October 5, 2017

You can Strata that Laneway House~And Other Zoning Changes in Vancouver

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There are some big changes coming  to Vancouver zoning as reported   in Metro News. You can read through the reports on changes to the single family zoning areas and the Grandview/Mount Pleasant areas here.  On Tuesday City of Vancouver Council approved policies that will allow for more density on single family lots throughout the city . In the RS single family zones, homeowners will be allowed to build a laneway home, stratify it, and sell it off.  The intention is to encourage the maintenance of older Vancouver residences and to build more laneway homes. This is the first time that laneway houses could be split from the original title and sold.
In Grandview Woodlands and in Mount Pleasant that have denser “RT” zones, Council is allowing the number of units on a standard thirty-three foot lot to increase from two dwellings to three. This means that now a  house could be built as a duplex with a laneway house in the RT zones. Larger lots will now be allowed to create four unit developments.
In the case of the RT zones, the three units on one lot can be owned by one person, or again can be stratified and sold to separate owners. Laneway homes were originally restricted to the RS traditional single family zoned areas;  laneway homes can now be buit in the RT zones  as well.
There is one strange wrinkle in all of this. Originally the idea was that the size of new  single family homes in the RS zones was to be distrained to encourage the retention of older character homes.  This restriction is now gone. Strangely though, the same restriction was approved for houses in the RT zones, so that if a heritage home is demolished the City can limit the size of a new house. You could argue that this restriction should also apply in the RS single family zones that are losing 1,000 single family homes annually and are being replaced by larger single family homes with no rental  accommodation available to the local market.
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  2. Older experiments (early 1990s) with strata laneway homes in Vancouver were successful. Just loook at 13th and Cypress, or Manitoba and 13th. This form of housing is really old hat … bigger moves needed for affordability.

  3. This is a good move. I suggest the city should not impose strata tile, but should make an occupancy permit conditional on signing a standard contract with the neighbours on the subdivided lot. Strata can be very problematic and stressful simply because of human nature where the insecure tend to want control over others through petty rules and strong personalities gravitate toward power.
    The city should also adopt more flexibility to negotiate alternatives to demolition of non-heritage structures with owners. builders and developers. Dismantling structures is very labour-intensive and costly, but recycling wood frame materials (often Douglas fir in houses built before the 70s), ground up concrete aggregate from foundations and so forth back into the new structures should be audited and a reward system established where additional floor area, or even in some cases an additional unit, will allow the builder to recoup the recycling costs and make his / her 15%.
    If the city rated this activity, then it would be clear which builder-developers score the highest and thus have a cooperative and productive relationship with the city and do not cause undue delays in processing their application and in building inspections.
    A correction, Sandy. The low-density single-family RS zones do not represent 80% of housing, but occupy ~80% of all residential-zoned land. Mountain Math pegs it at ~30% of all housing.

  4. Sandy.
    “Originally the idea was that the size of new single family homes in the RS zones was to be distrained to encourage the retention of older character homes. ”
    Definition of distrain
    transitive verb
    1 :to force or compel to satisfy an obligation by means of a distress
    2 :to seize by distress
    intransitive verb
    :to levy a distress
    I don’t imagine the properties were to be seized. You mean ‘constrained’?

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