Vancouver’s civic election should make it clear how difficult the affordable housing issue actually is.
Each party has a platform, but none of them come to grips with the reality of the situation.
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NPA is saying ‘let ‘er rip’ – the market can solve the problem (but not all their candidates agree, particularly Bill McCreery).
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Vision is saying they’ll ‘press on the accelerator – while controlling the steering wheel’ (but not all their allies agree, like COPE).
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Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver is saying they’ll ‘step on the brake’ (but without any real options).
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Truth is: the solution is not in their hands. How money moves is as important as how the city gets zoned. A change in the income tax act has more effect than a change in the development bylaw. And City council doesn’t get to change the income tax act.
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Realistically, the consequence of local inaction or inability to act will be a more crowded city: more people in the same floor space. Physics, not policy, will prevail. (Take a guess at the at the number of foreign students already crowded into one-bedroom apartments in the West End.)
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Secondary suites, micro-condos and and laneway houses are other manifestations of the same phenomenon. They’re as expensive on a per-square-foot basis as larger condos and houses, but cheaper because they’re smaller.
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Here’s another option we should be seriously planning for: the boarding house. They’re what the West End was filled with before the highrise apartment boom in the 1960s (when the population was half what is today, even though there highest building was only eight storeys). What may have looked to be largely single-family houses had been divided up from attic to basement with separate suites. There are still a few left:
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Today, we need a contemporary version, since we can presume that our generation’s megahouses will go the same way, and that we might even come up with some purpose-built designs.
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In his column, Neal Pierce discusses:
… we do need much smaller, more affordable units than today’s market offers, especially for our millions of “millennials” — twenty-somethings who are now selecting cities to live in. Millennials find themselves stuck with meager pay (median income $31,000) in today’s limping economy. ….Candidate strategies for more compact urban housing units abound. (David Smith of Recap Real Estate Advisors in Boston) suggests, for example, basement or attic flats that use the “excess” space in larger homes in which an aging homeowner wants to remain but has rooms that are idle and chores that need to be done. “A bargain can be struck,” he suggests, with a younger tenant who pays reduced rent in exchange for upkeep and light maintenance. The net result: “to turn an over-housed, under-maintained single-family dwelling into a multi-household home that benefits both parties.”
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Urban designer Mark Hinshaw in Seattle has been exploring this too – and will perhaps provide some useful precedents for Vancouver if we can get over the resistance (and illusions) of the single-family homeowners and legally do with good design what will happen inevitably and illegally (just as with secondary suites – the one-unit, self-contained version of the boarding house).
It’s interesting that you should suggest boarding houses as a potential contribution to affordable housing. I’ve recently been researching the developers responsible for creating some of the early buildings in the city that are still in existance. (http://buildingvancouver.wordpress.com/). Several of them, including J M McLuckie and J W Horne both lived in ‘residential hotels’ for a number of years. Mr Horne lived in a series of hotels over the years, including the Hotel Vancouver, while becoming a wealthy and successful developer (among other buildings he built was the Yale Hotel). Ethel Bryant was brought up by her grandmother Anne Malkin and on Mrs Malkin’s death moved to live in the Langham Hotel, ‘a respectable residential hotel’ on Nelson Street, near Burrard Street. She later married Wallace Wilson and became a successful novelist in the late 1940s.
Perhaps it’s time to (re)create a new form of residential hotel that combines a private room and bathroom with communal facilities that might offer a more affordable housing option for some people. We have arrangements like this for students and seniors – and with the demographic ‘bulge’ of boomers reaching retirement in greater numbers, we’ll probably need more housing choices designed for them anyway.
First-time poster here. I actually live in a rooming house in Vancouver. Actually, there are two kinds of rooming house in the historical sense:
The bedsit – bathroom in the hall, kitchenette in the room, no communal meeting space. Cheap, efficient, to the point. Not intended for social butterflies.
The boarding house – bathroom in the hall, no kitchenette in the room (though probably a tiny sink), communal kitchen and dining room, sometimes a communal living room. Convivial and efficient. Not for autonomous types.
Vancouver has a small but significant stock of “chopped-up” manses, a few in the West End, but most in a northern Granville/Oak/Cambie corridor. They are not like the traditional models, as suites are self-contained and larger. They seldom feature shared space. They are, at least in comparison with the trad bedsit/boarding house, rather expensive, but people will pay because of the superior locations the manses are located in.
Living in a bedsit (5 years now) is ideal for me. The location is fantastic, the building is clean and the rent is way low. Ocasionally, a terrible tenant will move in, but the good outweighs the bad (and tends to outstay the bad, as well). I know many will cringe at the thought of shared washroom, but it makes for a very sustainable and quiet living experience. The live-in manager keeps the facilities sparkling clean. I seldom have to lift a finger.
I know I’m lucky, I live in an SRA that is one of the better ones. What I’ve described is analogous to a very common and inexpensive form of housing in Tokyo, the “won rumu”, or “one room”. Millions of people live in a contented and very civilized fashion in this way. SRA-style living does not have to be the hell-hole type of accommodation it usually is in Vancouver.
The rooming houses are certainly still here. I spent last week helping a 23 year old family friend from the island find a place to live. She had been over the week before following up on a bunch of “rooms for rent” she found on CL. These rooms were in rooming houses. 8-12 Asian girls per house at a cost of $500-$700 a month for a furnished bedroom and access to a kitchen and bathroom. They were in diverse locations from 61st and Knight to the west end. She decided she wanted more control over her housing situation so she started targeting two bedroom apartments where she would find a roomie herself. The place we ended up getting her was so interesting Gordon. It’s 1 of the 2 basement suites in a massive 2 year old house in the 400 block of W. 26th, just west of Cambie. The house has a garage and a lane way house plus the two 800 sq/f two bed 2 bath basement suites as well as a large 4 bedroom owner suite. The whole place was purpose built to have 4 separate living spaces where one family would have lived in the past, fascinating. Anyways, thought this was topical. Thanks as always for the great ideas and insight.
A worthwhile read on the subject is “Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the U.S.” by Paul Groth. The VPL has copies. It’s a good survey of the forms of hotel living from the genteel to the brutal that were typical in the US (and Canada) prior to WW II.