What a property could look like under Barry Johns’ plan for saving existing houses and making maximum use of vacant space in back yards. Note the long central trellis and the mature trees.
What a front yard can look like in Edmonton, where eight units are allowed per lot, 10 on corner lots. Johns calls it the “meat in the sandwich” look.
By Carol Volkart
Barry Johns knows it’s essential to add new housing to mature neighbourhoods like Dunbar. But he’s also passionate about protecting what makes them wonderful –the eclectic homes, the mature trees and gardens, the intricate social networks of longtime residents.
How to do both? The Edmonton architect will present his solution at the Dunbar Neighbourhood Café on Monday, Feb. 9 at 11 a.m. at the Dunbar Community Centre.
His plan was developed during four years of study that led to a doctorate and a book offering “genuine fresh thinking on housing,” according to former Vancouver planning director Larry Beasley, who called it “just what the Canadian housing sector desperately needs right now.”
Johns’ concept tackles a number of issues now showing up on our doorsteps:
- The premise that adding housing supply will lead to affordable housing – false, in his opinion.
- The high cost of land that virtually guarantees new housing will be expensive.
- Changing housing needs as the population ages and intergenerational living becomes more popular.
- The environmental impacts of demolishing houses and eliminating trees and green space to build new housing.
- The destruction of friend, family and social networks as people flee their longtime neighbourhoods.
- The overwhelming nature – “rude and disrespectful” Johns says – of some of the new buildings popping up across the country as cities encourage multiplexes in the name of affordability.
“There’s no doubt that densification is absolutely needed in our mature neighbourhoods,” Johns said in an Athabasca University lecture.
“But why must we start by tearing down good, solid, serviceable existing housing? If we’re concerned about the housing crisis and treading lightly on the earth, we should be using and reusing and repurposing as much serviceable housing that we have out there.”
Central to his solution is eliminating land costs, which he said have increased exponentially over the past 25 years. “What if the cost of land, the biggest barrier to affordability, could be set at zero?” he asked. “What a crazy idea that would be. An instant increase in affordability.”
So here’s what he figured out:
Property owners could leverage their land equity by partnering with a developer to build new housing in their backyards, 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 fact that land does not have to be bought or sold eliminates the key factor that makes infill housing so expensive, says Johns, noting that in the current climate, individual multiplex units often cost nearly as much as the single house they replaced.
The land-cost key opens the door to many other benefits, including preserving the look and feel of existing neighbourhoods, with their older houses and mature trees. From the street, the new density would be mostly invisible.
But in the back, ahh! That’s where Johns gets even more enthusiastic. A clue is his acronym for what would happen there: BAAKFIL, which stands for Back Alley Advantage Kinship Family Integrated Living.
The 70 percent of undeveloped yard space in some older-neighbourhood lots would be transformed into 24-by-24-foot housing units, about the size of a two-car garage, nestled among existing trees, and making use of back alleys as lively community corridors.
It would all be environmentally friendly, with trees and green space preserved as much as possible. Johns has designed a tool kit providing a basic environmentally friendly design for the type of housing that could be built, but wants builders, designers and architects to put their own stamp on it so it fits the space and avoids the homogeneity of the current housebuilding industry. The small size of the units fits the demographic shift to one-person households, and makes it possible for family members to come together in various configurations on one lot.
But above all, Johns sees it as promoting connections, both among the people living on the transformed property and with neighbours. He envisions a lively back-alley community springing up, maybe even with some communal spaces, and where permitted, occasional small businesses such as hair salons or coffee shops. In short, to replicate in the back what the older houses in front once had with their neighbours – a feeling of community.
Johns has sympathy with longtime residents’ reaction to the changes in their neighbourhoods.
“It is little wonder that communities are fearful about zoning reform,” he wrote in an essay in the Vertical Urbanism magazine. “When prices go up dramatically, social makeup and street character are compromised and new product is oversized, disrespectful, and out of reach of the average incomes of the neighborhood.
“This naturally yields antipathy from those who have spent decades paying off their debt and who have grown to simply love their neighborhood. Cities have yet to figure this out.
“This is not NIMBYism. That has become a trope with municipalities. It is also not elitist. Citizens simply want to be included in the development conversation and naturally expect that the outcomes will not negatively alter their lives.”
Johns knows his plan won’t appeal to everyone. But he says 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, this “non-disruptive, gentle densification” plan could grow to accommodate millions of people over a quarter-century.
“That’s a staggering number that I think needs to be understood by politicians and industry,” he says. “I believe it’s actually possible to do it all – increase supply, density, affordability, increase community acceptance by including landowners, and not victimize the neighbourhood’s essence by destroying its character.”
The social scene Barry Johns envisions for back yards under his plan.