Reviving the Vancouver Special
Proposal for in-fill housing could better meet the needs of middle-income earners
There’s rarely a day that goes by when I don’t hear a story about how someone is trying to stop or make it more difficult to build housing in Vancouver.
It’s stories about neighbourhood opposition to higher density; new, more prescriptive government policies that make it more difficult to design and obtain approvals for housing; or about those lamenting the loss of older homes that are being demolished to make way for new housing that meets changing needs. Each story shares a common theme centred around a message about Vancouver’s housing market being out of control, about prices being out of reach and about the need for someone to do something about it.
That theme is about stopping the supply of new housing, something that seems totally counterintuitive when housing prices are high. It ignores the fact that demand for housing is outpacing supply and high prices are the product. It also fails to acknowledge that the kind of housing many are looking for — especially modest housing within the financial reach of middle-incomes families — doesn’t exist in Vancouver’s neighbourhoods and isn’t being built today.
Rarely do I hear stories about new ideas about policies that could: allow housing to be designed and approved faster; that would encourage the more efficient use of land in existing neighbourhoods; that are based on building more economically; and that could promise to end up meeting the needs of people we need to house in our cities.
But recently, a developer and urban planner proposed a new type of in-fill housing that could promise to achieve all of these things, and if Vancouver adopted his ideas as new planning policies, we could see housing prices at least stabilize and begin to see Vancouver’s first-ring singlefamily neighbourhoods change in a gentle way, while providing much greater housing choice.
During his 20- year career, Michael Mortensen spent some time as a planner at the city of Vancouver. He went on to work as a senior manager with development companies both in Vancouver and the U.K. He has on-the-ground experience managing the development of mixed-use projects in Vancouver and Toronto, and more recently in London and Edinburgh. He resides in London, but keeps very much in touch with Vancouver, contributing often through social media to an informed public discussion about urban planning and housing issues in Vancouver.
Mortensen recently published a blog post detailing his idea for a “new Vancouver Special” — a new type of in-fill housing that addresses affordability, the high cost and limited supply of land, and the scarcity of ground-oriented housing typically favoured by families.
Mortensen is proposing that we look for inspiration to the old Vancouver Specials, those ubiquitous but simply designed boxy two-storey homes that were built on 33-foot lots across the city from the mid-1960s through the 1980s. What stands out about them was the repetitive simple design that allowed a streamlined approval process at city hall. The Vancouver Specials were also designed in a way that the use of space was quite flexible and met the space needs of a typical family. They could also be converted easily to an upstairs/ downstairs duplex.
Essentially, he is proposing breaking up the Vancouver Special building to create more, but slightly smaller, separate units to house more families per lot, making better use of land by taking advantage of the efficiency of assembling two to three lots. He suggests a three-storey design instead of the typical two storey Vancouver Special. Since Vancouverites are beginning to shift their transportation habits and many of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods are well served by transit, Mortensen suggests reducing parking requirements, which frees up more land for housing people, rather than housing cars.
His plan uses two 33-by-120foot lots — abundant in Vancouver neighbourhoods — and clusters four four-bedroom homes at the front of the property, each with a 500-square-foot floor plate and three levels, yielding 1,500 square feet of space per home. He proposes three two-level coach houses at the back of the property, yielding a 1,000-square-foot three-bedroom home and two 500-squarefoot one- bedroom or studio homes. Two of these homes have parking below.
These homes would be strata owned, sharing some common property. In an effort to increase energy efficiency, environmental performance and affordability, Mortensen also suggests residents could share facilities that would otherwise consume space within each of the homes, such as laundry space or workshop space. This type of development is something planners at the City of Vancouver have explored before. Mortensen acknowledges that work and points to the evolution of the city’s existing zoning provisions, which allow similar development schemes in the Norquay neighbourhood.
He also worked out the economics of this type of modest re-development of existing single-family lots. With a blanket rezoning that allows this type of development on all single-family lots in Vancouver and without the city taking a share of the increase in land value due to the higher permitted density, the cost of this housing should be within reach of middle-income families and this new city-wide potential supply should temper housing price increases.
The idea for this is a promising one because it allows homeowners to get together and do their own development without the need for a developer to assemble a number of lots. It uses land more efficiently in our existing neighbourhoods, housing more than two families on a lot with in-fill housing that is attractive and more in character with local architecture. It also promises housing that is quick to design, approve and build. We need more creative planning like this.