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The family compound: Part 2, Expanding the family

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By:David A. Smith

 

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

Yesterday post using as source an interesting if oblivious Wall Street Journal (June 3, 2013) article showed that when a city is facing continuous immigration pressure, that city must go up (into high-rises, often condos) or infill (by increasing FAR of already-developed plots), because otherwise scarcity pricing drives out of the city those who are the offspring and progeny of people living in the city:

 

A typical home in the city cost C$ 721,500 in March, or about $696,000, up 25% from March 2007, according to an index compiled by the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver.  While Vancouver prices have eased over the past year, they remain well out of reach for many residents. The city’s median income was about C$ 47,000 in 2006, the latest data available.

 

Over the last two years I’ve had several email inquiries and requests from Vancouver to the AHI Web site asking what we can recommend Vancouver do to relieve the upward pressure on home prices caused by all these foreigners buying in. 

 

During the past two decades, Vancouver’s main approach to add housing has been to go up, constructing scores of downtown condo towers.

 

Going up is inevitable.  Though the result may be Hong Kong on [name of straight], which changes the city’s character, there is no practical alternative – trying to stop the tide, as Portland, OR has done,  serves only to enrich the lucky incumbent inhabitants, deflect industry and jobs elsewhere, and condemn the city to gradual irrelevance.

 

up_house_balloons

One approach to going vertical

 

In the neighbors where one cannot go up, one can increase the FAR (Floor-Area-Ratio) of the built-up neighborhoods by permitting more small structures on the same sites.

 

up_carls_house

You’re blocking progress

 

Recently the city has started rezoning arterial streets to allow more compact row houses.

 

The city took a step toward increasing density in single-family neighborhoods in the 1980s, when it first allowed basement suites. Since 2009, it has reduced the amount of time it takes to get a permit for basement apartments and permitted laneway homes like Mr. Kumar’s throughout the city.

 

Vancouver’s constructive pro-supply initiatives are a pleasant contrast to the NIMBYs and BANANAs that I enter in too many American cities.

 

smallworks_arbutus

Smallworks’ Arbutus House

 

Some 500 laneway homes have been built. In addition, about a third of the city’s new single-family homes now are built with a rental suite in the home, up from 5% in 2000.

 

Measured against normal real estate cycle speeds, that’s a revolution.

 

With basement suites and laneway homes, “on paper, they have effectively tripled the density of a single-family home,” says Andy Yan, a planner at Bing Thom Architects.

 

In short, that is incremental verticalization.

 

The growth of laneway housing has created a cottage industry, literally, of manufacturers like Jake Fry of Smallworks. To keep costs down, he designs his homes from one of fourteen models that buyers can customize.

 

smallworks_blue_lantern

Smallworks’ blue lantern house, wedged into a laneway

 

Improvability, an essential benefit in the homeownership bundle!

 

He has the frames built an hour-and-a-half outside of town in a truss and wall panel factory. This allows him to put the home up in a week; it takes another two months to finish the interiors and landscaping.

 

I really like this low-tech low-distance prefab approach; it brings industrial building technology down to a smaller and more human scale.

 

“How often do you get to design your own house?” says Ms. Clarke.

 

We all design our own house; some of us limit our designs to purely non-structural elements.

 

Ms. Clarke’s house is a temple of efficient living, with touches such as a squat coffee table whose folding legs transform it into a dinner table.

 

It is also, I can more or less guarantee sight unseen, able to be small because if it’s high-tech then one space can be used for multiple purposes during the twenty-four hour diurnal cycle.

 

Mr. Fry also has developed tricks for squeezing his homes under the city’s 750-square-foot limit for laneway homes, such as installing skinny appliances and building bookshelf walls.

 

Many of these space-saving ideas go back to prehistory (one can find built-in shelves in Skara Brae):

 

skara_brae_house

Remains of a Neolithic House, Skara Braw, Orkney

 

They’re also found inthe architectural fantasies like Rienzo Piano’s folly and Frank Lloyd Wright’s more practical (but still cramped) Usonian House.

 

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Usonian house, Getty collection

 

The closet entrances are just under five feet high. At that height, their innards don’t count against the city’s square-footage limit.

 

Another example of zoning’s invisible corset, like saltbox house roof lines and King Charles’s window tax.

 

“You have to treat the house like a sailboat,” he says.  (But not for tax purposes.)

 

And the most common means of solving the challenge of high land cost is by adding a dwelling to the family homestead

 

Mr. Fry’s clients include Tania Clarke, a 31-year-old who grew up in Vancouver but can’t afford a home in the city [because she] works at a local botanical garden and supplements her income by selling clothing that she sews in a home office that converts to a garage.

 

Observing briefly that Ms. Clarke has made conscious choices whose economic consequences make market housing unaffordable for her, we can observe that in the absence of an inclusionary housing policy that enables low-cost low-consumption homes or flats to be produced at scale, Ms. Clarke and those like her would be exiled to the outer ring.  If we want employment diversity in cities, we need housing cost diversity, and that means we need means of delivering low-cost housing into the city close to the transportation grid.

 

hollywood_transit_village

Hollywood Transit Village, Hollywood, CA

 

It also means that families may need to tap the liquidity in the incumbents’ appreciated home (appreciation, benefit of homeownership; liquidity, benefit of homeownership) and transfer the wealth down-generation, via the altruism that can be relied upon only when people are related by blood:

 

So Ms. Clarke’s parents took out a mortgage on their house.

 

Parents give to children.

 

She and her husband used the proceeds to build a two-story, $300,000 cottage.

 

Let’s be clear: this house is ‘cheap’ because it is small.  At $400 a square foot – with zero land cost – it’s not cheap per unit of production.

 

It sits about twenty feet from Ms. Clarke’s childhood bedroom, in what was once her mother’s garden.

 

There is the trade made manifest: a garden or a daughter.  Which would you rather tend?

 

Living close requires compromise. Ms. Clarke sometimes has to sleep with ear plugs on nights when her husband continues playing videogames after she has gone to bed.

 

The couple usually keeps the blinds in their living room shut. They say they are tired of pedestrians looking in at them.

 

NYT2010041516230060C

Born a store, converted into an apartment, and with a frosted-glass window

 

Living in the city requires having the option of privacy to keep out the peepers.

 

rear_window_framing

These new apartments are fun to look at

 

Ms. Clarke’s neighbor, Amber Paul, doesn’t mind the new unit. While the home casts a shadow on her backyard, she says it adds some life to an alleyway that is full of trash cans and electric poles. “It’s a more friendly face on the lane than a double-car garage,” she says.

 

Ms. Paul is familiar with Ms. Clarke’s situation: She lives in her parents’ home with her husband and two daughters. Her parents stay in a suite below.

 

Ms. Paul’s parents have made a sacrifice greater than Ms. Clarke’s, though perhaps they are older and Ms. Paul is paying for the trade by tending to their health and personal-care requirements.  That too is a form of altruism most reliably performed between generations of blood.

 

A dozen blocks away, Ronald Hatch also lives next to a laneway home, and he hates it. Mr. Hatch, 73, a retired literature professor, says the two-story home shades his backyard, reducing his raspberry crop.  With a window peering down on them, he and his wife feel like they are being watched when they sit at a round table in the yard.

 

“You’re having your lunch on a sunny day and the first thing you see is a laneway house staring at you,” says Mr. Hatch, who has tried to block out the view by adding three feet of latticework atop his fence.

 

A space dominated by raspberries is a farm. 

 

backyard_raspberry_garden

You could put a small apartment in that space

 

A space dominated by people is a city.  The original suburbs sought to keep the rural micro-environment in the context of an urban social infrastructure, but at the cost of lengthy commutes and, eventually, unsustainable traffic jams and transportation costs.

 

I’d rather have the jobs, the liveliness, and the city.


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