Architects, planners work to create family-friendly apartments in city
Most multi-family housing projects have amenity rooms, but with the cost of land rising and new units getting smaller, many of these common areas are being downsized. Often they are only 450 square feet.
“You put in a few exercise bikes and you’re done,” said Vancouver architect Marianne Amodio. “They are getting smaller and smaller.”
But at Tomo House, a co-housing project “for middle-income families” that she is designing, there will be an amenity room designed for 28 people to be able to sit down and have dinner together.
“It’s really about the de-commodification of housing,” she explained of the thinking behind creating spaces where people and families can interact and live together. “It’s not designed for sale or investment purposes.”
Amodio will be speaking at the Architectural Institute of B.C.’s Confab 2019 on Tuesday about designing family-friendly housing. Her panel was put together by Amalie Lambert, an intern architect and research assistant at B.C. Children’s Hospital Research Institute who has been examining the well-being of children.
The panel also includes Edna Cho, a City of Vancouver senior housing planner, and Ann McAfee, a former planner who created some of the first guidelines on “designing for families at high densities” in the 1970s.
McAfee said she was hired by the city as a housing planner in 1974 after Vancouver’s decision to abandon its plans for a freeway into downtown. The TEAM government of the time decided if the city wasn’t going to have a freeway conveying commuters from outer suburbs, McAfee recalled, then they wanted to figure out how to make room for different kinds of families in the city.
At that time, when “families were leaving the city at a very huge rate,” McAfee set to work conducting research and speaking directly with families about the pros and cons of living in multi-family dwellings such as apartment buildings.
McAfee’s fellow co-director of planning, Larry Beasley, describes the findings of her 1970s research in his book, Vancouverism, to be released in May by UBC Press.
“First, she found that there were many families who would be happy to consider a multiple-family lifestyle — this was something that was inherently attractive to many potential urban family households,” Beasley wrote. “Second, however, she learned that most multiple-family housing was just not workable for families with children. The unit and building designs did not accommodate the needs of parents and their kids.”
The guidelines produced by McAfee and approved by council were put into use starting in 1978. They weren’t mandatory, McAfee explained this week, but developers would have to demonstrate their proposed projects would meet the needs of families if they wanted extra density.
“Developers at the time were telling us, ‘People aren’t going to want to live downtown,’” she said, adding that she had “big fights” with developers, trying to convince them that not only would people be happy to live downtown, but so would families.
In 1992 and again in 2016, the guidelines have been revised and now include a stipulation for higher numbers of two- and three-bedroom units for families. She said the number of families living in apartments in the city has gone from 25 per cent of the total in 2001 to 36 per cent in 2016. jlee-young@postmedia.com