For decades, suburbia has fought a battle for the heart and soul of the Canadian middle class. Its opponents: condos, townhouses, and the concept of 鈥渉igh density鈥� itself.

The wars are now over. High density has won. 

The war has its roots in architecture and city design of the mid-century, when the automobile was king.

Older cities and villages had been built with foot traffic, horses, and perhaps tram cars and bicycles in mind. New suburbs were built for and around sedans and station wagons.

Land and lumber was cheap, and the prospect of having a split level surrounded by some grass and trees was welcomed by people who had grown up in urban apartments and rural farmhouses alike.

But as populations grew, we found the limits to suburban expansion. You can only 鈥渄rive until you qualify鈥� so far. 

There鈥檚 only so much developable land in a country where our urban centres are often up against mountain ranges or large bodies of water.

And unlike in the United States, in Canada cities never suffered from desolate, largely empty downtowns. People always lived near the centres of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. So there were always people who would champion high-density living.

The last 20 years have seen open ideological warfare. Would Canadians embrace density, or stubbornly insist that suburban single-family dwellings were the only route to housing happiness?

In the end, it was that stubbornness that doomed the low-density side in the war.

With cities, even big cities and close-in suburbs like Vancouver, Richmond, and Burnaby protecting vast swathes of low-density housing, an artificial shortage of land was created. That shortage drove up prices, all to the benefit of people who had already got their slice of the suburbs, but to the detriment of everyone else.

And so the people in houses, on average, got older and greyer, and everyone else put more and more money towards less and less housing.

The low-density forces had shot themselves in the foot. Young people have, for the most part, given up on the idea of ever owning a house. They aren鈥檛 even mad about it, not anymore. 

Would you be mad if you were told you couldn鈥檛 have a gold-plated yacht? A quarter-acre lot is about as out of reach for the average 25-year-old, these days.

So as local, federal, and provincial governments have spent the last year rapidly pushing through policies that mean an end to single-family zoning across vast swathes of Canada, the response has been little more than a shrug.

Young people hoping to own a home 鈥� a townhouse, a condo, a duplex, anything! 鈥� have their fingers crossed that this will help. Older folks, even many who love their single-family homes, are resigned to the coming changes. Sure, there are some bitter holdouts who think apartments are the work of the devil.

But it鈥檚 over. A couple of generations from now, the suburban single-family lot will be as quaint an artifact as the horse and buggy.