Local firm has housing concept for ‘missing middle’
A local design company has come up with a way to gently densify neighbourhoods full of single-family houses without overwhelming them with condo towers.
Vancouver-based Haeccity Studio Architecture was a winner of a competition run by Urbanarium, a local non-profit group that was looking for ways to plug the “missing middle.”
Missing middle is the concept that there is more to housing than just houses or large condo developments.
Architects, planners and academics say the concept means tucking additional density into areas of single-family homes in a way that doesn’t dramatically change the feel of the neighbourhood.
Haeccity ’s concept is a three-storey building of six or seven housing units that would fit onto a singlefamily home lot of about 33 feet by 122 feet without overwhelming adjacent single-family houses. It could be in two buildings, separated by a common courtyard, with the flexibility of a combination of one-, two- and three-bedroom units ranging in size from 525 sq. ft. to 1,350-square feet.
Haeccity partners Travis Hanks and Shirely Shen drew up sketches, but they say their “micro-ops” could easily take on a totally different exterior look.
“It could be anything. A character home or super modern,” says Shen.
“Our graphics are purposefully sketchy and not a rendering with everything figured out.”
Rather, the focus in the exercise was to come up with a model that chips away at issues of zoning, land costs and ownership that are killing housing access and affordability.
“One of the things we came to, and other winners did as well, was trying to question the developer model that is the standard way of creating new housing” in Metro Vancouver, says Shen.
“When you look at, for example, the Cambie corridor, you see the land assembly, and then, there’s stratas and big buildings with lots of units packed into them,” says Hanks. “We wanted to think of a way to use single lots and create incremental infill to add density without destroying neighbourhoods.”
By fitting six or seven units on a single lot and cutting out the need for land assembly, there wouldn’t be as much speculation in land costs and the “boarding up of houses for years and years while you’re waiting for approvals and not making all the people on the block move out. It’s allowing people to age in place and stay in neighbourhoods they like,” says Hanks.
“In our proposal, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, either stratified or outright owning,” says Shen.
“A group of six households come together, develop one lot together and together own a rental property that they then lease back to themselves.”
Competitors in the contest were randomly assigned one or two single family lots in four Metro Vancouver areas ( Vancouver, Port Coquitlam, Burnaby and Surrey) and had to provide a concept based on municipal plans and bylaws.
This winning proposal imagines a zoning that doesn’t exist yet, but since this is thinking outside the box, Hanks envisions a way that “all relaxations in terms of height, site and density ... could only be available to people putting in an application under a co-ownership model, signed into agreement by all the people planning on living there.
“This means you don’t have presales or re-sales before the building gets built. People aren’t using it as a speculation model. They want it as a place to live.”