy food, right, or creating other aspects, it means that by approaching the problem from a multi-pronged perspective, we have a much greater ability to have an immediate effect on families.

Jan: Antonio, we are going to have to leave it there. This is not the first time or the last time that we're going to have you on the program. Of course, you are going to be joining us throughout the rest of the season to talk a little bit more about what design can do for us in this province.

Antonio Gomez Palacio: Jan, it was a pleasure and thanks for tackling such an urgent issue.