NEWS PLANNING
October 24, 2025 212
Book review: “The Unfinished Metropolis”
Few issues are as pressing as the future of our cities, as ever-increasing urbanization will shape the face of global society and economic development in the 21st century. In his new book “The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution,” Benjamin Schneider examines the major crises and questions shaping North American city building and urbanism. From the decline and revival of social housing initiatives to the role streets play in a city's collective consciousness, Schneider offers a comprehensive exploration of urban life in a rapidly changing world. In a recent interview, Schneider and I discussed the specific challenges facing policymakers, urban planners and the private sector in addressing decades-long housing and transportation crises.
The cover of The Unfinished Metropolis, image courtesy of Island Press
Schneider opens the book with a vivid description of San Francisco's glittering financial district, home to some of the world's most cutting-edge technological innovations, and quickly shifts his focus to the vast tracts of land that surround this center of sophistication and ambition. It describes a nearly endless expanse stretching south along the San Francisco Peninsula and radiating around the bay, filled with hundreds of thousands of single-family homes. Frozen in amber since its construction decades ago, this vast sea has remained largely unchanged, even as the city at its center helped usher the world into the digital age.
As a sort of ground zero for the current North American housing crisis, San Francisco and the Bay Area more broadly have embarked on a path of housing shortages that has become all too familiar to residents of major cities across Canada and the United States. Schneider traces how new housing was virtually forbidden for decades due to restrictive zoning, a highly politicized approval process, and a variety of complex regulations, all in service of what he calls “the cult of the single-family home.”
An aerial view of south San Francisco, image courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica
The consequences of a freeze on new housing in a booming urban center are predictable: rapidly rising housing costs, the displacement of low- and middle-income residents, and associated social problems such as mass homelessness, overcrowding, and declining neighborhood vitality. But Schneider does not accept this dismal status quo as the inevitable result of short-sighted politics and deep-rooted NIMBYism. He details the various reforms that have taken place across the Bay Area over the past decade, which in some cases have produced more new homes in a few years than were built over the entire decade.
A rendering of a proposed affordable housing development in West Oakland, image courtesy of San Francisco YIMBY
Speaking with Schneider, he emphasized the importance of land use and regulatory reforms to create more market-rate housing, but believed that such methods could only be truly affordable if they were accompanied by public investment in subsidized housing, often referred to as social or public housing. While endorsing the concept, The Unfinished Metropolis addresses the hurdles to achieving significant levels of public housing, a welcome change from the often fantastical speeches and ribbon-cutting ceremonies associated with these projects. Schneider draws attention to the particularly egregious cost increases in California, where the cost of building affordable housing projects often exceeds $1 million per unit, twice the cost of bringing similarly sized homes to market by the private sector.
For those familiar with Toronto's ongoing struggle to provide affordable housing on a large scale through its public developer CreateTO, this story may sound all too familiar. The agency, founded in 2018 after years of discussions, was tasked with developing new homes on public land while “streamlining planning and achieving major cost savings.” Nearly a decade later, after an unprecedented condo boom and repeated difficulties navigating the city's own development review process, not a single unit has been completed. A few projects just started construction last year, and occupancy will take years.
A recent construction update for one of the agency's mid-rise, mixed-income projects at 1113-1117 Dundas Street West boasted that the “deconstruction” of a single home had been completed after workers spent an entire summer dismantling the building by hand to “reduce emissions.” For those unfamiliar with the construction industry, demolishing a home typically takes hours, not months. To some citizens, such severely delayed schedules – extended even further by literally medieval construction methods – appear to reflect a profound inefficiency in the public sector, undermining confidence in the public sector's ability to deliver affordable housing at scale.
A photo posted by CreateTO as part of a time-lapse of the agency “deconstructing” a single home as part of a construction project at 1117 Dundas Street West, image courtesy of CreateTO
Turning from buildings to the spaces between them, Schneider highlights the growing success of “open streets” in cities across the United States, describing them as “some of the most striking and visible transformations of American cities that have ever occurred.” One of the most notable examples in The Unfinished Metropolis is the expanding open street stretch of Broadway in New York City. This busy Manhattan artery, once dominated almost entirely by automobile traffic, is now populated by pedestrians and cyclists day and night after then-Mayor Bloomberg's radical rethinking of what kind of street could be initiated in the 2000s.
Schneider explained to me the major opposition his research uncovered to the original Broadway proposal. Members of the business community expressed concerns about reduced foot traffic and declining revenue, fears that would be difficult to allay without a local precedent. Perhaps the greatest resistance, however, came from Bloomberg's own city administration. Schneider detailed the intense “siloing” between public authorities, where transport authorities, transport ministries and infrastructure players compete for priorities in redesigning roads, often leading to institutional gridlock.
A section of Broadway in Lower Manhattan, New York, following the redesign of a car-free street, image courtesy of the Flatiron NoMad Partnership
Conflicts between public bodies with overlapping and sometimes competing mandates affect not only efforts to improve public spaces, but also initiatives to improve public transport. Toronto is no stranger to this phenomenon. Attempts by advocates and the TTC to secure dedicated road space for the city's busiest rural routes have failed for years, often due to opposition from Transportation Services and City Hall, which are reluctant to reduce space for private vehicles. In this context, San Francisco offers a success story that can serve as a source of inspiration
The Dufferin Bus 29/929, one of Toronto's busiest bus routes, is set to get its own bus lanes, but with years of delays in delivery, image courtesy of the City of Toronto
Unlike most North American cities, San Francisco's municipal transportation service and transit operator are one and the same, known as the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). Schneider claims that this one-stop-shop method of municipal transportation has resulted in a dramatically faster and more comprehensive approach to bus lane delivery. A look at the city's network of dedicated transit lanes seems to confirm this theory: dozens of streets are receiving transit priority measures and plans for further expansion are detailed on the SFMTA website. Compared to Toronto's paltry network of (dubiously enforced) transit-only lanes, such a network certainly seems like a dream to transit and TTC advocates seeking relief from the city's endemic traffic.
A map showing transit lane coverage across San Francisco in 2021, image courtesy of SFMTA
Concluding The Unfinished Metropolis, Schneider considers what the future of American urbanism might look like, acknowledging the great achievements in urbanism already achieved while acknowledging the uncertainties presented by rapidly changing political realities. He presents a practical vision for 21st-century cities, complete with all the complexities that entails, and avoids the all-too-common historicist impulse to return to an imagined idyllic early 20th-century city.
A SkyTrain passes through a sea of high-rise residential buildings in Vancouver, image courtesy of the Broadway Subway Project
Schneider's first book is a valuable and timely summary of the challenges facing North American cities in the 2020s, carefully considering solutions from across the policy spectrum. Refreshing is the lack of partisanship and tired political platitudes that so often derail discussions of urban policy, instead allowing his obvious passion and desire to improve urban form to guide his analysis.
However, “The Unfinished Metropolis” misses significant opportunities by failing to delve deeply into any single topic. I was often frustrated as I read, because just when Schneider seemed to get to the heart of a topic and a valuable insight emerged from his well-researched analysis, the narrative would move on to the next topic and return to broad description and general breakdowns to repeat the cycle. For this reason, the book serves as an engaging introduction to the world of urban design in 2025, but more experienced readers may wish for more depth and a more thorough exploration of the ideas presented.
* * *
A copy of The Unfinished Metropolis can be purchased through Island Press and all major online retailers. Benjamin can be found online on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @urbenschneider.
* * *
UrbanToronto's research and data service, UTPro, provides comprehensive data on construction projects in the Greater Golden Horseshoe – from proposal to completion. Other services include instant reports, downloadable snapshots based on location, and a daily subscription newsletter, New Development Insider, that tracks projects from the first application.