THE 3-BEDROOM CHALLENGE
Metro Vancouver’s young families are priced out of detached homes and townhouses, but condos built to accommodate them are nearly non-existent, Bethany Lindsay writes.
Space is in short supply in Matthew and Courtney Emerson’s twobedroom Kitsilano condo. They would love to have a play area for their young son, office space for the adults and room to grow if they decide to have another child.
But finding a three-bedroom unit in their price range of about $750,000 has been nearly impossible.
“They just don’t seem to be in the market,” Matthew said. “We find a lot of townhomes, which are great and we’d be happy to do that — if we could afford it. When we looked at three-bedroom condos, they just didn’t really exist.”
For developers like Beau Jarvis, there is an easy solution to the problem of finding affordable threebedroom condos in Vancouver. All the city has to do, he says, is relax one simple rule in local bylaws: that every bedroom in any new home needs at least one window.
“It’s rooted in good intention from the policy side of it, and that is livability,” said Jarvis, senior vicepresident for Wesgroup properties. “If we could change that and have what is called borrowed-light bedrooms … we could easily make smaller three-bedroom units that would be more affordable.”
To demonstrate the idea, Wesgroup drew up plans for two threebedroom condos in a wood-frame mid-rise building: one that meets Vancouver’s current requirements and one with an interior third bedroom that would capture light from the living room using a transom window.
In this first reckoning, placing all three bedrooms along the exterior walls would require an extra 264 square feet of space. If the condo were sold at a relatively reasonable $600 per square foot, that would add nearly $160,000 to the purchase price.
“If you were to use the standard of one-third of your income to pay for housing, that’s an additional $30,000 somebody needs to make in income,” said Brad Jones, Wesgroup’s director of development.
It is an idea the Emersons would consider if it meant finding something in their price range. As an architectural designer, Matthew is well aware of the difficulties in designing a condo with three bedrooms on the exterior of a building.
“I think if it were designed appropriately, that it would be acceptable,” he said.
At least one Metro Vancouver city has already opted to allow this sort of design.
New Westminster recently enacted a bylaw requiring all new multi-family projects to include at least 30 per cent two- and threebedroom units, and a minimum of 10 per cent with three or more bedrooms.
“The advice that we got from architects (was) that to get the third bedroom in is really challenging,” explained Beverly Grieve, the city’s director of development.
And so the city updated its regulations to allow the third bedroom to have indirect light from two sources — via a light well, a window into another room or a doorway.
In Vancouver, city staff are looking at a proposed policy that would also require 10 per cent of all units to have three bedrooms, and borrowed-light rooms could be up for debate during consultation with developers, according to Abigail Bond, director of housing policy and projects.
“I’m sure that question will come up during those discussions,” she said. “But it is important to make these homes livable for families — especially for children.”
Meanwhile, some planners argue purpose-built third bedrooms might not even be necessary. What is really crucial is creating layouts that can be adapted easily to create more sleeping spaces as needed.
Urban planner Michael Mortensen, who has worked in the city’s planning department, recently played around with some floor plans for two-bedroom condos to demonstrate how this could work.
“I think we have to question some of our lifestyle requirements,” he said. “Do we need a second bathroom, or can you manage with one? Do you need an enormous walk-in closet? That’s a design fix — once you build a walk-in closet, you can’t do much with that space.”
One of his experiments eliminates the large walk-in from a master bedroom, giving space for two double-width bunk beds separated by a movable wall of shelving. Another design takes its inspiration from Japanese design, turning a dining room into a part-time sleeping space with a bed that can be folded away in the morning and converted into an eating area.
Mortensen, who is now based in the U.K., is big on the idea of square feet hours — that is, evaluating a room’s usefulness based on how many hours it’s used each day. In this thinking, a large bedroom is not a great use of space in a city where real estate is at a premium.
He said Thomas Jefferson placed his bed in a hallway nook between two rooms at his grand Monticello plantation in Virginia.
“Kings and queens and presidents slept like this, in alcoves off grand rooms,” Mortensen said. “In the end, a bedroom is an eight-hour space.”
That is the kind of thinking that makes condo living comfortable for Adrian Crook, who has managed to fit five kids into a two-bedroom-plus-den in Yaletown.
“A lot of time what drives people to get larger places is the feeling that they need these single-purpose rooms,” said Crook, who chronicles his family’s adventures on the blog 5 Kids 1 Condo. “In a past life, I had a house in North Vancouver. … There were some rooms that I didn’t use for weeks, and it just didn’t make sense to me to be paying for those.”
Now, he has turned his solarium into a master bedroom, where the bed folds up into the wall and a desk folds down to create a workspace during the day.
Another working area is available in the bedroom shared by his two girls, where the bottom bunk folds out into two benches and a small table.
And the boys’ bedroom includes a futon couch, TV and video game consoles for playtime.