For decades, the suburban dream has been sold as the ultimate marker of financial stability and personal success. It is the promise of a quiet street, a private yard, and a sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle of the city. But as the cost of living in Ottawa and across Canada continues to climb, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this lifestyle isn’t sustainable, and it’s a premium subscription service that most families don’t even realize they signed up for.
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Suburban homeowners often talk about “affordability” in terms of housing or grocery prices, and tax or interest rates. But there is a hidden, structural drain on suburban bank accounts that rarely makes the headline: the privatization of the previously public services. In a traditional village or a dense urban core, many of the things that make life enjoyable are shared expenses, funded by a collective tax base or used by and accessible to everyone. In the modern, single-family subdivision, those shared services have been legislated out of existence, and replaced with private liabilities that the individual homeowner must purchase, maintain, and eventually replace.
You can call this suburban subscription “Privacy+,” and it is squeezing suburban families from every conceivable angle. You’ve been sold an expensive lifestyle, and the suburbs will be happy to sell you solutions for an additional cost.
The Home as a Multi-Purpose Utility
In more compact neighborhoods, the home is a place to sleep, eat, and relax or have some alone time. Life happens in the “third places“—the parks, the local cafes and restaurants, and the community squares. In the suburbs, the home has to serve as all a family’s indoor spaces. Because there isn’t a café on the corner or a library within a safe walk, your house must now contain a coffee bar, bookshelves aplenty, a home office, a gym, a playroom, and a cinema, and the list goes on. We are forced to buy more square footage than we actually need to live in, just to compensate for the lack of shared community infrastructure in our neighbourhoods. You aren’t just paying for a place to stay; you’re paying for a private version of the public square. Keeping it all clean and neat is a whole other money, time, and energy cost which is build into suburban living, but is ultimately a choice.
This doesn’t even get into the amount that has been and is being spent on things like heating, water, sewer, and roads that would be cheaper for everybody if we were more broadly willing to trade in single-family homes for multiplexes or compact family-friendly condo or apartment buildings. It’s easy to say “some people prefer to live in single-family homes”, it’s another thing altogether to consider that there are tradeoffs that come with that preference. Even some people who would theoretically prefer to live the private suburban lifestyle might make a different choice if presented with urban and suburban options, especially when considering the full cost of each.
The Driveway: Your Personal Infrastructure
Next, let’s discuss the suburban driveway. In a dense city, the “last mile” of your commute is a public sidewalk or a shared lane. In the suburbs, that last mile (or last ~30 feet) is now wholly yours. You are personally responsible for the capital cost of that asphalt, the labour of clearing it of snow, and the eventual $5,000 to $10,000 bill to repave it. When the city maintains a road, the bill is spread across residents who share the cost and the roadway. When your driveway needs to be replaced, that’s on you. We have taken what used to be a shared public utility—the place you start and end every trip—and turned it into a private maintenance liability.
The Backyard vs. The Park
Suburban homeowners value private yards for the ambiance and privacy they provide, but we rarely account for the cost of that isolation. A public park is a highly efficient piece of “green infrastructure,” a place that anyone can use for any part of their day. A single crew can maintain a beautiful park that serves hundreds of families. In a single-family suburban community, five hundred families must each buy their own lawnmower, edge trimmer and gardening tools, store their own fuel, and spend their own Saturday afternoons performing maintenance.
We see this same pattern with “luxury” amenities like pools. A community pool is a shared asset with professional staff and specialized filtration systems funded by the city. A backyard pool is a massive private expense that can add thousands to annual utility and insurance bills. We are paying a massive premium to ensure that when we swim, we don’t have to see our neighbours—and the cost of building and maintaining private pools certainly isn’t getting any cheaper.
The Two-Car Mandate
Perhaps the most aggressive “subscription” in the suburbs is the necessity of the private vehicle. This is why my “less car” approach aims to talk about the combined environmental, safety, and financial arguments around reducing the amount of driving we all do. In a neighborhood where you cannot buy a liter of milk without a 5- to 10-minute drive, a car is not a luxury; ownership is a mandatory tax. For a family with two working parents and three children, this almost always translates to two or even three vehicles, once kids hit driving age.
Between insurance, fuel, maintenance, and depreciation, the average Canadian family spends over $10,000 per year per vehicle. In a walkable village, that $20,000 would be living in a high-interest savings account or RESP, paying down a mortgage, or even invested in a local business. In the suburbs, car ownership is a non-negotiable operating cost required just to participate in society.
The Library of Things
Obviously, owning books is a pretty common thing, but more often than not, the suburban ‘library’ is just towering bookshelves in our dens and bedrooms holding hundreds or thousands of books. Even the most avid readers likely only read most of their books once or perhaps twice. Though kids books tend to get repeat readings, it’s only a few years before your child has moved on from board books and wants early readers or YA novels. Rather than building or making space for libraries where books can be read by anyone who wants them, we each stock our own personal libraries that often end up just taking up valuable living space.
Books aren’t the only things where suburban homeowners take this approach. Life in a single-family home requires a whole “library” of tools and appliances that most people rarely use. Every house on the street has its own ladder(s), a power drill, pressure washer, lawnmower, and of course in Orléans, a snowblower. You can probably think of dozens of tools and household objects that fit this description, some perhaps only used weekly, monthly, or even yearly. In more connected and compact communities, these are easily shared through formal tool libraries or informal neighborly bonds. In the atomized suburb, the combination of isolation and convenience means everyone must own one of everything. This redundancy is great for big-box retailers, but it is a silent drain on household wealth.
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Why Does This Matter?
For a long time, I didn’t even think about these costs because the math of home ownership is hidden from view, spread across bank statements throughout the year. We didn’t even get into how the same costs that make suburbs unaffordable for individual homeowners are also slowly but surely draining city finances. Ottawa uses development charges (basically one-time taxes on new development) from new subdivisions to pay for the maintenance of old ones, creating a cycle that feels sustainable, but functions more like a financial trap. As infrastructure like the roads and pipes in older suburbs begins to fail and need replacing, cities can’t afford to subsidize the low-density suburban model.
As property taxes rise (albeit slowly) to aim to cover the city’s insolvency, suburban families find themselves hit twice: they are paying more to the city for fewer services, while their private “subscription fees” for cars, yards, and home maintenance continue to inflate.
Reframing Suburbia – The Call of the Village
The solution here isn’t to “ban” the suburbs or make backyards or driveways illegal. It’s about choice and efficiency. We need to look at our neighborhoods and ask: What can we share again?
If we allowed denser housing in single-family residential areas (even denser than the new zoning by-laws), better options abound. Going one step futher, legalizing and incenivizing more community services and amenities in our neighbourhoods—things like small corner stores or cafes integrated into our streets—we could reduce by a significant proportion the number of daily car trips for most residents. If we invested in high-quality public parks and community centers, families might realize they don’t need a 3,000-square-foot house to feel like they have room to live.
The current suburban model is built on the idea that total privacy is the greatest public good. But that privacy is part of a premium subscription that is increasingly out of reach for the average family. By shifting back toward shared infrastructure and more efficient land use, we can start to lower the operating cost of being a resident of Ottawa and build a city that is actually built to last.
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