Speaking of smaller homes...in the National Post today,"Why Canada's houses are getting smaller":
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/0...-home-why-canadas-houses-are-getting-smaller/
The incredible shrinking home: Why Canada’s houses are getting smaller
Tristin Hopper Jul 13, 2012 – 8:13 PM ET
Akua Schatz and Brendon Purdy have trouble finding space for a coffee table, not to mention the baby they are expecting this fall.
The couple, both in their mid-30s, live in a 500 square foot home in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Dunbar. Completed last year for $280,000, the modernist two-storey home stands on what used to be Mr. Purdy’s parents’ backyard.
While the style may be precedent-setting for Vancouver, they are not alone in living small. Increasingly, young families in the city’s constricted housing market are eschewing a distant suburban address for the ease and walkability of the core – even if it means doing it without enough space for a Christmas tree.
From post-war bungalows to 1990s McMansions, the Canadian house has spent the last 60 years progressively ballooning into one of the largest domiciles in history. But amid shrinking lot sizes, skyrocketing land prices and a new generation of homeowners uninterested in the lures of suburban life, the ever-expanding Canadian house has finally reached its apex. After decades of pushing the limits of human dwellings, Canada’s unbridled passion for square footage is coming to an end.
“Smaller space, bigger lifestyle,†said Ms. Schatz.
In 1947, to accommodate a wave of post-war home construction, the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation began publishing catalogues of housing plans drawn up by prominent Canadian architects. They were cheap and well-planned, but shockingly to modern eyes, they were often no bigger than 1,000 square feet. The typical Canadian of the Louis St. Laurent era, it seems, was raising pre-birth control-sized families in homes half the size of a volleyball court.
“Canadians were pretty down-to-earth people in those days. They bought as much as they could afford and expanded later if they could afford it,†Canadian architectural historian Ioana Teodorescu told Postmedia in 2009.
And expand they did. Powder rooms, family rooms, enclosed garages; by 1975 home sizes had jumped to 1,075 square feet. But still, their children, the Baby Boomers, shared bedrooms and coped with the weekday morning ritual of waiting for a spot in the home’s only bathroom.
Crazed for elbow room, when the Boomers finally seized the reins of home ownership in the 1980s, all hell broke loose: Wide hallways, gargantuan entrance halls, mud rooms. By the turn of the millennium, Canadians lived in some of the world’s largest houses – and were filling them with some of the world’s smallest families. In 2002, a U.K. market analyst lined up developed countries according to how many of its citizens owned homes with more than five rooms. Canada easily bested Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand for the top spot.
But then, by 2007, the meteoric growth of Canadian houses began to slow to a trickle, according to floor size data compiled by Natural Resources Canada. In its latest industry survey, the Canadian Home Builders Association reported that the average new home size had dropped to 1,900 square feet – well down from a mid-2000s peak of 2,300 square feet. According to internal forecasts, they are only going to get smaller, reported the association.
Craig Alexander, chief economist of TD Bank Financial Group, says that Canadian cities simply ran out of space. In the 1950s, the CMHC’s “catalogue homes†were often plunked down in a sea of grass. Over the years, lot sizes stayed pretty much the same, but builders added storeys, dug out basements and pushed the front steps to the sidewalk. “We’ve gone from land rich and house poor to land poor and house rich,†said Mr. Alexander. “If the square footage has levelled off, it’s probably because we’re building the biggest homes we possibly can on the existing lots,†he said.
Following the 2008 U.S. housing market collapse, new U.S. homes immediately sloughed off the equivalent of a large bedroom and by 2011, the American Institute of Architects reported that cash-conscious homeowners were increasingly shrugging off the “special†features of decades past: Mud rooms, home theatres and outdoor living rooms. Canada, too, is witnessing the slow death of walk-in closets, hobby rooms and even the once-ubiquitous living room. “We haven’t built a living room in the past two years,†Greg Graham with Ottawa’s Cardel Homes, told Postmedia in April.
Canada’s housing stock is drifting toward the “European model,†said McGill architecture professor Avi Friedman. Never ones for picket fences and outdoor barbeques, most Germans, French, Italians and Spaniards raise their families in flats, maisonettes and terraced houses.
The British, inventors of the lawn, can now claim the smallest homes of all, with the average new home clocking in at just over 800 square feet. “Room to swing a cat? Hardly,†commented the BBC. Tellingly, while Prime Minister Stephen Harper occupies a mansion in Ottawa, his U.K. counterpart occupies a non-descript townhouse jammed into downtown London.
“If you take the typical Canadian home and take out all the wasted space, you have a European home,†said Mr. Friedman, speaking by Skype from Northern France, where he is midway through a tour of European housing projects. “They’ll have the same number of rooms, the same uses, but they will all be smaller.â€
Luckily, two decades of condo building have already steeled Canadians for the realities of tiny spaces. Last year, a slate of new Vancouver developments offering condos as small as 400 square feet – about two-thirds the size of a Skytrain car. But what the micro-condos lack in square footage, they are balancing with efficient design: Tight entranceways, smaller bedrooms and a rabid aversion to hallways.
House builders are taking the hint. “People are doing with less space, but they want it to be a richer experience,†said Ben Taddei, COO of ParkLane Homes, a Vancouver-area house builder. “Large landings, sweeping staircases, those have all gone the way of the dodo bird.†Where past homes counted separate dining rooms, living rooms and kitchens, Mr. Taddei’s designers simply combine them all into a single “great room.â€
The Milllennials, the generation born from 1983 onwards, enjoyed a childhood free of bunkbeds or even shared bathrooms. Growing up in plush megahomes undoubtedly helped them become, in the words of one author, “self-centred, needy, and entitled with unrealistic work expectations.†Oddly, it also spawned a group of people patently unimpressed with backyards and breakfast nooks.
Under current economic forecasts, Millennials are poised to spend their early adulthood decidedly less affluent than their parents. They are also facing a housing market that has outpaced income growth for well over a decade. Mr. Friedman calls it a “perfect storm of phenomena†that is making homebuyers “physically and psychologically comfortable†in small spaces, said Mr. Friedman. Condo towers and row-houses will continue to sprout, he predicts, and as boomers vacate their large suburban houses for retirement, developers and municipalities will carve them up into apartments, duplexes and laneway houses.
“In 2006, the market peaked and everybody got back to the idea of ‘We’ve got to make houses smaller and we’ve got to make them more affordable,†said Brian Johnston, CEO of Mattamy Corp., Canada’s largest builder of new homes. “I don’t think it’s a matter of personal preference, people just can’t afford to live in those big houses anymore.â€
Except, of course, in Alberta. In the land of $85,000 median wages and dirt-cheap housing lots, young families are still snapping up giant, single-family homes like it’s still 1985.
“Edmonton has more space per person than any major city in Canada,†Sarah MacLennan, marketing director with Edmonton’s Coldwell Banker Johnston Real Estate, wrote in an email to the Post. “Our average single family home size has actually gone up.†While other cities cope with forests of new downtown condo towers, in Edmonton’s centralized areas schools are starting to shut down due to low attendance.
In Calgary, even the condos are 4,000 square foot “monsters,†said Bob Jablonski, president of the Calgary Real Estate Board. “There’s a lot of money in Calgary, old and new,†he said.
Fifty years ago, when land was cheap and the asphalt on Vancouver’s Highway 99 were still fresh, Ms. Schatz says it is quite likely she and her husband would have sprung for a typical white-picket fence home in the suburbs. But now, with suburban isolation, a regional smog cloud and clogged highways to worry about, the choice was easy. “You’re looking at three-hour commutes, and I just don’t want to spend my life doing that,†she said.
And their plan is conveniently inter-generational: The grandparents in the nearby big house will help babysit, Ms. Schatz and Mr. Purdy – both in their mid-30s – will help them with household repairs. Eventually, said Ms. Schatz, the two will switch places.
Since Vancouver gave the green light to laneway houses in 2009, the city has received 500 applications, with 50 new applications trickling in every month. With the massive single-family home increasingly out of reach for all but the wealthiest buyers, said Mr. Friedman, the middle-class entrants are instead “seeking comfort in other things.â
For Ms. Schatz, at least, her tiny house has put her only a 10-minute bike ride from work, a short walk from the beach and in a home just cramped enough to push them outside on sunny days. “People can sacrifice space for that,†she said.
National Post
thopper@nationalpost.com
