Redeeming the Vancouver Special

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.

Hong Kong Doorways: Houseboats

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.

Tung Tau Estate

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.

Shelter: Life in Habitat 67

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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Living in a Laneway

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

Shelter: A Home, For Now

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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One-Storey Houses

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?

Home Sweet Flophouse

A single-room occupancy hotel in Vancouver

Today’s Guardian features an article on a new generation of Japanese — most of them young men — unable to afford homes. They spend their days either unemployed or working at menial jobs; at night, they float between 24-hour internet cafés and capsule hotels.

“According to a recent government survey of the people the media has dubbed ‘net café refugees’, 5,400 people spend at least half the week living in cafés such as Manga Square, though most have little or no interest in the internet,” the Guardian reports. “Instead, they are attracted by the low cost of a night’s accommodation, an expanding array of services and the sympathetic attitude of café owners.” A night at a net café costs about $8.70 per night — double if you include dinner.

In some ways, living in an internet café is really just a novel take on an old standby: the flophouse. These cheap “cubicle hotels,” along with their slightly more upscale cousins, the single-room occupancy hotel (SRO), have traditonally offered low daily rates for a modest amount of private space. They flourished in North American cities until the 1960s, when they slowly began to disappear, with no tears shed from municipal authorities who saw them as a blight.

New York’s Bowery was especially famous for its flophouses. In the 1930s and 40s, up to 25,000 “Bowery bums” spent their lives on the street, many of them residing in its 100 flophouses. Today, just a few of those hotels remain; the rest were long ago purged by housing reform, urban renewal and gentrification. In Vancouver, an abundance of SROs has been whittled down to a mere handful as they have been converted into hostels, hotels or condos.

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Fort McMurray Goes Supernova

Oilsands refinery in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo by Chad Young

VBS.tv, the online documentary arm of Vice Magazine run by Spike Jonze, has a thought-provoking documentary called Toxic Alberta available to view for free (in 15 segments, with some interruptions for ads). The film touches on the extreme environmental impact of tar sands operations; the burning of natural gas to reform bitumen into crude oil is responsible for a staggering 20% of all of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and this is set to rise as there are calls to quintuple output in the next decade.

However, the film also inadvertently exposes the crisis the boom towns face, in terms of managing a 9% population growth rate. Most cities struggle to deal with 2-3% growth; 9% would be crippling. (Imagine adding another 100,000 people to Montreal in a very short time.) Thousands of people — many of them Maritimers looking for work — have flocked to the towns of Fort McMurray and Fort Chipyewan. I’ve heard stories of people getting paid insane amounts of money — even fast food workers make $20 an hour — and thus everyone with some sort of skilled trade has headed west. The documentary bears this out, with one surveyor mentioning a $10k monthly paycheck.

The problem is that planning has lagged far behind. The influx of newcomers and lack of housing has left many in a quasi-homeless situation. On top of that, the enormous salaries have distorted the local economy; a one-bedroom apartment rents for $1800 a month, and a small house can cost upwards of $500,000. Developers are building everything from dormitory-style bunkhouses, to subsidized apartments. One developer, quoted in the film, says that ‘anyone making less than $70,000 here basically needs public assistance.’

When the boom is over — or if there’s a massive switch to renewables and energy efficiency — what will become of these towns?

Shelter: Moving Out Without Leaving Home

Shelter is a weekly Montreal Gazette series that peeks into the lives of ordinary apartment-dwelling Montrealers.

I was surprised when I came in. It’s not a typical Montreal duplex layout. The front is what I expected, but the back is very open-concept, with no walls between the kitchen and the living room.

Marie-Louis Letendre: Well, what happened is that (the back) is a new extension and the basement is new, too. Where the kitchen is now, that used to be a bedroom. The renovations started about seven years ago and they’ve continued ever since.

So it’s been …

Letendre: A constant thing. Now, my mom, (who lives upstairs,) is doing the upstairs as well. Because renovations cost a lot, we got the basement and the extensions done seven years ago and now we’re doing the entire front of the house.

You have a big backyard.

Letendre: Yeah. Outside used to be all concrete with ridiculous amounts of grapes. They were wine grapes, so you couldn’t eat them. We didn’t really make wine, so they kept spreading until we did the renovations. We had to have the entire yard dug up to build the basement.

So I guess it was a 4 1/2 when you first moved in.

Letendre: Yeah. Now it’s a 7 1/2. We doubled the apartment in size. It looks infinitely nicer. It’ll be nice when it’s done, but I was joking with the contractor, I said: “What happens when it’s done? Do we start again?” And he said, “Probably.” The renovations never completely end. There’s always something that needs to be done.

How long have you lived here?

Letendre: Since Grade 3. About 12 years. I lived here with my mom, my brother and many foreign exchange students. We constantly had students staying here and renting out one of the two front bedrooms. I kind of got used to random people in my house all the time.

But now your mom is living upstairs and you have three roommates.

Letendre: She’s in the process of moving upstairs. I really like it. It’s comfortable because I don’t have to go through the process of actually moving and relocating and creating a new home.

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Finding the Light in Tokyo

On my last trip to Tokyo I could not help but remember how important it was when living there to choose an apartment with sufficient light — something I now take for granted since I moved to Los Angeles. When I first moved to Tokyo, I looked at an apartment in the building on the left, on the second floor, the second apartment in. The balcony, which is barely visible, provided the only real source of light. Needless to say, I did not take that apartment.

But other buildings do more to maximize natural light. In the photo below, which I took from my hotel room on a recent visit to the city, note how the taller buildings have a graduated set back as the floors go up, thereby increasing the amount of light available to those on lower floors. I am not sure if this set back is mandated by planning codes and, if it is, whether that has always been the case.

Nanaimo’s Shack Island

The last thing you’d expect to see in Nanaimo, while driving down Hammond Bay Road in the city’s northern sprawl, is an island full of shacks. Yet there it is, just past the waterfront mansions, next to a bucolic park named Pipers Lagoon. The island, which is accessible at low tide, appears to contain at least a dozen brightly-coloured wooden shacks, so close to the water it is hard to imagine how they are not submerged when the tide comes rushing in.

Although many of the shacks are shuttered, none seem to be quite abandoned; indeed, this afternoon, when I went to see the island, a man stood outside, hauling a small boat to shore. A Canadian flag hung from a nearby porch. The last time I visited, almost ten years ago, I seem to remember entire families hanging around the shacks, kids running around and playing near the choppy water. It was entirely incongruous with the predictable cityscape of suburban Nanaimo.

I have no idea about the current legal situation of these shacks, but according to one Nanaimo website, the island was settled by fishermen squatters in the 1930s. Their shacks were passed down through the generations to the current inhabitants, most of whom use them only seasonally. I don’t imagine there is any electricity, plumbing or running water in these places, so living on the island full-time would probably appeal only to bearded eccentrics, artists and Unibomber types.

Shantytowns and squatter settlements were common in pre-war Canada — my grandmother used to tell me about the squatters who lived on the islands in Calgary’s Bow River — but today they crop up only occasionally before they are cleared and their inhabitants rehoused. It’s nice to think that at least one example of those Depression-era squats has survived more or less intact to this day.

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Clean and Green

The first time I went to Singapore — in April, 2000 — the city state was in the middle of a “Clean and Green: That’s the Way We Like It” campaign. That was nothing unusual, I discovered later, but as I wandered around this densely populated island nation I was impressed by just how green and how clean it was.

I’d gone there to look at the Singapore Botanical Garden for my book Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens, and I didn’t know what to expect. Shortly before somebody had been flogged for marijuana possession and there was much rumbling about what a police state the place was. So I was surprised when I was there for several days before I saw anyone in uniform besides a cop directing traffic. And I was amazed at what a green place this city of high-rises was. When I decided to do a book exploring the ways that people interact with nature in urban settings — Green City People, Nature and Urban Places (Véhicule Press, 2006) — Singapore was at the top of my list of cities to check out. I visited twice in 2005, and I came away even more impressed.

Singapore is an island about 250 kilometers north of the equator, and 13 hours ahead in time of the east coast of North America. It’s hot all year round, and as soon as you go outside you’ll meet the smells and the sights of a tropical paradise. Orchid and bromeliads grow on big trees shading thoroughfares, bougainvillea cascades from pedestrian walkways over roadways, well-tended gardens surround tall buildings where more almost all of the city’s 4.5 million people live.

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Ghetto in the Sky

Suburban Toronto at night. Photo by Dennis Marciniak

In 1970, Toronto was in the throes of Apartment Fever; nearly 40 years later, we are paying for it, and dearly.

It seems like a cruel joke for a city that tries so hard to become a centre of good design, but concrete evidence of this mid-century orgy of high-rise construction exists in hard statistics: Toronto, with more than 1,700 completed high-rises, has the second largest number of skyscrapers in North America, most of these being the mid-century apartment blocks in question. For a more tangible sense of the situation, however, one only needs to walk down a random inner suburban thoroughfare, like Don Mills St. or Finch Ave.

The immediate impression is the striking banality of these apartment blocks, whose shabby air is instantly familiar to anyone from Vancouver or Sudbury. Toronto’s distinction lies in sheer numbers. On any given major avenue in Toronto’s outer boroughs—North York, Etobicoke, Scarborough—these buildings can line the street as far as the eye can see, 30-storey concrete slabs thrown haphazardly together with wind-blown voids in between, the only attempt at adornment being the brick facade (choice of red, brown, beige) and novel building shapes (Y or X). In other words, they are about as charming as Victorian mental wards.

Enter one of these buildings (note the ragtag curtains behind the windows) and one may encounters either a spartan but well-cared-for lobby—or a scene of squalor. But invariably one can smell curry or some other fragrant ethnic cooking, and white faces are hard to come by–these buildings may be eyesores, but a deeper problem is the fact that they’ve worked wonders in accomplishing segregation (racial and economic) and isolation.

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