green all over: trees and wealth
playing SimCity teaches you that more parks = higher land value
(Video courtesy of Max — and remember to engage your glutes, kids!)
The ÜNDA Trail club helped plant beautiful pine trees in the Don Valley yesterday, an activity that was part of the Don’t Mess With the Don’s Earth Day efforts. The Don Valley Trail is where we run weekly, and it was only fitting to help add more greenery to Toronto’s largest urban park. Thousands of trail runners, hikers, and mountain bikers use the trails, activities which shift soil, rock, flora, and fauna all over the place. I’ve taken home a few pounds of dirt from this trail system over the years and if it wasn’t for stewardship projects like the DMWTD, this wonderful green space would have collapsed long ago. I’m grateful for the chance to finally pay back, and look forward to visiting the trees we planted. (One was named Archibald.)
Yesterday’s tree-planting reminded me of a Paul Graham tweet about trees, and this story about Lee Kuan Yew and how influential trees were in the shaping of modern Singapore. I’ve lived half of my life in Toronto, and never do I take for granted how green and accessible it is compared to Manila. I’ve had the opportunity to live in Singapore for my MBA internship in 2019 and have experienced firsthand how green, prosperous, and yet industrialized that small city-state is. Manila is famously not green and with climate events being unprecedented and therefore hard to plan for, the consequences of becoming less green become more drastic.
Toronto is one of the top twenty cities with the most green space according to this Time Out article, which is a wonderful thing. Having been to a handful of other cities in that list, I do have a bias of good memories about feeling more relaxed and at ease when I visited, specially when I got a chance to go through their green spaces. The feeling of ease was particularly true of Barcelona and San Francisco: the former has El Diagonal which is essentially one long park that cuts across the city, while the latter is so close to Marin County which is just magical.
Top Twenty in the world for green space availability is overall a good thing, and we can aim for better. A closer inspection highlights the distribution of green space in Toronto:
Researchers led by Félix Lorrain-Landry of University of Quebec in Outaouais reported the city’s forest canopy isn’t distributed fairly: “whiter and wealthier” areas, such as along Scarborough’s waterfront, had the most tree cover.
There are many socioeconomic determinants to health, and without any research at all, I want to stake a claim that the more green space, and more trees around a neighbourhood, the healthier its inhabitants are, and therefore a reduced load on the healthcare system. Net-net a win. This reminded me that to increase the land value in SimCity, you need a lot of green space in and around it. (Which does of course lead to, well why not just green it all up??)
My neighbourhood has green spaces as in parks and green roofs, and in my opinion, too few trees. This time last year I was in Argentina waking up to birdsong, surrounded by trees. Yes, there is birdsong in Toronto (a friend has seen an owl in the city! what a hoot! hehe) and I hope we can be a city of great food and great birdsong. I hope more streets are lined with trees, I hope we aspire to become as densely green as Singapore is. The Port Land Project is redesigning an industrial space in Toronto and I hope it gets even more green (not a lot of green in renderings).
Imagine if the measure of a city’s livability also includes the volume and variety of birdsong in it? I remember reading something like in Paris you’re never more than a few hundred meters away from a world-class bakery. What if in Toronto, you’re never more than a few hundred meters away from a green space? A cluster of trees? A trail?
Yes it’s simplistic to reduce it to one metric, but what if we really just aimed to plant more trees in the name of greater development? And if you get a tax break for every decade that a tree you planted stays alive? Bonus if a bird nests in it. Plus points if an owl make it its home. Extra bonus if it’s a raptor (because Toronto, duh).
One can dream.