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Vancouver Special

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Re: Vancouver Special

#11

Post by LawnGnome »

emacsen wrote: post #6
pabloescobyte wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Vancouver Special

#12

Post by SnowProblem »

cperciva wrote: post #7

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 appro…

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

Re: Vancouver Special

#13

Post by Mezzie »

cperciva wrote: post #7

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 appro…

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

Re: Vancouver Special

#15

Post by ripley12 »

emacsen wrote: post #4
nikanj wrote: post #2

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.)?

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.

Re: Vancouver Special

#16

Post by ido »

papandada wrote: post #3

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

Re: Vancouver Special

#17

Post by derefr »

LawnGnome wrote: post #11
emacsen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Re: Vancouver Special

#18

Post by ripley12 »

derefr wrote: post #17
LawnGnome wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> 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.

Re: Vancouver Special

#19

Post by ghostpepper »

SnowProblem wrote: post #12
cperciva wrote: post #7

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 appro…

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

Re: Vancouver Special

#20

Post by Patrick_Devine »

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.

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