Simple reno soars to $1M and takes eight years thanks to city regulations
When she started renovating a dilapidated heritage house at 320 Union St. in Strathcona in 2016, Sandra Botnen thought it might cost $150,000 to $200,000.
Eight years later, she's still working on it, and has spent over $1 million.
What happened?
The project ran into several layers of rules and regulations laid down by the City of Vancouver.
Botnen's plan now is to restore the 1895 house in the front of the property and turn it into affordable rental housing for seven artists. She is also building a three-bedroom house for herself in the back.
Sounds simple, but isn't.
The house had been empty for a decade when she purchased it, partly because it had been classified an SRO, like a single-room-occupancy hotel, or rooming house, in the Downtown Eastside.
It wasn't a hotel, it had been a Chinese society building that had rented seven rooms to its members. But city regulations state that to convert an SRO to a single-family residence, she would have had to pay $125,000 a room, or $875,000.
The City of Vancouver said in an email the house had been designated an SRO because, “It was a rooming house owned by a society. However it is not considered a society building as we see in Chinatown, which are usually tall masonry buildings.”
So Botnen decided to turn it into an SRO for artists.
She initially wanted to just fix up the house and build a lane house later, but the city insisted she do them at the same time, so she did.
“When I bought the property, there was a risk, because it had a lot of limitations on it that were intersecting,” said Botnen by phone from New York, where she now lives.
“There was a heritage component, there was a social housing component, there was the zoning. (But) I came up with a plan that I believed spoke to all the hot topics that Vancouver was trying to remedy, affordability and adding to the housing stock.”
“Well, despite my project being everything the city was trying to work on, I feel like I wasn't given the green lights where I thought I would have. At one point I even asked if the city wanted to buy the (property) ... If they weren't going to offer me some of the concessions, then would the city like to buy the property, so that they could solve the problem themselves.”
The city declined to buy it, so she soldiered on.
“If I was doing this as a developer to make money, I would have walked away,” she said. “There was a point where I had to decide whether I was going to do this for more personal reasons rather than business reasons.”
In this case, the former dancer and performer with Cirque du Soleil wanted to build a legacy.
“The vision is to give back culturally to the city, and provide affordable housing to artists,” she said.
“People who make a city interesting, make neighbourhoods attractive. (The house is) designated class A heritage, and I love the idea of the house way down the line having a legacy and becoming a cultural landmark, where the lives of artists and their careers is documented.”
The house is high profile because it is on the Union Street bike route. The first hint something was finally happening was when 320 Union was lifted in the air and moved to the back of the property, so that a new foundation could be poured.
“The contractor decided it would be best to rebuild the foundation,” said architect Tony Osborn, who has been working on the project since 2017.
“We thought they would just lift the home up, the way they usually do, but they wanted it completely out of the way. So they put it on beams and slid it to the back of the lot, rebuilt the foundation and slid it back. It was kind of cool to see it moving around.”
The costliest part of the project is redoing the old house, which had to be stripped to the studs and rebuilt to modern code. Last week, the only original detail left was the peak of the house, which retained its Victorian fish scale siding and diamond shingles. But they have been taken off this week.
Nonetheless, the house will be rebuilt to look as it did in 1895, using as much of the original material as they could salvage.
“Wherever possible, we've retained the wood siding, because it's so hard to replicate it nowadays,” said Osborn. “There are also some features on the inside, some wood balustrades have been retained and they'll be brought up to code as well.”
The restored house will feature a square bay window in front, a funky little arch above the front door and a second-storey balcony. The new house in the back will be completely modern. The property is a lot-and-a-half wide, so two buildings easily fit.
“Our philosophy is that a new structure shouldn't pretend to be a heritage structure,” said Osborn.
“When you read the built fabric of Strathcona you should be able to tell this was built in 2024 and (the house in front) is obviously older. It will have an expression different than the heritage house.”