Dunbar Neighbourhood Cafe organizer Carmen Smith (front, right) welcomes architect Barry Johns to a Feb. 9 meeting. All the seats were filled by the time the talk got underway.
Barry Johns answers questions after the meeting. The Edmonton architect earned a doctorate for his plan to preserve mature neighbourhoods while adding housing to backyards.
By Carol Volkart
Edmonton architect Barry Johns had the crowd in the palm of his hand Monday when he brought his vision for a kinder, gentler way of densifying mature neighbourhoods to Dunbar.
He told a jam-packed room at the Dunbar Community Centre that it is socially and environmentally wrong to tear down usable housing, rip up treed streetscapes and destroy residents’ social networks to build the kind of enormous multiplexes now going up on city streets.
“What’s being forgotten is social sustainability, how neighbourhoods are being eroded by erasure, where existing good housing stock is disappearing,” he told the Feb. 9 meeting of the Dunbar Neighbourhood Café.
“It’s scaring the bejeezus out of people who are wanting to stay and age in their neighbourhoods, where they spent 30 years building up their social network.”
Edmonton is seeing an even more extreme version of what’s happening in Vancouver, he said, drawing gasps from the crowd with a photograph of a “meat-in-the sandwich” house lodged between two apartment-sized multiplexes. In Edmonton, eight units are allowed on 33-foot lots, and 10 units on corner lots.
Johns said politicians allowing such construction — on the false premise that more supply automatically increases affordability — aren’t thinking about the impact on human beings who have built lives and networks in those neighbourhoods.
They think in terms of four-year election cycles, and being able to boast about housing statistics in the next election, he said. “All governments want is housing-start numbers.”
Johns, an established Edmonton architect, returned to school in his 70s to earn a doctorate and write a book about his alternative concept for mature neighbourhoods.
His multi-pronged idea involves saving existing houses and streetscapes and building new housing in the backyards of older neighbourhoods, where he says the unused space can be as high as 71 percent.
This backyard housing is his vision for a better future, encapsulated by the acronym BAAKFIL — Back Alley Advantage Kinship Family Integrated Living.
The new buildings would be small, with the footprint of a 24-by-24-foot two-car garage, suitable for the emerging demographics of single-person households and the growing phenomenon of intergenerational living. It would be environmentally friendly, fitting unobtrusively into the property, with as many trees as possible retained. Johns also envisions it as a way of fostering connections and neighbourliness, incorporating creative uses of back lanes and possible vacant spaces in the area. He said it would have been a far better environment for his mother, who died recently after spending the last 10 years of her life in an institutional setting.
Key to it all is his idea for eliminating land costs, which have risen exponentially over the past 25 years and made most new housing prohibitively expensive.
He proposes that property owners leverage their land equity by partnering with a developer to build the new housing, while keeping tenure in their original house and property. Once the construction is done, the developer would share in the proceeds and the partnership would dissolve. It would be up to the homeowner to decide what to do with the resulting housing — rent, sell or create forms of co-op or co-housing.
The Dunbar crowd, which included several housing experts, was supportive but sharp. Audience members questioned the tax implications of some aspects of his scheme, and whether new buildings could fit into 120-foot deep back yards common here. (In Edmonton, they are often 150 feet deep.)
Developer Michael Geller questioned whether the new housing could even begin to be called affordable in Vancouver, given the high costs of building here and the avalanche of development fees and taxes imposed by governments. He also questioned whether it would be possible to retain the trees in the back yards as Johns hopes, given the damage to roots from building and the need for parking.
While Johns’ ideas were welcomed, much of the crowd’s concern was directed toward an absent party — the politicians who have presided over the housing turmoil that led to a meeting like this.
“Why isn’t this presentation being made to city council?” one woman who’d attended the meeting asked later. “They’re the ones that need to hear about it.”
During the question period at the meeting, the mood toward politicians was hostile.
When an audience member suggested ways of getting Johns’ proposal more widely heard, one commenter said: “Talk to [former mayor, now federal housing minister] Gregor [Robertson], “and I think there’s room for enlightenment there.”
Dunbar architect Brian Palmquiest said Johns’ talk reminded him of the “stupidity” at all levels of government on housing issues. Noting that he was instrumental in getting laneway houses allowed in Vancouver, he said when it came time to build his own, city regulations had become so onerous and costly that it wasn’t worth it to proceed.
“So many things we’re trying to do are impeded by the governments we have.”
When an audience member asked: “Didn’t they just remove all those bylaws so you can do anything you want?” the response was, “No.”
Another commenter said a friend of his with a big lot wanted to divide it into three for an age-in-place community with two friends. But when the city looked at the lot, he was told he had to have a minimum of four. Or, alternatively, the city told him, he could put up a monster house.
Johns knows his plan won’t appeal to everyone. But he estimates that if only 25 percent of landowners in Edmonton’s 84 neighbourhoods were to participate over a 25-year period, it could accommodate another 250,000 people. Spread across the country, he says it could grow to accommodate millions of people over a quarter-century.
In the housing turmoil affecting cities everywhere, including the quiet neighbourhood of Dunbar, Johns’ proposal is another option.