Laneway housing seems too good to be true. It’s a form of detached housing that can be built almost anywhere in Vancouver for as little as $140,000 (ready to move in, everything included) – half the price of an equivalent condo. For that you can get a 400-square-foot living space with a parking spot and a shared yard. Larger – up to 1,000 square feet – units are more popular, costing as much as $330,000.
Laneway housing’s characteristics make it especially attractive to seniors who want to age in place with their families, to young couples able to use one parent’s back yard for a starter home or to young homebuyers who rent out these mini-homes as mortgage helpers.
Homeowners who move into their laneway house and rent the main house can get an annual return on investment of 15%, adding to their cash flow and increasing the city’s shrinking rental stock.
More than 400 have now been approved across the city, with 150 completed and occupied. While those numbers continue to climb slowly, they should be climbing a lot faster. Speed of approval still isn’t the top priority it should be with city hall bureaucrats. That’s partly because this is a new housing form and they’re still ironing out the wrinkles – especially those related to buildings with a second storey, or “half-storey” as some would have it. Those precautions are understandable as a cautious response to NIMNBY (Not In My Neighbour’s Backyard) residents who claim these new arrivals are “destroying the neighbourhood.” But the delays are frustrating and unnecessary. (What’s really destroying neighbourhoods – and silently killing the city’s creative economy – is unaffordable housing that drives young families out of town, to be replaced by overseas investors who value their empty new purchase as a safe asset for cash savings rather than a place to live.)
At a recent Housing Now workshop on ways to provide more affordable first-home ownership, laneway housing builders described how the delays in approvals hurt builders, workers and their financially stretched homeowner clients. Even when a design has been previously approved on the same-sized lot, it gets scrutinized anew, for weeks, while dollars fly out the window.
The consensus of builders, based on conversations with their clients, is that larger, higher units currently allowed are more desirable. But the second storey can cause neighbourhood angst, so now any laneway home over one storey has to book a committee review (six weeks to arrange), then get the review (another three weeks), then wait another six to eight weeks for permits – even if it’s a plan that’s exactly the same as one previously approved!
For one laneway housing builder, those delays have resulted in laying off 10 workers and shelving plans for prefab construction – green jobs killed, affordable housing delayed.
City of Vancouver planning director Brent Toderian counters that no two lots are identical and insists that his staff take “a nimble approach without going fast at the expense of good design. We’re working to strike a balance,” he said, noting that no other city has managed this delicate dance with density as deftly as Vancouver.
The city has scheduled a review of the first 150 occupied laneway homes for early 2012.
Meanwhile, back on the street, the housing affordability crisis deepens as average detached home prices in Vancouver top $800,000.
Laneway housing is a solution that is efficient, proven, approved and unattractive to foreign buyers. Speed of approvals has to become more of a priority than comforting opponents who will never be happy, even when the changes they detest are making their neighbourhoods better places by making housing more affordable. •
