January 6, 2016

If you build it they will … um …

I covered a story about the great looking architecture in Winnipeg which has suffered greatly since its initial photos put both Winnipeg architecture, and that of a hit young firm with a name no-one can really remember 5468796, on the architectural map.
As initially photographed:centrevillage_elevation
I posted it because it fits a trope of apparently good architecture, and I had specifically wanted to elicit exactly the comment which Dan provided:

You can’t fault the architects for their execution – much. They seem to have made a few of the errors that British planners made in the 60’s on a more impressive scale (i.e., narrow stairwells, too many access pinchpoints, too many hidden pockets, etc. – thinking largely of Hulme, Manchester)….
…You’ve got a new subsidized house whose exterior won a design award. Great. How does that get you a job, or get your brother-in-law off your couch and into rehab, or get your nephew out of that gang he’s been running with? How can the structure alone improve your life?

This is exactly the kind of entirely correct set of questions which architecture alone is incapable of answering – they require a holistic combination of design and policy and government and societal support which is very seldom (it seems) considered.
Michael Mortensen writes a response to a piece in the Guardian which demonstrates clearly that as unaffordable as Vancouver housing has become (Mayor Robertson just posted on Facebook about this again today), London is worse:

A friend was apartment hunting and – despite being employed, personable and trustworthy – was having a difficult time finding a place. After a few weeks, she was invited to a “pre-showing”, where landlords show the apartment to a select group of prospective tenants before having an open house.
The apartment was perfect, if expensive: think hardwood floors, lots of light, high ceilings. She was smitten. As she was strolling through what she thought might become her new home, however, a man in hip clothes walked up to the landlord and said, “I’ll give you a year’s rent, in advance”. Needless to say, she did not get the unit.

The article calls for large scale building, to catch up with the lack of supply which is decades in the making. In Michael’s response, he points out (as Dan did) that that things may not be that simple:

Housing supply in global cities is a complex, wicked problem. We need to look at the the housing supply systemically and cohesively from the beginning of the supply chain right to the end.

There are of course examples of ‘catching up’ which have had disastrous results (Pruitt-Igoe is the classic example, however I suggest also watching the Pruitt-Igoe Myth) … Toronto has similar, as does Paris, etc… Michael finishes with the following, also suggesting us to watch this.

Large projects, prefabricated at scale in response to political direction were an unmitigated disaster for the UK. Watch this and ruminate a bit for yourself on the relative success of massive government housing initiatives. It explains a lot why major parts of London look the way they do.

One important issue which is omitted in the damnation of the housing estate (or social housing, depending where you are) is that, as Dan mentions, the architecture does not exist in a vacuum, and whether the reason for the ‘failure’ of the social housing is societal or due to a lack of maintenance, I believe that there is a big role for public investment in housing, and that there is a strong argument that “the story of … public housing is one of quiet successes drowned out by loud failures…”. The talk by Geraldine Denning of ‘Architects for Social Housing (ASH)’ at last years ‘Urgent Imaginations’ conference at the Western Front gallery suggested the the same, that in many cases, the only failure is the lack of repair and reinvestment of rents, and the new desire of city councils to monetize their land at the expense of the current residents. Vancouver wouldn’t know anything about this of course.
The environment in which Council Housing (which I will use henceforth because, here at least, it has fewer bad connotations than social housing) exists determines its success/failure – in this it really isn’t any different than private housing (except for $$$ and correspondingly disparate budgetary cushions). No matter who you are, you need schools, work, food, shelter, and all things being equal, will choose to live where these are best available.
There was a great lecture last year, by the Globe and Mail writer Doug Saunders, at the Ismaili Center (and also a similar talk a year earlier at Surrey City Hall) about the Arrival City, a topic about which he has written and spoken at length. His point is that the areas of cities which once served immigrants (and I would add many non immigrants also) well, as places to enter a society, have cheap housing, and provide the ability to work and socialize both within the neighborhood and with the rest of the nearby city, no longer exist. The new equivalent is parts of Surrey, or Paris’s peripherique, which might provide affordable housing, but not any opportunities to work, or connections to the adjacent community.
Saunders argues that these areas must receive much more investment, to link them to the rest of the city with transit, to ensure barriers to work are not too high, to ensure that high quality education is available, and that the arrival city and the ‘arrived’ city are able to mix, and will meet.
One of the results of the Vancouver transit referendum would have been to provide these connections, and let neighbors meet each other, which is a start, and would have gone a long way to address Dan’s concerns about the 546’s Winnipeg housing, but doesn’t address all of it:
(to save you scrolling up)

“How does that get you a job, or get your brother-in-law off your couch and into rehab, or get your nephew out of that gang…”

Transit might get you to a job, but not the rest. What else then is needed?
 
Dan’s example of the couch surfing brother-in-law presents the question, where is he to live? The simplistic answer of ‘get a job and get a roof’ falls flat when for whatever reason he can’t, and so, he can’t. This isn’t that unusual – unemployment rates are nowhere near recovered to their pre-financial crash levels, and show no trend of doing so – he could have a disability, and unable to find somewhere where the province’s $395 a month rent assistance will support (or unwilling to deal with a lack of heat once there). There was a recent court case, which required the city to provide housing for its homeless, but it doesn’t require a large leap of logic to assume that where one group is required to have housing, has a RIGHT to housing, that all groups have a right to housing. I would be surprised if there wasn’t an attempt to test this in court at some point, but even if not, it was part of the Green Party platform from the last election, that the Right to Housing be added to the Canadian Carter of Rights and Freedoms. Of course, the Green Party isn’t the one with a majority in the House of Commons, but its proposal is still the only one on the table as a national strategy for housing, although it is on the todo list for the Liberal party as well.
So say this affordable housing arrives … maybe because the city puts its people where its land is (an alternative to ‘money where its mouth is’), maybe because it follows Vienna’s model (or Singapore’s), maybe because the federal government resumes its investment in Council Housing  … how does Dan’s example resident eat?
One way to ensure that the simple act of living is possible for all is something which was investigated (rather successfully it seems) in the 1970s in Dauphin Manitoba:

Between 1974 and 1979, residents of a small Manitoba city were selected to be subjects in a project that ensured basic annual incomes for everyone. For five years, monthly cheques were delivered to the poorest residents of Dauphin, Man. – no strings attached.
And for five years, poverty was completely eliminated.

And before you go and dismiss this as a example of Hippy triviality, it is a concept which will soon be rolled out in Utrecht, Finland, and theoretically will be put to referendum in Switzerland in 2016. There isn’t much logically separating the support of refugees, to supporting a nation’s current residents, and the 25000 refugees we have committed to admitting is not dissimilar to the number of homeless on the street on any given night now, so the scales aren’t out of line.
Dan’s final point, about ‘getting your nephew out of that gang’ can be addressed with the same solution that is suggested is the best one to prevent terrorism – through education. Doug Saunders suggests that the Arrival City shouldn’t just have good schools, it should have the best school in the city – both to introduce competition for kids to enter ‘their own’ school, and to ensure that those from elsewhere in the city will also want to addend. What he suggests is not simply covering the bare minimum of needs, but leaping past these needs.
This is where this article circles back to my first post this week about the Mount Pleasant Library building. In some ways it presents a good example of a city funded building created as a baby-step towards addressing the lack of rental housing in the city (though not necessarily the ‘affordable’ aspect of this issue), but it was necessarily hamstrung by site, and funds, and scale. It is an example of NOT leaping past the needs of a neighborhood, and an example that to serve as a true public good, sometimes the bare minimum is insufficient. Cities (whether aided by government above or not) have to push further, build for the future, and build truly Rad Shit.
‘But what if we imagine that cities could initiate more projects? What if we imagine a city as something more akin to a product industry? After all, cities are a pretty weird service industry, with services certainly not as straightforward as a plumber’s or a doctor’s — or perhaps as useful sometimes — and with a form of product (sewers, schooling, roads …) that lead to other products (buildings). What if rather than waiting to be asked to solve problems, cities could identify needs or opportunities (or “markets”) and offered solutions to address those needs? Could cities initiate more projects? Could cities become more streamlined, efficient, cost-effective, far-reaching, accessible, and profitable? Could cities follow a VC model? Could more taxpayer-city relationships change into partnerships? Could cities have both a voice and a hand in how our cities are built?’

Housing supply in global cities is a complex, wicked problem. We need to look at the the housing supply systemically and cohesively… 

I agree with Michael completely … I think though that I might be looking a bit more holistically than most.
g’night
-Ian

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  1. “addressing the lack of rental housing in the city (though not necessarily the ‘affordable’ aspect of this issue)”
    This is a massive pet peeve of mine: “affordable” is not the right term to use here.
    1 Kingsway *is* affordable to my family and 98 other households that live there. It’s made the rest of the region marginally more affordable too, because 99 households are no longer bidding up the price of other housing.
    I suspect “below-market-rate” would likely be a better term for the meaning you’re intending.

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      Thats why I used the quotes on the affordable … you’re right, generally lacking a word to parse the issue. Market doesn’t suffice … welcoming suggestions from all for this.
      (I have the exact same situation as you Ripley … my building is basically the same situation as yours, and it is a superposition of officially market rents, but slightly more affordable than actual market rents, but certainly not specifically ‘affordable’ but certainly more affordable than I would otherwise be paying … Its complicated!)

  2. Interesting…
    I agree that social housing should be built at higher than current demand since it takes time to design and build and in that time the demand can increase. The Little Mountain project, (and while I support the new design in general,) is only replacing the amount of affordable housing by a small amount. It should be double what there was before.
    Also, check out Seattle now, there’ve been so much new housing built that rents are now falling.
    http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/2015/11/bad-timingas-thousands-of-new-apartments-open.html?ana=twt
    http://bikeportland.org/2016/01/04/after-years-of-building-seattle-gets-a-holiday-gift-falling-rents-171524

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  3. If you want more housing that is affordable a few things are critical:
    A) more supply in general, cheap and high end
    B) low build costs and that either means up to 3 1/2 stories with no elevator or 7+ stories with elevator
    C) low build costs have to consider all costs i.e. land, construction costs, permitting costs and timelines i.e. D to G
    D) Time is money and cities can do a lot here to shorten timelines and relax rules .
    E) Land is often 25% or more of the entire cost and as such lower land cost i.e. less desirable locations are to be considered, i.e. Not west end or ocean view lots.
    F) Parking relaxation and rules reviews and less bureaucracy is crucial and much red tape could be eliminated . We need a few blog posts here as some rules exist merely to keep planners employed and city coffers filled.
    G) Size had to come down as it costs less to build 500 sq ft than 1600
    H) Density has to be increased to lose land cost per sq ft of housing and if you look at single family house zoning along major arteries on Vancouver ( Hastings, Cordova, Commercial, Fraser, Granville, Knight to name a few ) much can be done here.
    I) think multi-use. Why can’t we build housing on top of schools or industrial warehouses or offices ? Schools especially are used 8h a day less than 220 days a year. Much amenity space, say a gym or outdoor space could be shared with residents on floor 4-12 if school is floor 1-3. VSB sits on very valuable land that could be monetized for market or subsidized housing.

    1. City could build social housing on parking lots in our parks while preserving parking space for park visitors.. The parking lot south of Nat Bailey Stadium in Hillcrest Park would be a great location. Also Kits Beach Park, Spanish Banks, John Hendry Park.

      1. Yes surface parking must be THE worst land use. Anything would better: grass, housing, shopping mall, playground, offices, industrial use .. Or multi-use.
        One reason why housing is so expensive in Vancouver is land availability and certainly the city could do far more here. Keep in mind though that New West, Burnaby or certainly land east of Burnaby or south of Richmond is far more plentiful and cheaper. If Vancouver included those cities housing in “Vancouver” on average would be cheaper. Once you are willing to rent in Vancouver-Burnaby or Vancouver-New-Westminster rents are actually not all that high anymore and far more available.
        Other ideas:
        2) ALR could be relaxed somewhat
        3) oceans could yield several sq km of new land
        4) loads of public land, including public golf courses, schools or parking lots could all be redeveloped and/or repurposed with multi-use in mind !
        5) Expectations have to be reset. You cannot expect taxpayers to subsidize your demand for an elevator to the third floor or an apartment two blocks from the beach.
        6) Access to financing needs to improve as it is hard to finance new construction for rentals as there will be no presales. A developers as such would prefer to sell more profitable condos with the same $s invested .

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          1. Design is house design
            Use a different term of you mean a city wide approach to housing solutions i.e. use the word process or wholistic process if you wish to include multiple stake holders like banks, land owners, developers, tax payers or city council

  4. Some great ideas from your readers. However, we’re in from a decade of push-back from rate payers associations. They are aided by what are called ‘trolls’ – paid and unpaid.
    It will be interesting to see the excused anti-development forces use to stop any and all development.
    Here’s an over-the-top article from the U.S. It would be humerous if it weren’t true.
    http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/01/14-incredible-objections-to-a-single-boulder-housing-development/422724/
    Frances Bula puts it so well in her column regarding community concerns about growth.
    rancesbula Mod AlexB • 2 days ago
    It would be simple if it were just special interests and big money. Sadly, I think one of the major pressures on politicians to not do anything is from the high-voting single-family homeowners who feel, however unjustifiably, that they’re being robbed if anyone tries to take away their real-estate gains. That’s a scarier group for politicians than almost anyone else.
    1 • Reply•Share ›

    1. Some great ideas from your readers. However, we’re in from a decade of push-back from rate payers associations. They are aided by what are called ‘trolls’ – paid and unpaid.
      It will be interesting to see the excused anti-development forces use to stop any and all development.
      Here’s an over-the-top article from the U.S. It would be humerous if it weren’t true.
      http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/01/14-incredible-objections-to-a-single-boulder-housing-development/422724/
      Frances Bula puts it so well in her column regarding community concerns about growth.
      rancesbula Mod AlexB • 2 days ago
      It would be simple if it were just special interests and big money. Sadly, I think one of the major pressures on politicians to not do anything is from the high-voting single-family homeowners who feel, however unjustifiably, that they’re being robbed if anyone tries to take away their real-estate gains. That’s a scarier group for politicians than almost anyone else.
      1 • Reply•Share ›
      Ooops, should be ‘excuses’

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    1. Design is obviously context sensitive as the statement ” I am in design” usually implies house or fashion design.
      Otherwise they’d say
      I design monetary systems
      I am a shoe designer
      I am on industrial design ( still broad )
      I design cars
      Or is this implied here: “I design housing policies for affordable housing but ignore tax payers, ALR constraints, oceans abilities to yield land, banks or developers’ right to make money on the vast risk they take” ?

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    I think the distinction which is important however is the use of Design not simply as a verb, but to describe a mindset which doesn’t just design shoes, for instance, but considers also the entirety of the biomechanics of human movement, as well as the psychology of aesthetics. As this says – a system of thinking: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/design-thinking-for-a-better-you/?_r=0
    There is architecture, and then there is Architecture, just like there is design and Design. (I should have capitalized mine accordingly).

  7. The topic of this string – Build it and they will-um- is about the design of buildings containing
    many units in which people live. Such buildings are quite different than houses primarily in the way that occupants relate to the natural world and the way in which activity is enabled or
    constrained. A house has a yard in which many activities can take place. A building does not
    have a yard.
    IDEA HOUSE is a design strategy that delivers the ideal that most people yearn to achieve, a home and a yard to call their own at a price with-in reach of the average wage owner in the City of Vancouver. It is not that mysterious, it is the result of design that seeks to satisfy the most human of needs; a place of ones own.
    You Thomas are in the apartment rental business. I can understand why you would find IDEA HOUSE a threatening proposition because it offers an escape route from a lifetime of rental servitude, in my view the modern form of indentured servitude. This situation exists for lack of imagination, for lack of design. Design is the answer, there is no other answer. Look around you Thomas, there are only two classes of things in the world, those things made through natural processes and those things made by design.
    Design rules, it rules everything that you do, and most of what you think about, so much so that the modern human can be considered a kind of cyborg embedded and dependent on the constructed world in which he or she inhabits.
    The purpose of IDEA HOUSE is to set you free!

    1. No need to insult me because I offer affordable housing to hundreds of people !
      Renting is a choice.
      No one is forced to rent or to own.
      No one is forced to smoke and spend $250-500 a month on it. No one is forced to own. A house with a yard is NOT attainable for a majority in Vancouver. As such any design idea pretending such is bad design as it is unrealistic .No one is forced to live in Vancouver. Plenty of house choices with a yard elsewhere. Plenty.
      Equality is not a goal, only the pipe dream of socialists. A house with a yard is reward for hard work attained often over years or decades of study, work, risk taking and good behavior ( aka no drugs or crime or theft or drinking or sloppiness)
      I laid out numerous options to provide more affordable housing in Vancouver. Why don’t you comment on those rather than insult intelligent and well thought out posts ?
      Is housing a right ? And if so, at whose expense and at what size, what quality level and what location ? Living in Kits ( or Yaletown or west end) a block or three from the beach, is not a right, nor is a house with a yard. It is certainly a goal striving for but as I showed poor politics and deliberate choices by politicians make it less affordable than it could be.
      What do you do for a living ? What do you do to provide affordable housing ?

  8. The call for affordable housing is a cry for social justice. The answer does not simply lie in
    reducing the costs of land, construction, borrowing or approvals otherwise we would have easily achieved affordable housing long ago. The answer if there is one must lie in the direction of design that enables self-determinism, new housing typologies that create new economies with new entrepreneurial opportunities.

    1. Spoken like a true socialist. Why is owning a house better than renting ? In Europe, where I hail from originally and visit frequently, roughly 50% of the population rents, while in Canada it is more like 30%. Renting is an economic choice many make, especially in expensive cities. Why is this a bad choice ?
      ==> Who owes what kind of housing to whom, at what price point in what quality levels in what locations – paid for by whom ?
      Is full social justice the goal ? Isn’t free education from K-12, free healthcare and income taxes at the 50% level for top earners, plus property taxes and 12% GST/PST enough social equalizer in Canada ? Taxes even higher so people have even less incentive to work ? Disallow private parenting altogether ? Disallow private ownership of land or property altogether ? Free housing too, beachfront or merely in a concrete high rise close to LRT ? Free car too ? Tesla style or Kia good enough ? Free food too – Five Sails or merely prison quality ?
      Canadians are one of the most heavily taxed citizens in the world with one of the lowest poverty levels worldwide and one of the most upward mobile countries on the world with a very large middle class. You want even more freebies & higher taxes ?

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