November 19th, 2009
Curious about what the building his great-great-grandfather lived in was like, ex-Brooklynite Zach van Schouwen was soon researching the history of his entire street. The result is “The Block,” a series pen-and-ink drawings of how the stretch of Eldridge Street, between Stanton and Rivington on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, looked in every year since 1795.
Eldridge turns out to be fairly typical of the neighborhood, which evolved from “Delancey’s Farm” to a series of tall, narrow tenements that start replacing the street’s small rowhouses in the 1850s. Fire escapes begin to appear, in accordance with law, in the 1920s and 30s. The block takes a downward turn just after World War II, when a number of tenements are gradually boarded up, torn down, and replaced with garages and storage facilities. In 1985, the entire block becomes occupied by a single housing project.
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Popularity: 3% [?]
September 6th, 2009
Rooftop houses in Kwun Tong
By the end of this year, Hong Kong’s Buildings Department plans to finish clearing illegal rooftop structures from single-staircase buildings, marking the end of a clearance programme that began in 2001. But illegal rooftop communities continue to thrive, fed by a shortage of centrally located public housing and perennially high rents in the private sector.
Nine floors above Li Tak Street, in Tai Kok Tsui, more than 100 people live in haphazard shacks on the roof of a large block of flats.
Sam Fong, 23, who studies English at Polytechnic University and is an amateur photographer, moved to the rooftop two years ago, when he left Guangzhou to join his father, mother and sister in Hong Kong. They share a sheet-metal shack with small kitchen, living room and bedroom.
“Hong Kong is just like a jungle. You have to fight for your survival here,” said Fong, who recently started working part-time in a nearby supermarket. His father is a building concierge, his mother is a waitress and his sister works in a clothing store.
Because Fong, his mother and sister have not lived in Hong Kong for seven years, the family cannot apply for public housing, a common problem faced by poor immigrants.
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Popularity: 3% [?]
April 3rd, 2009
At some point or another, most of Asia was occupied by the Japanese, usually with disastrous consequences. But Taiwan is a bit different. From 1895 to 1945, Taiwan was a full-fledged Japanese colony, a legacy that continues to manifest itself in many subtle aspects of Taiwanese culture. Not the least of this is the urban landscape of Taipei. It’s hard to pin down, exactly, but there’s something that makes it feel very different from mainland Chinese cities, and I’m willing to bet that much of this has to do with the way the city evolved during the Japanese period.
Japanese bungalows are one example of this. In the early twentieth century, low-slung wood cottages were built on the edges of Taipei. Somehow, even as the city expanded into its current bulky mass of low-rise apartment blocks, many of the cottages survived. They’re usually surrounded by concrete walls and sit amidst lush greenery; a bit of the old countryside left behind in the concrete and asphalt of Taipei. Peek over the walls and you’ll see an elegant but dilapidated house, its garden unkempt, windows dusty. Many of the houses seem abandoned but there are often scooters or cars parked in the yard, and sometimes laundry drying, which seems to suggest that some are still occupied, despite the dilapidation.
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Popularity: 3% [?]
March 23rd, 2009
I’ve always been curious about the flat-roofed one-storey houses that are sprinkled throughout many of Montreal’s neighbourhoods. Rather than traditional bungalows, they look more like growth-stunted plexes that are missing their upper floors. Last Friday’s Montreal Gazette featured a nice feature by Susan Semenak on the houses, looking both at their history and their current popularity with home buyers looking for an in-town single-family house. I never realized they had a name: shoebox houses. (It’s cute, but I prefer “hobbit houses,” which is what one Urbanphoto commenter called them.)
Most shoebox houses are found in neighbourhoods like Verdun, lower NDG, Villeray and Ahuntsic, which were opened to development with the spread of Montreal’s electric tramway. They appealed mainly to working-class families that couldn’t afford to build proper duplexes or triplexes but still wanted a house of their own. According to David Hanna, an urban studies professor at UQAM and Montreal’s plex expert, they could be built for as little at $500 if family members helped with construction. (That’s about $9,500 in today’s money, according to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator.) The houses were designed to be expandable, so that a second storey could be eventually be added, a piecemeal process similar to the way houses are built in many of the world’s developing countries.
As in the rest of Canada, that kind of independent house construction has vanished in Montreal, as land and construction prices soared and the house-building trade became dominated by professional real estate developers. And even though shoebox houses might be enjoying a resurgence in popularity, they’re also being knocked down for new condominium developments, a trend documented by Guillaume St-Jean on Spacing Montreal and in his series of then-and-now photos. My feelings about this are mixed: on one hand, densification is a natural, desirable trend, but on the other, we’re losing an historically important type of house that remains an affordable entry into homeownership.
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Popularity: unranked [?]
March 14th, 2009
Click on the image above to watch an audio slideshow
I didn’t even notice the smell until my friend Will McCallum pointed it out — I was too busy contemplating what it would be like to spend my nights in a cage set inside a one-room apartment with ten other men (not to mention the occasional cockroach). But the smell, when I finally paid attention, was pretty terrible. The apartment had two grimy bathrooms, one with a squat toilet and one with a sit toilet, and the smell of shit and stale sweat wafted through the whole place. We were in Tai Kok Tsui, a gritty neighbourhood just a few minutes away from one of Mongkok’s glossier shopping malls, covering a press conference by the Society for Community Organization, a non-government group that is working to eliminate substandard housing in Hong Kong.
Cage homes have been around for a long time. They first emerged after World War II when hundreds of thousands of refugees from mainland China arrived in Hong Kong. Today, there are still 53,200 people living in cage and cubicle homes. (Cubicle homes are apartments that are subdivided into tiny rooms separated only by flimsy plywood walls.) Some of these are licenced and regulated by the government, but housing activists say that thousands more people, including single-parent families, refugees and recent immigrants, live in illegal cage and cubicle homes where conditions are particularly dire. At a housing-rights protest we attended last October, we met women who lived with their children in vermin-infested cubicles less than 100 square feet in size.
Some people live in cages and cubicles because they are the waiting list for public housing; others choose to live there because they are often centrally-located. Some are refugees or undocumented immigrants who cannot afford a proper apartment and who are not eligible for government housing. I get the sense that inertia had something to do with it, too: when you live in a cage home, the toll on your health and mental well-being is such that it becomes hard to save up enough to leave. Most of the men in the apartment we visited did not work, and they spent most of their meagre welfare allowances on rent, which can be more than HK$1,000 per cage. The apartment we visited in Tai Kok Tsui had eleven cages. In that neighbourhood, a one-room apartment like that would rent for no more than $4,000 or $5,000 per month. You do the math — that’s a lot of profit for the landlord.
Along with another friend, Zoe Li, Will and I made a brief audio slideshow about cage homes. It was our first attempt at creating something like this, and the audio mixing is a bit rough, but I hope it gives you more of an idea about the underbelly of Hong Kong’s housing situation.
Popularity: 7% [?]
September 11th, 2008
A block of Vancouver Specials. Photo by Jason Vanderhill
It usually takes a generation or two for maligned building styles to win new appreciation — or even any sort of appreciation at all. That’s certainly the case with the Vancouver Special, a ubiquitous type of house that has long been considered an eyesore for its bland features and repetitive nature. But its practicality has made it popular with generations of immigrants who have used them as stepping stones into homeownership. Now, finally, it seems to be earning a sort of grudging respect, if not outright admiration.
I like to think that the Special is a West Coast equivalent of Montreal’s plex; both emerged at a time when strict building codes tried to mitigate the impact of large population booms. In Montreal’s case, those codes were meant to improve living standards in a city where much of the population lived in dark, toilet-less apartments. In Vancouver, however, zoning laws were biased in favour of detached single-family homes in an attempt to maintain the city’s suburban character. The Special, with its shallow pitched roof and large front balcony, gave the appearance of being a single-family home, but its ground floor was designed to include an extra flat that could be rented out, a nice way for the upstairs owners to subsidize their mortgage.
Aesthetically, it’s hard to find many redeeming qualities in the Special—it is gangly and awkward, like a teenager after a growth spurt—but its simplicity, functionality and accessibility are earning it newfound respect. After all, cities need these kinds of houses. They’re residential workhorses, easy to build, easy to modify and well-suited to the diverse needs of a growing population.
In the most recent issue of Savfaire, a Vancouver-based zine, Keith Higgins writes about his obsession with photographing Vancouver Specials; he has shot at least 1,400. He’s at a loss as to why he started taking photos of them but he hints at their populist appeal and the way they reflect, like the famous Levittown houses, the people who have lived in them over the years. Each one of the Specials he photographs (in a style deliberately reminiscent of MLS listings and freebie real estate magazines) is fundamentally similar, but each reflects years of decades of occupancy in a way that more precious or more refined houses do not.
Popularity: 3% [?]
June 23rd, 2008
For all the glitz of its office towers and the sheer triumph of its gargantuan housing estates, Hong Kong is still inextricably linked to the ocean that surrounds it. Fresh fish is a staple of Cantonese cuisine and, throughout Hong Kong, dozens of villages and neighbourhoods still rely on the fishery. The Aberdeen Harbour is one such area, populated by dozens of people who live on boats, making their living as fishers or as proprietors of floating seafood restaurants. If you walk along the Aberdeen promenade, you’ll pass by gangways leading to the boats, each one guarded by a metal door similar to what you would find in front of most houses or apartment buildings.
Popularity: 3% [?]
May 12th, 2008
North Americans and Europeans have an almost natural aversion to Modernist housing projects. They’re very much maligned in our popular culture, often for good reason: generations of official neglect and social marginalization have left many of them in a desperate state. In Hong Kong, though, a large chunk of the population lives in housing estates, either upscale and privately-built or more modest and publicly-funded, and in most cases they are well-appointed, busy and perfectly pleasant.
Tung Tau Estate is one such example. Walking from Kowloon City to San Ko Kong, about 10 minutes away by foot, I passed through Tung Tau, a large public housing project built in the 1970s. I made my entrance through a flight of stairs into a sunken garden, where I came across a large group of poh poh — old women — sitting around a playground, chatting. As we passed through the rest estate, I noticed that everything was well-maintained, all of the public spaces were well-used and there was no shortage of amenities, including supermarkets and restaurants.
For years, the failure of many housing projects in the United States, Great Britain and France has been blamed on design. Their Corbusier-inspired towers-in-the-park, large open spaces and disruption of the surrounding urban fabric have all been blamed for encouraging social dysfunction. While Hong Kong is not immune to those problems — one particularly massive and isolated housing estate, Tin Shui Wai, has been dubbled the “city of sadness” for its high rates of unemployment, social isolation and suicide — most of its housing estates seem to work just as they should.
Popularity: unranked [?]
February 16th, 2008
Shelter is a weekly Montreal Gazette series that peeks into the lives of ordinary apartment-dwelling Montrealers.
This installment looks at an apartment in Moshe Safdie’s iconic Habitat 67, inhabited by Margaret Somerville, the founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. The apartment consists of four “cubes” covering 2,700 square feet, with an additional 1,800 square feet of outdoor terrace space.
Most apartments in Habitat consist of different cubes stuck together, right?
Right. Most of them are one or two blocks, and this was a three. (Gestures to a corridor leading away from the dining room.) The apartment used to stop here, but the people who owned it before me purchased the next block and turned it into a bedroom wing. It was a originally a one-block apartment, there was a kitchen, a living room, a dining room. You can see how you could have a nice little cozy apartment here.
So how much of the renovation was done by the previous owner and how much was yours?
About half and half. (We wander down the hall and into the bedroom. She gestures to a glass door leading onto a large terrace.) This is the back terrace, which is beautiful in the summer. It actually goes right over to the river. I have a lovely garden there in the summer. You can see the casino.
So you have views on both sides of the apartment, the city at the front and the river at the back.
Every single window has a gorgeous view, it’s amazing. (We head back into the dining room and down a flight of stairs. Most apartments in Habitat are split between two floors.) In the original three-block this was originally the living room, and the bedroom was over there. I took out all of the internal walls, so this is a huge entertaining space. It’s actually one block.
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Popularity: 18% [?]
November 14th, 2007
Abandoned laneway triplex near St. Louis Square
This summer, while wandering through one of the sidestreets between Prince Arthur and Sherbrooke, I veered off into a laneway. Expecting to find some interesting graffiti, a picturesque clothesline or maybe some discarded furniture, I was surprised to come across an entire triplex at the intersection of two alleyways. It appeared to be abandoned — windows boarded up, balconies rotting — despite its prime location.
Montreal has a long tradition of laneway housing. In many of its neighbourhoods, especially those built before the 1920s, you’ll find old houses, duplexes and even the occasional triplex in back alleys. I don’t know how they ended up there — property owners trying to squeeze more money out of their land, probably — but they add to the laneway’s sense of being a sort of secret, parallel city, where things are quieter, more intimate and a bit more mysterious. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a laneway.
So why we building any new laneway houses? In Toronto, many architects and urban designers have embraced laneway housing as a form of incremental densification, a way to add more people to existing neighbourhoods without seriously disrupting their atmosphere or urban form. Although the city has so far refused to legalize new laneway housing, it does make case-by-case exceptions to its zoning laws, which has opened the way for some intriguing bits of domestic architecture.
Laneway houses don’t have to be newly-built; they can capitalize on existing garages and sheds. Wander through the laneways of Montreal and you’ll see an endless variety of them, many with second floors. It would be so easy to convert them into tiny but innovatively-designed apartments and houses, infusing our neighbourhoods with a cheap and flexible form of housing. But nobody’s talking about it. Unlike Toronto, Montrealers haven’t had a public discussion about laneway housing. Why not?
Laneway house in the McGill Ghetto
Two-storey garage in a Mile End alley
Popularity: 9% [?]
October 14th, 2007
Shelter is a weekly Montreal Gazette series that peeks into the lives of ordinary apartment-dwelling Montrealers.
Well, my first impression is that it’s small but very bright.
Marcus Benigno: It’s very airy, very bright. Bright makes things look bigger.
What appealed to you when you first saw this apartment?
Benigno: The most important part was the location. It’s really close to McGill but it’s not in the ghetto. It’s sort of in the Plateau, and Carré St. Louis is right there. We can hear the fountain at night. Oh, and it’s old. It used to be the maids’ chambers to the house that’s on the square. That’s why this apartment building only has four or five units and it’s connected to the house. So we’re actually living in two maid chambers. There are two doors (to the apartment.) I would prefer that it didn’t open to the kitchen but, you know, the kitchen is the hearth of the home.
That’s a nice table in the living room.
Benigno: That’s Kevin’s grandmother’s table.
Kevin Garneau: Great-grandmother.
So it’s a family heirloom?
Benigno: A lot of the furniture is his great-grandmother’s. But you know, this table shows you that I can’t really have space for a real living room. But I guess it works because the centre of the house is food.
Do you eat most of your meals at home?
Benigno: Oh yes, definitely. We cook a lot. A lot. Trust me. I’ve spent the whole day washing dishes.
The kitchen is small, but is it functional?
Benigno: We have the tiniest kitchen in Montreal! But we do with what we have.
You told me earlier that you both spent the summer away on trips, Marcus in the Middle East and Kevin in Africa. Did you collect anything?
Garneau: This is a box with all my stuff from Africa. I have all of these art objects and posters that I have yet to put on the wall. Otherwise, it’s Marcus that normally takes care of the decoration. The decor isn’t really ready. We put something on the wall, not because it’s beautiful, but because it touches us, because we have a connection with it. It’s a relation d’appartenance.
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Popularity: 3% [?]
October 9th, 2007
Montreal developed as a geographically disparate patchwork of independent municipalities. Many of these old towns and suburbs were long ago absorbed into the city, but traces of their past character can still be seen in their streets.
Last week, Guillaume St-Jean wrote on Spacing Montreal about three one-storey buildings in Villeray that will be demolished for condos. Clad in brick, these kinds of flat-roofed brick houses were built mostly in the 1910s and 1920s in the neighbourhoods north of the CPR tracks, like Little Italy, Park Ex, Villeray and Youville (an old village in what is now northern Villeray and southern Ahuntsic). I’ve always found them funny because they look like triplexes missing their top floors.
In the east end, it’s not unusual to find another type of one-storey building: old woodframe cottages, many of them set well back from the street in contrast to the plexes that surround them. That’s the case on Joliette Street in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, where I spotted the two houses above. According to the city’s property bank, the green house was built in 1910. You wouldn’t know it from the vinyl siding.
I’m curious to know who built these houses and why. Were they too poor to invest in a full-fledged duplex or triplex, which were far more lucrative? Did they simply predate the mass development of plexes?
Popularity: 7% [?]
May 3rd, 2007
Classic turn-of-the-century triplexes on St. Urbain Street
In Montreal, it’s hard to avoid plexes. Found in almost every neighbourhood, they define the landscape and have made this city what it is today, architecturally, culturally and socially. With their distinct form—several superposed flats, each extending from the front of a building to the back—plexes are a popular form of housing, adaptable to many different lifestyles. But what’s their story? How did Montreal come to be a city of walkup apartments, outdoor staircases and balconies?
According to David Hanna, professor of geography at the Université du Québec à Montréal, the origins of the plex can be traced to a nineteenth century “marriage of convenience” between French and Scottish traditions. Historically, some French-Canadian settlers used outdoor staircases to link the first and second floors of their houses; immigrants from Scotland, meanwhile, brought with them the custom of stacking one flat on top of another. “It kept morphing in the nineteenth century until it settled into the form of an outdoor staircase leading to each apartment,” said Hanna.
Architect Susan Bronson, who teaches at the Université de Montréal, notes that turn-of-the-century building codes, designed to improve living conditions, played a big role in reinforcing the dominance of the plex. In Montreal and the suburb of St. Louis (now Mile End), lot sizes were increased from 20 by 60 feet to 25 by 100 feet and laneways were built in between blocks to service new apartments. Setbacks were mandated on newly-built residential streets, indirectly encouraging the use of outdoor staircases as a space-saving measure.
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Popularity: 15% [?]
March 23rd, 2007
When he wrote earlier this year about the “two faces” of Tokyo, our contributor Siqi Zhu noted that, in Japan’s capital, “weak eminent domain laws have resulted in years of piecemeal development and an incredibly fine-grained urban fabric.” This is unlike many other cities in the developed world where government agencies eagerly expropriate land for vast new building projects. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, vast swaths of urban landscape were razed in Canada and the United States to make way for utopian housing complexes, stadiums and office blocks. The same thing is happening throughout China today.
In Japan, though, urban neighbourhoods remain eclectic patchworks of individually-developed houses and apartment buildings. Even in the middle of Tokyo, the world’s largest city, the backstreets of many retail and residential districts retain a cluttered, hodgepodge quality. Naturally, this jumbled pattern of development has left some odd-shaped spaces between buildings—spaces that are attracting attention from people who want an affordable home in the heart of the city. Enter the kyo-sho-jutaku, or microhome: houses built on parcels of land that, in some cases, are as small as 250 square feet, about the size of a single room in many North American dwellings.
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Popularity: unranked [?]
Montreal Apartments