Laneway housing - Alternatives- Toronto City Hall

The laneway house: A novel solution to Vancouver's real-estate crunch

Donna Woodman is one of the many people in Vancouver anxiously waiting for council to approve Wednesday the city's latest effort to cope with high house prices and lack of space: the laneway house.

Like others who have expressed an interest in this new housing form - converting the garage to a home - Mrs. Woodman was considering the option at her son's east Vancouver residence because it would solve a lot of problems for the family.

Then the economic crash added another compelling reason. In the past year, the 77-year-old retired dietitian lost a quarter of the value of her investments, where she'd put all of the profits from the sale of her White Rock condo. Now, getting an independent place to live in Vancouver for only $150,000-$200,000, where the listings for one-bedroom apartments in the cheapest parts of town start at $202,000, is becoming her only real option.

"It's a housing type that suits the economic times," said Brent Toderian, Vancouver's head of planning. He heard more than one story like Mrs. Woodman's last week when more than 60 people appeared at city hall to speak for and against the plan to allow laneway houses in the city's two major single-family zones.

Laneway houses, similar to the one shown here in Toronto, may soon become an option for Vancouver homeowners.

Homeowners who can't afford to pay their mortgages, parents who want to give their struggling children a place to live, and recession-strapped boomer retirees who want to lower their costs by moving into their own backyards showed up to make the argument that this is a great option for Vancouver.

Builder Jake Fry, whose company Smallworks has been gearing up to build the laneway houses, said he's getting calls from families like the Woodmans "who are just finding it hard to get by, so they want to downsize and move in with the kids."

Some residents, including Linda MacAdam, were adamantly opposed during last week's public hearings. She complained bitterly that the "Vancouver we know and love now will no longer exist" once 65,000 homeowners potentially get the right to add another small house to their yards.

It's a foregone conclusion that council will approve the new option Wednesday, which will allow homeowners to build a 750-square-foot, 11/2-storey home, as long as there's 16 feet between the back of the main house and the front of the laneway house.

The only real decision will be how many parking spaces will be required. That's been the second most contentious issue at public hearings, since single-family units will now have the right to include both a secondary suite in the house and the laneway house, forming a potential small compound on a 33-foot city lot.

Vancouver's move is being watched with interest by cities across Canada and some in the United States, local architect Michael Geller said.

Laneway houses have been allowed by a few smaller cities, such as Maple Ridge to the east of Vancouver and Qualicum on Vancouver Island, although homeowners may be permitted either a secondary suite or a laneway house, but not both.

Large cities such as Toronto and Montreal have allowed laneway houses in small numbers on a special-permit basis, but very few have experimented with throwing open the gates to every single-family lot.

But it's been Vancouver's unique way of trying to add density to a city that, in spite of its much-praised residential downtown packed with towers and townhouses, has one of the largest proportions of single-family lots of any North American city.

The quasi-suburban feel of those neighbourhoods has always been vehemently defended by residents, especially on the wealthier west side, where even a proposal for a four-plex or a set of townhouses can turn into a political bonfire. Many of those defenders came out one more time against the laneway house, seeing the proposal as a sneaky way of squeezing thousands more people into their city.

But the initiative has also generated support from across Vancouver, and not just because it would help economically or create a more environmental city.

For Donna Woodman, it solves all kinds of family problems, including where to live in the later stages of her life.

With a laneway house on her son's lot, she will be close to her grandchildren, and her son and his wife would have built-in child care. Plus, Mrs. Woodman said, "I'd make it wheelchair accessible so that if anything happened, I'd have a place that's safe and close to my family, because long-term care is not as good as it used to be.