How to tell a story: “Cleaning Out the Fridge”

I’ve been reading Alan Durning’s affordable housing series on Sightline with interest because it dovetails with an interest of mine: small houses and do-it-yourself solutions.

In the past, the most affordable housing was the house that you made for yourself. A hut. It has been the habit of human beings throughout history to match housing with the material means of providing it. People live in what they can build. The early European colonists of North America built very tiny homes, 16 feet by 18 feet was common, because that is what was available through their own labour. It’s nonsense to hold up an unattainable standard as the only way to live and then shiver in the cold. But with zoning and building regulation, that is essentially what we have been doing. Minimum lot sizes, setbacks, parking requirements etc are forcing people to live in a more materially intensive way than they want or can afford. (I love the Andres Duany quotation about the traditional town of Alexandria VA, it’s “efficient, beloved, and illegal.”)

The totally unregulated housing solution is the shantytown, but without adequate water and sewers shantytowns are a health hazard. During the Great Depression there were shantytown settlements in Vancouver called “jungles”, but Premier Tolmie had them demolished after a death from typhoid. What I think would be interesting is a modern shantytown built with water, sewer and electricity, but with very small, very densely plotted homes that even poor people could afford and could even help build.

Witold Rybczynski and Avi Friedman proposed the Grow Home as a much less extreme version of this idea premised on “less land, more do-it-yourself”. The Grow Home is a row house, 14 feet wide with 1,000 square feet on two floors. In 1988 the estimated construction cost was $35,000 and the total cost with land and all charges was $60,000. Some were actually built in Montreal for around this price – cheap even for Montreal in the 80’s.

A very tiny home could be built at 13 feet by 18 feet on one story with loft. It would have an enclosed bathroom, a sitting area, a kitchen counter, and a sleeping loft accessed by a staircase up the side of the home. The home area would be 234 square feet plus loft. At $150 per square foot, the construction cost would be $35,100. The homes would sit on 13 by 20 foot lots for a lot area of 260 square feet. At $75 dollars per square foot, the lot would cost $19,500, and the whole home would be just $54,600. (At $75 per square foot a serviced acre would cost around $2,000,000 after subtracting circulation areas. This would only be doable in less desirable areas in Vancouver.)

Streets would be 15 feet wide. This is not really auto friendly and would leave no place to put a car, but it would allow for vehicle access. The lots would be arranged back to back along parallel streets that could be curved or straight. Between every fifth and sixth house there would be a five foot path that would allow for pedestrian traffic. The lot area and lot share of the circulation areas would be 385 square feet. After subtracting 10% of the land for parks and public amenities, this modern shantytown would have 101 dwelling units per acre or 244 dwelling units per hectare. Assuming 1.2 persons per dwelling unit, the neighbourhood would have 293 persons per hectare. The average density of the Vancouver metro area is 20.8 persons per hectare; the European average is 49.9; Asia is 161.9; and the US is 14.2. Thus this neighbourhood would be extremely dense by world standards, and in fact I would not advocate building whole hectares this way but rather interspersing this style of development with other building types.

Because the homes would be so cheap, people would be able to afford them on the equivalent of welfare. A mortgage of $55,000 at 4.0% amortized over 25 years would have payments of $288.14 per month.

The trick to keeping the costs so low is to increase the density by increasing the ground coverage, here 54%, rather than by building higher. Increasing land coverage brings no added cost, but moving to multi-story and then to concrete and steel construction greatly increases construction costs. With increased construction costs per square foot, the increased efficiency of land use will not make up for the increased construction cost. (In fact increased land efficiency would probably make up for increased construction costs up to four stories at which point an inflection point in the construction cost curve makes height more expensive than coverage. But four-story buildings would never be affordable to people on low wages, and the idea here is to posit something that could serve as a self-help solution to people with little money.)

I have also wondered whether zoning regulations like minimum lot sizes that make housing unaffordable could be vulnerable to challenge under section 7 of the Charter:

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

The thinking is that these zoning regulations make housing unaffordable and thus endanger the physical and mental security of the person by rendering them homeless. The Chaoulli decision of the Supreme Court of Canada that limits on private health insurance violated s. 7 lends support to this line of argument that zoning bars people from housing themselves just like forbidding private medical insurance barred people from securing adequate healthcare. (Although I think this is an interesting line argument, municipalities should consider this on their own because actual court control of the zoning process would not be desirable.)

Obviously shantytowns as a solution to affordable housing are open to the obvious criticism that shantytowns are crap and people should not have to live that way. However, it really isn’t clear that living in a tiny house is the wrong way to live. It might be right for some people, and it certainly has a strong historical pedigree. And second, as with the case of drug prohibition, government action is doing more harm than good. Declaring that tiny homes are not fit for human occupation and then not providing an anything else is hardly helping anyone.