Making Room a long overdue housing solution

Current zoning is decades out of date, Reilly Wood says.

Last week, Vancouver council voted to kickstart a new housing initiative called Making Room. The program aims to provide more housing options in low-density neighbourhoods, but it’s not a done deal. Making Room is about to become the biggest issue in Vancouver’s October election.

Making Room would allow medium-density housing — duplexes, triplexes, townhouses and even some low-rise apartment buildings — in one-family and two-family zones that take up most of Vancouver’s residential land. The proposed housing is often called the “missing middle” because it would provide an option between single-family homes and large apartment buildings. The missing middle is common in many of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods such as Mount Pleasant and Strathcona, but has been forbidden in most residential areas since the late 1920s.

Policy changes like this don’t happen overnight. Council has asked planning staff to provide detailed recommendations by June 2019, after which council may decide to vote on the recommendations at a public hearing. Making Room is far from a done deal and many prominent residents are opposed.

Barbara May of the Upper Kitsilano Residents Association said “these reports propose radical changes to zoning.” The Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods went further, claiming that Making Room “seeks to homogenize our neighbourhoods into an urban wasteland of conformity.”

For Vancouverites already comfortably housed, preventing neighbourhood change is often more important than making room for newcomers.

But for the rest of us, Making Room is essential and not remotely radical — it’s a long-overdue response to a housing crisis that is many decades in the making. Let’s go back to the Second World War to find out why.

Canada was facing a housing crisis in the early 1940s: an influx of workers was desperately needed in cities, but homes were scarce. The wartime government reacted swiftly, enacting the temporary Respecting Housing Accommodation in Congested Areas order in 1942 that overruled single-family zoning in cities. It effectively said that “if a homeowner wants to rent a suite or room out, cities can’t prohibit that.”

Many houses in one-family zones became multiple-family units.

Vancouver started eliminating wartime suites 11 years after the war, to the dismay of their inhabitants, especially UBC students. During the 1960s, UBC’s Alma Mater Society petitioned council at least four times to allow multiple suites in houses, but were denied each time.

It wasn’t until 2004 that Vancouver legalized one secondary suite per house.

Think about that timeline. Even though many people could not afford detached homes in the 1960s, it took more than four decades to enact a policy response.

Making Room foes say it is too radical, too dense and happening too fast. It is none of those.

It is simply catching up in a city with housing policy that is decades out of date. Triplexes, townhouses and small apartment buildings are reasonable housing options for every neighbourhood.

It remains to be seen whether Making Room will survive the October election. We’ve already seen that public opinion is divided, and it’s possible that the program could be significantly curtailed or scrapped.

With that in mind, engaged Vancouverites need to ask council candidates some questions: Are you willing to support the Making Room proposal?

Are you willing to open up all residential neighbourhoods for housing options other than multimillion-dollar houses and damp basement suites?

If we’re lucky, the answer will be yes.

Reilly Wood is a housing activist and member of Abundant Housing Vancouver.