Playing the Real Estate Game

The single-family house is an endangered
species in this city. What's a guy who's always wanted a house to do?

By Tyee Bridge

WHEN I WAS SEVEN, my family moved from a rented rancher in north Langley to a five-acre farm across the border in Blaine. Two dozen gnarled plum, pear and apple trees surrounded the four-bedroom house, and beyond the orchard was an old dairy barn. There was even a treehouse in the front yard. In summer, lounging in that elevated, 50-square-foot pad with X-Men comics, ghetto blaster and root beer, I had my first and only taste of the condo lifestyle. Price for the whole rural package, circa 1979: $55,000.

I’ve lived in cities for more than 15 years, but my real estate expectations—what home means, what a decent amount of space is, how much I ought to pay for it—are undeniably rural. When I browse the real estate listings, I remind myself that for the going rate of an entry-level, 650-square-foot condo, I could, in many parts of the country, purchase a farmstead similar to the one where I grew up. (Then I think of the 15-acre farm my parents bought two years ago in Cape Breton for $85,000, and consider, yet again, whether I ought to pull a Shipping News and head east.) This partly explains why new condos don’t appeal to me, why I live on the top floor of a drafty Craftsman deep in the east side, and why I’ve come to realize that, like most of my generation, I’m probably never going to live in a single-family home in Vancouver.

Reduced expectations are at the heart of the density issue, and, not coincidentally, the sustainability movement. Like most of my thirtysomething generation, I’m guilty of wanting the level of luxury that my parents enjoyed. I sulk at the thought of living with less. Do I really want to move to the far-flung suburbs in order to have a single-family house? If so, I want it to be my choice, rather than an imposition of the market. My friends and I can rant for hours about real dollars, speculative bubbles, Olympic hype, all the factors that appear to have priced us out of the market, but we don’t leave. We have roots here, and in spite of our whining we know Vancouver is a great city.

I don’t want to move to Blaine or Cape Breton, at least not yet, and I’ll probably never have any use for five acres of soggy grassland. Still, I refuse to accept the current Vancouver alternative: paying a third of a million dollars for a one-bedroom apartment that, besides location, offers at most an exercise room, a lounge with a plasma screen TV, and a Starbucks inset into the southeast corner. I think density is a great idea, on both cultural and ecological grounds, but I don’t want the glossy, Euro-clad lifestyle package of the recent condo boom. I want density with soul. If I’m going to live in a small space—and more and more of us are, as people crowd into the Lower Mainland and force more vertical development—I want it to be distinctly my own, not some cloned version of granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.

Density has always been a tough sell in North America. If you live in a condo, where do you put the barbecue, the ski-boat, the Winnebago? For the bigoted and skittish, dense cities also bring the unsettling possibility of living cheek-by-jowl not only with other races and cultures, but with all the other urban bogeymen—addicts, artists, the homeless, lord knows what else. Given the psychological integration required to deal with such diversity, the popular response has been to flee to the suburban edges. Time-lapse satellite photos of the continent from 1940 to 1990 would be queasy but fascinating, 50 years of sprawl leaching out from the city centres like a greyscale infection of nanobots.

Vancouver’s response to sprawl and its acidic side-effects—urban decay, clover-leaf gridlock, gobbled farms and wetlands—has been a bag of urban renewal tricks, with an emphasis on densely populated, mixed-use neighbourhoods. Thanks to the efforts of municipal savants like former co-director of planning Larry Beasley and marketing geniuses like Bob Rennie, condo living was rebranded from a squalid lowbrow compromise into a prêt-à-porter downtown cocktail party, complete with those granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.
In the past 15 years, our downtown population has doubled; the success of our density effort even coined a global urban design buzzword, Vancouverism. Now, at least for a certain upscale, trend-conscious audience, the term density no longer connotes the nasty scratch-and-claw of the urban jungle. It has visionary loft to it, the conceptual shimmer of a halcyon metropolis. A condo, a futon and a latte for every citizen—at least those who can handle the mortgage.

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