When I was visiting Portland regularly, I stayed in an exquisite streetcar neighbourhood called Irvington. (Map here.) Built out in the late-19th and early 20th-centuries in the northeast quadrant of the city, just north of Broadway, it was rather like our lower Shaughnessy: large lots, large houses, large street trees, conspicuously upper class. But not solely.
Scattered among the McMansions of that time were four- and six-plexes built by a developer named Bowman. These small apartment buildings were designed to fit in among the single-family homes, and did so with remarkable grace, each in a different architectural style but with a distinct arts-and-crafts bias. Some are now listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
Given their lasting value, not to mention charm, why did we stop building this medium-density model? Two reasons I can think of: first, zoning, reflecting the desire of homeowners and developers to keep multiple-family dwellings, especially rental, out of their neighbourhoods in fear they would lower propery values. And secondly, parking, for which there was no provision, save for the streets and lanes, when Bowman built these gems:
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But maybe now is the time to reconsider – as discussed by Dan Parolek in Better! Cities & Towns: Missing middle housing: Responding to demand for urban living.
Well-designed, simple Missing Middle housing types achieve medium-density yields and provide high-quality, marketable options between the scales of single-family homes and mid-rise flats for walkable urban living. They are designed to meet the specific needs of shifting demographics and the new market demand and are a key component to a diverse neighborhood.
They are classified as “missing” because very few of these housing types have been built since the early 1940’s due to regulatory constraints, the shift to auto-dependent patterns of development, and the incentivization of single-family home ownership.
Dan goes on to define the elements that characterize the Missing Middle, but he need do no more than provide a few illustrations to make the point – like this example:
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The East Beach neighbourhood in Norfolk., Virginia. Go to the map here to check out more examples.
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The irony, of course, is that these multiple-family complexes look better than most of the disproportionate designs generated for the single-family homes on steroids that production builders massed-produced prior to the Crash of 2008.
If we were able to tackle the parking and the politics, why not reinvent a model that worked so well a century ago?
Yes!
Why is Michael Geller on the task force but you’re not?
The problem of course, is that to build them NOW (in Vancouver), you still have to demolish single family homes in the process – so why not build denser?.
I suspect that when they were built (pre-1940s) they were built on undeveloped land. If you look to the [dreaded] suburbs, you’ll see that many new developments (on undeveloped land) are, in fact, a mix of single family houses and townhouses (and maybe even other forms of missing middle housing.
As The Couve below points out, you don’t have to demolish a home to transform it into a mix of suites, as has been done across East Vancouver. Many of these homes are exceptional places to live in fact. And sometimes, when demolition does take place, building larger still doesn’t make sense – as in the case of the middle of a single-family neighbourhood.
And sometimes, when demolition does take place, building larger still doesn’t make sense – as in the case of the middle of a single-family neighbourhood.
why not?
To MM: Because not everyone wants to live in a tower, and rightfully so – that type of densification is not right for all families, all people, all lifestyles. Because neighbourhoods ought to have some continuity, not just be a scattershot mess of different housing types, with towers thrown randomly across the cityscape. And because density doesn’t require towers – the city of Paris fits the entire population of Metro Vancouver into a space the same size of the City of Vancouver with hardly a building over six stories. Let’s show some respect for established neighbourhoods and densify without completely changing their character, by building units such as the “Missing Middle” pictured above.
Housing solutions like these seem totally appropriate for a city, middle housing for a middle class, there’s a slogan. Given the preponderance of stand-alone single family housing in Vancouver, the “solution” that housing demand has arrived at is to see these homes divided up into rental suites as they age, so that while the zoning “vision” for the neighbourhood might be single-family, they end up being small dense suites anyway because that reflects our income situation in East Vancouver for example. Why not just allow the construction of these kind of multi-suite buildings in the first place in areas where we don’t find we should have towers? We can’t only densify the arterials. Thanks for the article.
… very few of these housing types have been built since the early 1940’s due to regulatory constraints, the shift to auto-dependent patterns of development, and the incentivization of single-family home ownership
A certain belief has been promoted that you could build a city without densification, that everyone could have a sub-urban type of dwelling without any negative implications – call it a “spatial” credit expansion (bubble?), and now we’re facing spatial deleveraging – because it’s not different now, the rules of the city haven’t changed as much as we thought
So, when can we see units such as this built in Shaughnessy? Would be nice to see these types of buildings allowed everywhere in the city, and that includes those areas whose wealth and special zoning have generally prevented any densification.