Working From Home
and the need for multi-use housing after COVID-19
Living Local
One of the most often predicted changes to our daily lives after COVID-19 is a massive acceleration in the trends towards telecommuting. We are expected to see a rise in the number of people going to work and school from home. How are our neighbourhoods equipped to handle an influx of people staying at home? We can only assume that people will want to go out for lunch and after work drinks. That they will need nearby childcare. That they will occasionally want to work from a cafe or even join a shared work space because working from home isn’t for everyone. In a majority of residential neighbourhoods, these uses are illegal. While some of the oldest neighbourhoods have a legacy of corner stores, mixed uses and hyper-local commercial activity, these things have not been permitted in most communities built after World War II. In the Modern era, “economic research and urban planning tend to conceptualize commercial and residential functions as physically and semantically separate”.
Accelerating Changes
With more and more people working from home, we are seeing a really interesting change that flies in the face of predominate planning policies in Canada. Homes will become multi-use buildings, which is a new challenge for architects and planners to understand. More time concentrated in neighbourhoods is not a bad thing. We will see a reduction in vehicle miles travelled and subsequent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Parents can spend less time commuting and more time at home. Rush hour congestion on transit and roadways could be reduced. However, without adapting to these changes, we may not get anywhere better. Will people just drive to a cafe to work and eat lunch? Will parents work from home to save money on expensive child care exacerbating existing equity issues. If people are spending time at home, we need to diversify the services our neighbourhoods offer to bring them closer to home.
The rise of telecommuting and digital higher education also brings more disposable income concentrated in our neighbourhoods. The way land use policies currently exist, the ability for that disposable income to stay in that community is extremely stunted. We need a greater mix of uses in our residential communities to keep retail dollars in the local economy and create jobs that embrace neighbourhood entrepreneurialism and support the emerging group or resident workers.
The COVID-19 crisis has shown us just how significant small daily interactions with our neighbours are for our collective social, physical, and mental health. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg developed the term “third places” to mean spaces for gathering that are not the home (first place) or work (second place). As first and second places merge, the value of third places, which promote the social health and resilience of neighbourhoods, increases. Let’s embrace this change by making space for walkable amenities and third spaces within our neighbourhoods.
The Call for Action
In order to make proper use of the new found time and money that are left in neighbourhoods, we need to see changes in how our neighbourhoods develop. Let’s start by bringing back the corner store. (Re)legalize the local commercial activity on every corner in the city. By hyper-local I mean cafes, professional services, daycares, bakeries, mini-grocers, craft and thrift shops, and shared work spaces for local residents. Allow small businesses to flourish in support of our existing home-based micro-businesses/startups and growing number of remote workers. These small businesses themselves create localized jobs outside of white collar work that is typically done online. Another benefit- they make neighbourhoods more interesting by allowing the personality of a community to come out.
Neighbourhood scale retail space, Toronto