Vancouver Special | Hacker News Reader

Vancouver Special

en.wikipedia.org

100 pointsbasicallydan55 comments

A few details not mentioned in the article:

1. The Vancouver Special originated as a way to evade zoning regulations. The lower floor is 18" below grade which qualified it as a "basement" not counting towards floor area ratio calculations.

2. Once the design became widespread, the building permitting process was streamlined -- there was no need for a detailed review of plans if they were identical to previously approved homes.

3. These were fundamentally "cheap and fast" housing, and have a poor reputation not so much for their conformity as for the poor quality construction.

4. As a cost saving measure, Vancouver Specials often came with "unfinished basements". An entire generation of Vancouver homeowners learned to install drywall -- and often electrical and plumbing -- which further contributes to the poor quality of the construction.

Thanks. I was trying to figure out where the "monster homes" appellation was coming from. It evokes McMansions but it's more about reach and spread than size.

FAR zoning not allowing for a simple 2 story home seems absurd but I suppose those were written to imply a certain setback from the property line.

Not sure if this is still the case ~25 years later, but when I lived in Vancouver in the late 90s, a lot of those DIY-finished basements were set up as (probably off-the-books) rental units to help cover the homeowners' mortgages.

I lived in one of those for about a year in-between actual apartments, and always thought it was weird how it was just slightly below grade. Thank you for solving that mystery :).

The first generation of Vancouver Special owners were largely families who occupied the entire property. By the late 90s either their kids had moved out and they had space to spare or they sold their homes (at much higher prices!) to families who needed to help pay the mortgage.

BTW the "slightly below grade" situation is helped by Vancouver having lots of hills -- in many cases the front door is at grade even though the average ground level is 18" higher.

> The first generation of Vancouver Special owners were largely families who occupied the entire property.

I guess it's hard to get exact numbers on this, but the things I've read suggest that a lot of Vancouver Specials had multiple households right from the start. e.g. Barbara Pettit's excellent thesis:

"By the 1970s, the Special had a distinctive style and was spreading throughout the east side as the "popular plan." Neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, and residents began complaining about its size, its appearance and its use as a multi-family dwelling."

https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses...

The ones in Vancouver, yes. Not so much in the suburbs, and despite the name there were more Vancouver Specials built outside of Vancouver than inside.

That "grade" situation is especially fun in very hilly areas - I remember a relative's house in Seattle somewhere that had three "ground floor doors" on different levels because the hill was so steep.

Even relatively flat terrain can have "walk out basements" which make what is technically a basement feel more like a ground floor.

> Seattle somewhere

Tons of houses like that in Phinney Ridge.

Thanks for the added context! Would be great to contribute these details to the wiki page as well

Just cite the comment as the source and you’re golden.

Not so cheap anymore! They go for $2M each today which seems insane to me.

The Vancouver housing market is really insane when you compare it to average salaries. New-grad software developer at a non-big-tech can expect the equivalent of $45k USD

NAFTA (or whatever succeeded it) allows many of those Canadian SWEs to go south for better pay (e.g. Seattle), and a lot of them do. It isn't great situation all around (Vancouver loses talent because they don't want to pay for it).

Vancouver has NEVER paid that well. 50-60K is high end for SWE in Vancouver.

That's not been my experience at all. Amazon has really pushed compensation up over the last 10 years and 50-60K (CAD or USD!) would be low for even a junior position in the companies I'm familiar with.

FWIW the local market is fairly bimodal; there are the FAANG companies and those who keep up with them, and there are some local companies that still pay peanuts. The gap between those two is large.

This matches what i see in the past 5 years or so as well.

I left Vancouver over this.

Average salary : Canadian normal. (median $33K, 90% of people under 90K - Stats Canada and Canada Revenue Agency for sources circa 2015-ish). Need at least $300K/year to afford rent, and if you're not a multimillionaire, owning a home is out of reach. Well, except condos... then $200K+/year is ideal.

The rents are too damned high!

And yeah, there's a whole pile of homelessness and safety issues over that. That Vancouver has (on the whole) nicer climate than Seattle, let alone anywhere else in Canada - makes it "easier". I worry a lot about the people I know still stuck there.

Oh and if anyone's looking for causes, I recommend this podcast : https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/191-sold

The main cause is that Vancouver bans apartments on the vast majority of its residential land, and has done so for nearly a century.

Not the house itself! A typical property tax assessment on a Vancouver Special is $2M of land and $50k of building.

I lived in one of those basements as a grad student and yeah... the entire building was not well constructed.

Another thing I'd add: The Vancouver Special arguably led to the legalization of secondary suites across Vancouver.

Their design was optimized for 2 suites even though they were usually built in single-family zoning districts; enforcement of the 1-family rule was fairly lax: https://twitter.com/GRIDSVancouver/status/134921351159592140...

It led to a situation where the law was at odds with reality on the ground (tens of thousands of people living in technically-illegal suites), and I think that was a huge factor in Vancouver's decision to (finally) legalize secondary suites across the city in 2004.

Re: 3 funny to see 1) how people often point to how we need "cheap and fast" simple housing to fix affordability issues, and then get mad at all the "cookie cutter" housing that results from the implementation of this idea.

and 2) these maligned "cheap and fast" building styles eventually become (at least somewhat) loved.

Looking at a generation of houses before the Vancouver Special, it's abundantly clear that all the 1910s era heritage homes one finds near downtown are also pretty much all tweaks on a similar core design, just like the Vancouver Special.

I wouldn't assume the both halves of 1) are the same people.

In some Vancouver specials, this plumbing in the "basement" has a drainage problem. As a plumber once told me, circa 1991, there are two rules in the business: (1) shit flows downhill and (2) payday is Friday. In some of these fake basements, the sewage line is well above ground level. Thus, you see weird installations like showers and toilets raised a foot above the floor or more on a little deck. I saw one house many years ago whose owner boasted of the "throne" toilet, haha.

The concept of a cheap, post-war house that you can finish out yourself is great... for certain places. There isn't really room in Vancouver for them any more, as [Vancouverism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism) has taken over much of the city (i.e. low podium of 2-4 floors with a slender 100m tower).

Vancouver's biggest problem right now is housing affordability, and "the missing middle" (i.e. 20-30m high buildings). There isn't really very much housing stock in between single family homes and 30 story buildings, and getting those larger high rises built is expensive, and time consuming.

> Vancouverism has taken over much of the city

There are plenty of towers downtown but the rest of Vancouver (i.e. most of the city by land area) is still zoned for suburban levels of density: https://twitter.com/Scott_dLB/status/1599177703466610688

There are towers outside of downtown. In the 90s, I marveled at Vancouver's density compared to Seattle. But I guess it is a matter of perspective.

There are a few, but the vast majority of Vancouver’s residential land still bans apartment/condo buildings of any height: https://twitter.com/GRIDSVancouver/status/640544192045826049

Ya, I've been to a few residential areas in Vancouver, the same is true in most cities (definitely Seattle). I get focusing towers in areas where the density can be supported, but at the same time we need to incrementally allocate more area for tower construction.

The majority of the land is low-density, but there are condo forests that have popped up over the last twenty years at ~every SkyTrain station, both in the city proper, and in its suburbs.

Each of those condo forests house more people than the mile of suburban housing surrounding them.

> ~every SkyTrain station

I would say maybe half of the stations, but otherwise agreed.

> "...'the missing middle' (i.e. 20-30m high buildings)..."

the missing middle isn't just what's between two extremes, so here, it's not 20-30m (~65-100ft, or roughly 6-10 stories) as you've stated, though i'd certainly prefer cities to adopt zoning that allows much more density too (along with the mixed-zoning, public transportation and micromobility upgrades needed to support that density).

the missing middle specifically refers to 2-6 story stick-framed buildings that can be built quickly and cheaply while also providing ~4-10× the density of single-family zoning. 6-10 story buildings don't fall in this category since they usually need at least a concrete podium for the first 1-4 stories, which puts it in a different (higher-priced) construction category.

the missing middle is literally the space between single-family homes and the 6+ story buildings that require more expensive construction techniques.

"Fun" numbers on affordability.

A 3-bedroom rental unit is considered "affordable" if it rents at $4000/mo, or $48k/y[1]. The poverty line is at $60k[2] for a family of four. The city is encouraging developers to supply housing at a full 80% of poverty-level income, and wondering why tent cities keep growing.

[1] https://www.straight.com/news/4094-rent-for-three-bedrooms-n...

[2] https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/national-news/new-study-c...

You're not really taking a Canadian-wide definition of poverty and comparing it to a Vancouver-specific definition of affordability, are you? Because that would be just terrible.

The global poverty line is $785 but in New York City, the cutoff for cash aid is $83,250. Why does NYC keep giving aid to the top 1% !?

> A 3-bedroom rental unit is considered "affordable" if it rents at $4000/mo

This is an oversimplification that has been repeatedly pushed by Carlo Pablito for clicks. He knows it's not quite right, but the incentives for media these days are what they are...

I would summarize the situation like this:

- Vancouver wants to incentivize some % of new development to be rental instead of condo

- For various reasons (some dumb, some legal) they ended up using the word "affordable" when defining some limits on said rental developments

- Newer-than-average buildings are understandably more expensive than average, so the limits are fairly high

It's a bad choice of words but the program is generally more ambitious than what other municipalities around the Lower Mainland do for rental housing. Please think twice before sharing this misleading information again.

I grew up in a prewar house in EastVan but the neighborhood had a lot of these houses around it, usually filled with East Asian or Indian immigrants. Taking the Skytrain was so fun as a kid. It was certainly a unique experience. The big culture shock for me was moving to New York and having to deal with large five-floor walkups in Queens, but the diversity was just the same. And the subway was so much bigger.

Truth be told, while I have a lot of nostalgia of the Vancouver of the 90s, I've since been back to visit and if given the choice, I would pick living in New York every time.

Here's a modern reno of one of these that made it look nothing like the original even though it's the same blueprint -

https://www.darcyjones.com/430-house

Really nicely done.

I'm under the impression that despite being maligned in the middle of the century Vancouver Specials are in relative high demand compared to houses newer and older because of how their basic flexible layouts make things relatively simple for new modern renovations.

Back when you could simply build homes in Vancouver, without a literal decade of red tape spent in appeals, reviews and permit queues

Good to know.

It is like this in the nearby suburbs as well (Burnaby, Richmond, etc.)?

Yes indeed. There are Vancouver Specials in the surrounding municipalities as well (I used to live in one).

I meant more is the administrative red tape an issue. :)

This is somewhat aspirational, but I live in Vancouver and if/when we get PR, we'd like to buy a home and possibly want to renovate.

Condo living (or in local Canadian "Strata Living") has been a very mixed experience for us.

My impression is that it's not amazing anywhere, but I've heard Burnaby (for example) is a bit more development friendly than Vancouver.

I'm interested to see what happens in the next couple of years — Ken Sim (Vancouver's new mayor) had significantly improving permitting speeds and decisions as a key plank in his platform. I'm curious to see how he and his party are planning to follow through on that.

> Ken Sim (Vancouver's new mayor) had significantly improving permitting speeds and decisions as a key plank in his platform.

It's nice to say, but I heard a consistent response from the Vancouver subreddit every time this has been brought up that permitting speeds in Vancouver have been more down to how hard it is to hire/train/retain code inspectors, than down to how many red-tape policies they need to evaluate a plan against. Even with a permanent budget increase for hiring code inspectors, given the training time, you wouldn't expect to see the effects within Sim's tenure. So it's questionable what he's actually planning to do here.

(One thing I personally think could help is to get major property developers to peer-review one-anothers' work for its adherence to code; or even to require, as a condition for allowing such firms to do any development in the city at all, that said firms loan some of the talent that would normally be designing to code to instead sit on the other side of the table as code-inspection attachés — like a very domain-specialized form of jury duty. Most large development firms are already experts in local building codes, given that they have to design to them; so why not use that existing talent base?)

> permitting speeds in Vancouver have been more down to how hard it is to hire/train/retain code inspectors, than down to how many red-tape policies they need to evaluate a plan against

I'm not sure about that. I'm sure there's a bit of both but Vancouver has remarkably complex (and often unique to Vancouver) policies for pretty much everything to do with real estate.

It's an 18 hour course.

I think the short answer would be that the surrounding cities are often better+faster at permitting but they may have slightly less permissive zoning than Vancouver. For example “single-family” zoning in Vancouver actually allows for a secondary suite and a laneway house, and a lot of the suburbs are still dragging their heels on laneway houses.

I'm shocked by the memories that photo has unlocked. Early 90s road trip with my parents to their friends' living in Vancouver. Sleepless nights in the summer heat and humidity with no AC. All while reading Cliff Stoll's classic The Cuckoo's Egg.

Sleepless nights in the summer heat in Vancouver? Was this during a heatwave? Because average highs in July-August in Vancouver are just 22.2c: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver#Climate

I have had quite a few sleepless nights in Vancouver over summers, and I don't live there, so I must have hit a heatwave every time I was there ....

It may have been... and coming from the very dry prairies, any humidity felt uncomfortable.

https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.2695545,-123.0402209,3a,75y,3...

My kids like to play count the Vancouver Special when we drive down 1st Ave.

More detail about the originator of this architectural style

His ‘Revenge’ on Architects Was the Vancouver Special

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2019/12/17/Vancouver-Special-Reve...

When I was a uni student in Vancouver in 2005, “The Vancouver Special” meant a tall young white man with a much shorter Chinese girlfriend.

Most people in my circles (UBC engineering and humanities) agreed with this appellation. I wonder if it’s still used.

Like 10x more common

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