Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (21 page)

The Streetcar Suburb

Long after its streetcars were replaced by trolley buses, this district in East Vancouver balances density and land-use mix in a way that responds to human need for privacy, conviviality, convenience, and nature. The market street (
bottom right
) is not elegant, but it offers commercial destinations, transit, and apartment living. Houses on nearby treelined streets (
top right
) offer single-family residences and apartments, all within walking distance of schools, transit, and the market street.
(Scott Keck; Charles Montgomery/Google Maps)

Here is that terrain:

In front of the house there is a yard, a little over thirteen feet deep. All the twelve yards on this street are small enough to make gardening a relatively minor task, and so every stroll leads past a parade of flowers and shrubs and fruit trees. Four minutes’ walk away, there is a grassy park where old men play boccie every afternoon and holler at each other in Italian. Five minutes away, down the hill, there is Commercial Drive, a market street of remarkable plenitude. Two minutes up or down that street are a post office, a hardware store, an Italian grocery store, two Chinese veggie markets, a bakery, a fish shop, a parade of coffee shops, two used-furniture stores, some low-rise apartments, a few bars, a gym, a high school, and a community center that holds a library, a pool, and a hockey rink. The Drive feels loose and uncrowded, yet as abundant as a market street in Manhattan. The streetcars are long gone, but buses run both ways along the Drive every six minutes. You can be downtown in fifteen minutes.

Why, when so many streetcar neighborhoods across the continent have fallen ill, had this one stayed so healthy? As it turned out, it was nurtured by many of the same forces that fueled Vancouver’s vertical downtown: absence of freeways, geographic constraints, and, especially, local policies that encouraged more human density. While the world was gaping at the rise of Vancouver’s vertical downtown, these relaxed streetcar neighborhoods absorbed even more new residents. Between 1991 and 2006 the city’s population (not including the outer suburbs) grew by more than a hundred thousand. Most of that growth happened not downtown, but in neighborhoods like my own.

How was this possible? First of all, Vancouver encourages mixed-use development along the old streetcar grid. Single-story structures are constantly being replaced by three- and four-story apartments above restaurants, banks, and shops. Meanwhile, on the leafy residential streets behind those arterials, single-family lots like mine have been quietly transformed.

Laneway Revolution

In Vancouver and other cities, new zoning rules allow homeowners to replace their laneway garages (
top
) with small residences (
bottom
), one of many ways to add gentle density to existing neighborhoods. (This rendering shows home models designed and built by Lanefab.)
(
Lanefab.com
)

Many detached houses have been divided into apartments. Most basements have been retrofitted with full kitchens, bathrooms, and partial windows to create suites, a practice that has recently been legalized. In 2009 the city also legalized the construction of so-called laneway houses in the backyards behind most detached houses in the city. Think about it: owners of more than seventy thousand properties can now build cottages where their alley garages now stand. Averaging about five hundred square feet, the new cottages aren’t much bigger than small apartments, but they give homeowners a chance to house relatives or renters at a comfortable distance. This means that the vast majority of formerly single-family lots in the city can now legally include at least three households—a main residence, a basement suite, and a laneway cottage. Together these rules are enabling one of the biggest urban infill projects on the continent. They are proof that there is plenty of room for more people in almost any of North America’s old streetcar neighborhoods.

Diverse Density and Dense Diversity

This neighborhood upcycling provides a stunning range in housing choice, which means room for people of different incomes, mobility, ages, tastes, and tolerance for proximity. On my own street, a family of four lives alone in a three-story million-dollar house, right next to a house split for two couples, next to a house owned by Cynthia, a single woman nearing retirement who chopped her place up into three apartments so she could pay her mortgage and live well without making a bundle. Some people like their apartments. Some people like town houses. Some people will not be content without space between themselves and the nearest neighbor. We all find a place here.

Of course, this model contradicts nearly a century of urban practice in which people with money did their best to avoid people without money and succeeded with the help of city planners. But those of us who live in detached homes owe a debt of gratitude to all those people who either cannot afford a house or simply prefer apartments or sharing space. They help keep the cash registers flowing on Commercial Drive. They are the reason that the First Ravioli Store survives. Their patronage helps heat the public swimming pool and keeps buses coming so frequently that there is no point in checking the schedule. They offer eyes to keep the streets safe. They make life easier for everyone.
*
Accepting new people at new proximities certainly saved me from a disaster straight out of Luis Rayo’s evolutionary happiness algorithm:

After our renovation, my pal Keri and I strained to carry the burden of a killer mortgage and property taxes, much like the victims of the mortgage crisis in San Joaquin County. But we learned from our neighbors. Rather than move to a cheaper house on the urban fringe, we took a chance and invited our romantic partners to move in with us and pay rent. They agreed. That turned out to be pretty good for our relationships, but it still didn’t cover our costs. So we took on two extra tenants in our remaining bedrooms.

I never imagined I would roll into midlife in such a populous domestic assemblage, but this arrangement actually made life easier. Like many houses these days, ours had enough space to allow the six of us to gather or retreat from one another as we wished. We took turns cooking—just one night a week each. I saved on food and on transportation. After a few months of living there, I found I was walking everywhere because
everywhere
was suddenly so close. I rarely needed a car. The geometry of the neighborhood rewrote the pattern of my movements, the pace of my days, and the rhythm of my social world.

Vancouver’s experiments in proximity have become so popular that they have helped create a new problem: house and apartment prices have begun to soar well beyond the reach of most people who work in the city. In 2012 Vancouver won the dubious honor of becoming the most expensive city for housing in North America. This means many people who work in the city either can’t afford to live there, or have to work so hard they have little time for the social experiences that make life sweet.

To ease the pressure, the city is now scrambling to find ways to add affordable density. As I write this chapter, the Vancouver City Council is in the process of giving one property developer the go-ahead to build three towers of market condominiums above two floors of light industrial space—but only if the developer gives seventy of the apartments back to the city to rent out as affordable housing. The project will mix rich, poor, and work space in a way not seen here in generations.

A System of Voluntary Association

Design alone cannot solve the affordability crisis. Governments simply must invest more in social housing. This is not merely a design question, but a political one. Who will have the right to live in the Vancouver—or any great city—of the future? I will return to this question of equity in Chapter 10.

For now it is important to acknowledge that there are a thousand ways to retrofit proximity and complexity into cities, and they don’t all necessarily come from planners and politicians. We might emulate the Danes and build apartments around huge common courtyards. We might learn from the Emiratis of Abu Dhabi, whose traditional neighborhood system, the
fareej
, links courtyard homes with narrow alleys and intimate public spaces in ways that accommodate extended family networks. But in all my travels I have never found a design intervention that strikes a more responsive balance between privacy and conviviality than the one neighbors built for themselves in a typical suburban neighborhood an hour’s drive north of Stockton, California.

It started in 1986, when Kevin Wolf and Linda Cloud, a pair of young environmental activists, bought neighboring homes on N Street on what was then the edge of the university town of Davis. At some point they tore down the fence between those homes, and their roommates started sharing meals in the bigger house. As more community-minded people bought or rented the adjoining properties, more fences came down, and more people dropped in for dinner. The residents of the village that came to be known as N Street Cohousing won designation as a planned development from the Davis City Council, enabling them to add larger second units to their homes. In 2005 Wolf and Cloud financed a bigger common house, which became a miniature community center, with laundry facilities and a dining room that could handle dozens of people.

By the time I arrived on a Friday night in 2010, there were more than fifty people living on the two-acre site (at more than five times the typical sprawl density, it still didn’t feel crowded). I ducked through a narrow passage between a couple of ranch-style homes to find that the core of the block had been transformed into a lush open green. There were no backyard fences left inside the block. There was an orchard of apple and orange trees, a chicken coop, gardens, and lawns scattered with children’s toys.

I told Wolf the place felt a little bit like a commune.

“But it’s not!” he corrected me. “None of this land is communal. All the lots are still privately owned. We live in our own homes and have our own yards. It’s just that we choose to share those yards and some of our resources.”

The setup is remarkably simple. Members of N Street Cohousing pay $25 per month to use the common house, which Wolf and Cloud still own. Some take turns cooking meals for dozens of neighbors in the big kitchen. Some prefer to cook and eat alone at home. Some mix it up. Some have chipped in for a Jacuzzi, which they share with neighbors for a small fee. Others wouldn’t dream of hot-tubbing with the gang. People do what they want with their yards, but they agree to maintain common paths through them.

It’s a uniquely market-responsive kind of sharing, which allows each person to adjust to a level of engagement or retreat that feels right at any particular moment. People drift together when it suits them and apart when it doesn’t. The model pays biophilic dividends: by sharing their block, everyone in effect enjoys a gigantic green backyard. It pays logistical dividends too: parents feel comfortable sending their kids out to play in the super-yard, knowing that dozens of eyes will be watching them from the homes that surround it.

Amid all this voluntary intimacy, remarkable things happen. After I shared dinner with Wolf and a dozen friends, a neighbor arrived with a small child he introduced as Wolf and Cloud’s daughter. The child was about five years old, and full of spark. After Wolf put her to bed, he explained that the kid didn’t actually begin life as his daughter: she had been adopted as a nine-month-old by another community member, a single woman who later died of cancer. The change in the child’s family life was organic. As her mother’s health declined, the child spent time with key neighbors, sleeping over at Kevin and Linda’s house more and more often. The bonds of intimacy and care were so tight that when her mother finally died, the child had already transitioned into a new loving household (and she was formally adopted). The village had become her extended family and wrapped itself around her like a cocoon.