Petti Fong writes in the Toronto Star about small spaces:
270 square feet of home sweet home? That’s life in Vancouver
VANCOUVER—There are simple rules for how to live in a space of 270 square feet: live simply.
Vancouver residents understand that better than ever as the cost of homes continues to rise and the size of living space keeps shrinking. A downtown rental building featuring 270-square feet micro-lofts are now under construction. They’re believed to be the smallest units ever built in the city.
The development that is converting a 100-year-old building into tiny units will each have a wall bed with a convertible dining table, a bar-size fridge and a shower but no tub. The units will be rented out from $725 to $750 a month.
Former city councillor Gordon Price lived in a 290-square foot apartment as an experiment in the 1990s and learned it all got down to the basics.
“The ultimate lesson was under some circumstances and some qualifications it’s quite livable. Light and views help as does being able to convert spaces,” said Price. “In one room, you use the bed at night and in the morning, it becomes your living space.”
The cold reality of Vancouver real estate can be put down to the limits of geography and the law of physics, Price said. With the high price of ownership and constrained growth because of the mountains and the ocean, there’s crowding upwards and inwards. …
Actually, that was one of three lessons I learned from a month living in 600 Drake – a project the City approved when Mayor Gordon Campbell and developer Jack Poole came up with the idea of the Vancouver Land Corporation
(now Concert Properties, no longer with any City connection) to see if it was possible to build more affordable rental units, with only a long-term lease on City properties as a lever.
I figured if I could survive a month without going stir-crazy, the unit was ‘livable.’ Experience: no problem. But I had a few qualifications.
The first, as mentioned in Petti’s article, is that, because you’re living essentially in one room, design really counts. In most dwelling units, there’s a separate room for every major function – sleeping, dining, living. In micro-units, you convert throughout the day. So long as the room itself is functional – and you avoid clutter – it works fine. My bed, dining table and desk were all retractable, and I lived with a bare minimum of personal stuff.
I actually found the kitchen better designed than the condo I was living in at the time. The bathroom features were two-thirds size, and that too worked just fine.
Second, views and light really help. It was my first experience with floor-to-ceiling glass – and it expanded the sense of internal space immeasurably.
Thirdly, external storage, shared amenities like a gym, and lots of services and restaurants nearby offset the lack of personal space.
Big qualification: suitable only for one person. I know I couldn’t live with someone else in such close quarters.
It turned out, by the way, that small-size units didn’t give much of a cost advantage: the additional cost of materials and appliances, for one thing, wasn’t sufficient to get rents down below what you had to pay in the West End for a significantly larger, if older, unit.
But that’s always the problem with something that’s new: it’s inherently more expensive than something that’s old, assuming the costs of money, land and labour provide no major savings.
Now, after two decades, it’s still not noticeably more affordable – $950 for 300 square feet – though there’s a waiting list to get in.
But in a way I didn’t appreciate at the time, it helped retain affordability for rental housing in Vancouver. More in tomorrow’s post.
