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See also renting versus condos - ugh! - and a guide to valuing various types of real estate - single-family, condo, co-op, highrise, low-rise - selecting the lesser evil in today's anti-consumer market.
2400 W. Broadway in Vancouver, B.C. - modest, no-nonsense veterans housing, where children play safely in a large, fenced, grassy yard away from offleash dogs - where toys and parenting may be shared. How civilized! ... How long before greedy-guts developers assisted by unprincipled planning authorities jump the few remaining hurdles and turn it into high-priced leaky condos?
Biblitz replies:
Planning authorities' short-term stinkin' thinkin' means either they can't read or interpret demographics and correlate findings
with practical zoning and building regulations or there is an ethical issue or two creating willful blindness. Neighborhood community
groups are certainly vocal and articulate. City council simply ignores their views. Developers and architects are only bound to follow
the rules set by the city. They have no special obligations to subsequent purchaser consumers beyond those rules and the loose building
codes and regulations that led to an ongoing 'leaky condo crisis.' Even the rules about how long a building should reasonably be expected
to hold up without the need for major repairs are mere guidelines! They're not enforceable! All of this along with a bylaw shielding public
building inspectors from all liability means that there are no more watchdogs anymore to ensure quality housing or reality-based quantity.
With no affordable housing advocates on council or in the planning department, developers and architects are free to be as myopic about
land use as they wish. Consider:
Book 3
A Vision of the Living World
Hardcover
By Christopher Alexander
More of the book and examples of affordable, truly sustainable
housing.
More on universal barrier-free designs, which do
NOT cost more!
...In another part of the survey, Hosoi then asked the same questions again, though in a different form of words. He asked people to state
independently what they want most in their living environment. He found out that what people want most in the qualities of their dwellings
are the following eight things, listed here in importance as rated by the families:
1. Each house should have a private garden.
2. It should be low-rise.
3. The user must be able to design the dwelling - exterior and interior - for themselves, according to their desires, to make their own
living space unique.
4. The has little traffic, so it becomes a place for play and chatter.
5. The amount of sunshine in the dwelling is more than we can typically get in a high-rise apartment.
6. It is possible to park very near the house.
7. It is possible to enter the house directly from the street.
8. There are small shops near the house.
(From A Vital Comment About People's Wishes, detailing a case study of a truly livable, multi-unit housing proposal, which
eventually trumped the city's plan to build a series of highrises, in Nagoya, Japan in the late 1990s, at p. 312)
The new project ... showed that even in a big city
like Nagoya, high-density housing need not be built in the 14-storey free-standing apartment buildings which are common today, since the
same 500 units, on the same site, can be built in 2 1/2-storey buildings (2 stories plus an attic storey), arranged along narrow lanes. Even
though housing officials at first told me that they felt such a thing to be physically impossible, I demonstrated to them that it can be
done at the same cost and same density.
How does the "magic" come about? Two hundred apartments need a total floor area of about 14,400 m(squared). In the usual way of
building high-rise apartments, these 14,400 m(squared) of built space are put in a tower, and occupy only 1,440 m(squared) of the land. The
remaining 8,560 m(squared) of land is typically left as a large open area of dead space between buildings, good for parking, but so
unpleasant that it is useless for human purposes. Emotionally it belongs to no one. But if we put the 14,400 m (squared) in low
buildings, the buildings cover 4,800 m(squared) of the one hectare. This sounds more crowded, but what happens is that the remaining
5,200 m(squared) of land can now be divided into small areas which are beautiful and useful. Instead of being a desert of horrible space
it becomes human because it can be composed of small gardens and narrow, winding, semi-pedestrian lanes. (From
Shiratori: A New Form of High-Density Housing at 80 Families per Acre: Detailed Explanation, at pgs. 316-317.
Note: Photos of the case study resemble very closely the affordable veterans-style housing recently demolished at the
University Endowment Lands (UEL) in favor of low-rise, wood-frame market condos, the same design that's become synonymous with B.C.'s decades old 'leaky
condo crisis'. More on reisdents' typically well-reasoned objections, which
fell on deaf ears.
Joel Turkel, Principal, Turkel Design
February, 2009
Real development for the industry will come from young designers who are able to approach the problem from a more globalized vantage
point. This group is able to think in terms of complete front-to-back business models. They are aware of the needs and limits of
manufacturing processes but also are versed in new technologies, entrepreneurial methods, how capital works, strategic partnerships,
and the importance of marketing and branding. This group will not design buildings but rather solutions for distributed delivery
methods like those promoted by Kent Larson at MIT, who is leading
the way toward rationalized industry-wide changes to benefit us all, rather than just promoting an individual vision or aesthetic.
(-- p. 105)
Translation: I haven't got a clue and, frankly, there's no money for me in investigating prefab. Neither does my professional
governing body nor the jurisdiction where I flog my designs require me to give a crap about the public interest.
Note: Biblitz visited Larson's experimental home. Ho hum.
What is wrong with these 'highly-qualified,' self-congratulating design mo'feshunuls? In their strange, anti-social world, no one
ever needs counter space in the kitchen or suitable places to efficiently store things! No, and what careth architects for a steadying
rail to grasp on the way up their typically narrow, dangerously open stairs or - gasp! - any accommodation for mobility devices. Considering
today's demographics, such glaring omissions should preclude membership in the profession!
The magazine then goes on to highlight some of the ugliest, most impractical ticky-tacky rectangles - horizontal and
vertical - imaginable! Those few examples that seem superficially tolerable are single-family homes well beyond the bounds
of affordability.
Signs of the times. A development application sign like this one warns renters and co-op
residents if there was any doubt that market housing and developers - no matter how poorly their previous efforts have performed -
rule. There is no one on Vancouver City Council today or in the planning department with a commitment to affordable, accessible housing
based on demographics that are easily available at StatsCan. There is no point attending planning 'meetings' when voters hold no sway.
The only recourse now is for renters and co-op residents to promote their own candidate for public office - if there is a suitable person
willing to run!
Below is a typical tenants' response to a redevelopment application. The main objection is not to redevelopment per se, though
no one enjoys moving, but b/c such applications rarely, if ever, include similarly affordable, accessible housing with the same great
design amenities. Note how today's condo developers invariably replace large communal yards visible and available to all with more units - too
many, really - and tiny private balconies or patios that prohibit children's play. Translation; Families aren't welcome here. Adults
only - those with money!
Are there any affordable, accessible housing advocates
out there willing to run for public office?
Affordable housing is not a priority either to developers or building designers. Multifamily highrise, low-rise market condos designed to
fail predictably every five or 10 years requiring major costly reconstruction, is where the money is! A vicious cycle of repairs also
creates an illusion of full employment, so there's little incentive for authorities to challenge or even examine properly the status quo.
Whether techniques such as prefab would augment the supply of affordable housing is something only public planning authorities would be
likely confirm, but developers and design mo'feshnuls have somehow silenced them.
Any ideas on how make affordable, accessible housing a priority wherever it's needed? All comments gratefully received. We'll post
the best ones here. Please check back soon for updates!
By Frances Bula
October, 2008
At a time when Vancouver was crying out for affordable housing, there were 18,000 vacant condos. See Higher taxes for owners of vacant condos, NDP MLA proposes at cbc.ca June 18/08.
Little Mountain was built in 1954, the
result of 50 years of agitation for affordable homes and the more immediate crisis of returning
soldiers from the war, who were occupying buildings such as the Hotel Vancouver to protest the fact that they couldn't find anyplace to
live. The benchmark project, by the then-new Central and Mortgage Corp. (now Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.), launched four decades of
energetic government-supported construction in Vancouver - all of which disappeared in 1993, when the federal government decided to get out
the business of building subsidized housing. The problem of finding low-cost homes for those who can't quite get a handhold in the strictly
private market would not, however, go away.
Fifty years ago, it was veterans for whom everybody worried about housing, but today it's teachers, nurses - and even, in this new
century, double-income university professor households. (-- p. 62)
What does affordable housing for middle-income people really mean? ... in the Lower Mainland, the median income is $55,000. ... People
who make less than 80 per cent of that $55,000 are typically too poor to buy in any market. They need to find places they can rent that
cost no more than about 30 per cent of their gross income. That means rents from $500 for those coffee-shop clerks making $10 an hour, up to
$1,125 a month for the police officers just out of training school making about $45,000 a year.
... people who make 80 to 120 per cent of the median should be starting to buy their first homes, so there needs
to be something available in their range. That means they should be spending $1,100 to $1,650 on their mortgage, property tax and house
insurance combined, which pretty much caps that group at paying no more than about $235,000 for a place to live. (That assumes a 10 per
cent down payment of $23,500 with a mortgage on the rest). In the Lower Mainland, that doesn't get you much - unless you're willing to
move to Maple Ridge or cram into a postage stamp in the bad part of Mount Pleasant. A few people will even say that Vancouver's housing
problem is so severe that the affordability squeeze extends up to households with 200 per cent of the median income. Even though $110,000
a year seems like a lot, it's not that much when a fixer-upper crack house on Vancouver's eastside starts at $500,000 and the average
single-family house price in Vancouver now hovers around $765,000.
It used to be that it was mainly those living in Vancouver proper who fretted about affordability - and historically the problem was
moving to the cheaper suburbs or other cities in the province. But then the affordability crisis spread, with Whistler next to feel the
pinch. As it developed into the province's first resort town, Whistler found itself, as other resorts around North America had, struggling
with the question of housing its service workers and ensuring that regular people who live there year-round have a place to call
home. ... (-- p. 64)
