Municipalities can hardly keep up with the demand for laneway housing projects. Is this boom setting the pace for 2010?
Six months after its approval by Vancouver councillors, laneway housing is slowly finding its footings in a city keen to position itself as a green capital with enviable quality of life and top-quality housing that’s affordable for all.
It’s a tall order to expect any one type of housing to deliver, but architects and builders have found their clients are keen to champion the initial projects for just such reasons.
The city has received hundreds since councillors approved laneway housing in July 2009. These have resulted in 17 projects being approved to date and upwards of 60 pre-applications. The structures, built on the same civic lot as a primary residence, can be up to 1.5 storeys in height. Builders must follow detailed guidelines established by city staff to minimize the impact of the structures on neighbouring properties.
In addition, a minimum of one parking space must be provided with each laneway house. But Mat Turner, partner with Bryn Davidson in Lanefab Design-Build Ltd., said his company has enjoyed the biggest following among homeowners in East Vancouver. Approximately 70 per cent of the firm’s projects are here, with about 30 per cent on the West Side. It has approvals for three projects in hand, and hopes to have an additional four approved by the end January.
East Van residents don’t mind sacrificing the garage for a small dwelling unit, Turner said. While parking provisions are a requirement of laneway houses, Lanefab has geared its designs to be flexible and often the clients opt for bike parking or other uses for the space that would otherwise be used for a motor vehicle.
“We find that on the West Side, people want to have a lot of parking,” he said.
What those willing to sacrifice a garage get is a secondary residence, perhaps with office space, not unlike the coach houses of old (Vancouver calls the structures laneway homes to avoid confusion with the traditional coach houses allowed in the Shaughnessy area). Lanefab’s structures, employing structurally insulated panels, are energy efficient and strive for a high level of environment-friendly design.
While the $175,000 price tag may seem steep, Turner says it’s economical for a structure that can provide an additional 720 square feet of living space, the size of the firm’s first structure at McGill and Slocan streets in Vancouver. Turner points to the price of a single-level 500-square-foot condo for comparison, which typically run $275,000 and up.
“It’s quite a bargain.”
The more aggravating cost to date has been time. While total construction time for most laneway homes projects runs 10 to 12 weeks, the city permitting process has been taking up to 16 weeks.
While acknowledging that Lanefab was one of the first to seek permits for laneway housing after Vancouver council approved the housing type last August, Turner says it still took city staff more than four months to approve a permit for the McGill Street project.
“Council kind of put a rush on this, so the planners were unprepared,” he said “There were a lot of gray areas, and a lot of areas that were open to interpretation. So they had to come up with ways on interpreting the guidelines. So the original plans that we proposed, we had to redraw them 10, 12, 15 times to finally get them through.”
Subsequent proposals have enjoyed faster approval times.
“I think they were being really careful at the beginning just to make sure they didn’t set any precedents that they didn’t want to deal with further down the road,” Turner said. “But it is getting better. We’re both learning from each other.”
Heike Roth, a planner with the City of Vancouver, agrees that the months since laneway housing was approved by council have seen city staff and proponents climb a steep learning curve. Both sides are learning what’s possible and what is permissible, however, setting the stage for a more robust level of activity in 2010.
“It’s a brand new use with brand new regulations, and I think it’s taken time to understand how this would work,” Roth said. “I think things are moving along much more smoothly now, and we anticipate that this will just continue to improve as both staff and applicants become more familiar with the regulations and the requirements.”
The longest part of the process is the pre-application consultation with city staff, including the planning and engineering departments. The process determines site eligibility for a laneway structure as well as the particular strictures the structure might face.
“Once you’re through the pre-application process and are basically cleared for application in-take, it’s two to three weeks,” Roth said – about the same time as for a single-family home.
The permit granted is for development and construction. The consolidation of the two permits expedites construction, though many builders have been able to develop elegant design solutions that make basic construction a matter of a couple of days. It’s servicing, finishing and landscaping that takes the rest of the time.
Vancouver-based Smallworks Studios, which has been building small-scale structures for more than three years, offers custom-built structures that can take approximately 12 weeks to build. It has three laneway homes on the go, and principal Jake Fry says the experience has helped it streamline assembly of its homes to take no more than two days. Then comes the finishing and other aspects of construction and integrating the structure with the rest of the property.
Builder experience as well as city comfort with the new form of housing has helped smooth the process, and he’s seeing rising interest in the opportunities the structures offer.
“There’s a steady flow of interest that’s now coming in where we can now in a very concrete way say, ‘Yes, we can build for you, this is what we can do on your property,’” he said. “It becomes very much a discourse around basically selling our homes as opposed to this is what might be possible in the future.” Roth said the completion of projects by Lanefab and Smallworks, among others, will raise the profile of the homes and drive greater activity in 2010.
But what to do with the structure once it’s built? Smallworks originally touted the buildings as in-fill or accessory buildings, showing off their potential as offices or studios, but he also noted that the spaciousness of many of the homes could provide some extra living space or a granny suite. The city, for its part, saw the homes as assisting with Vancouver’s shortage of affordable housing.
While the units couldn’t be subdivided from the main property and sold to a separate owner, the affordable construction cost (a driver of Vancouver housing prices during the recent boom) suggested that rents of laneway homes might be lower than a newly built rental accommodation. Various housing advocates suggested that the homes could potentially serve as an external granny suite, housing older members of one’s extended family such that they retained some independence without moving beyond the care of able-bodied family.
Turner said the aspirations for the homes could work, providing certain conditions were met. He pointed to experience in Maple Ridge, one of the first Lower Mainland municipalities to approve laneway housing, where just a few structures have been built in the three years since the homes were approved. The economics have been difficult to pencil out, Turner said, as the rental prospects for the homes haven’t been great. Not so in Vancouver, where single-bedroom apartment rents are approaching $1,000 a month – a sum more than enough to repay financing obtained to develop a laneway home. Coach houses in Surrey’s East Clayton neighbourhood max out at 500 square feet and have been known to fetch $850 a month.
The potential of the homes to boost density, address housing issues and add value to properties is prompting other Lower Mainland municipalities to embrace the concept.
North Vancouver endorsed the concept last year and is widely expected to grant formal approval to the structures this spring. The result of several months’ worth of study, its units are described in municipal jargon as detached secondary suites – in short, residential units that have the same advantages as basement suites and other dwellings ancillary to a main residence.
Designed for single-family neighbourhoods, the initiative will require homeowners to seek rezoning of their properties to accommodate a coach house. As in Vancouver, the units can’t be strata-titled or sold off.
A laneway home might seem like a simple project, but the novelty of the structure in many municipalities mean some outside help is worthwhile.
Smallworks Studio principal Jake Fry said the structures are too new to be do-it-yourself, and recommends that homeowners seeking to develop such units enter the process with an experienced professional familiar with city processes.
Vancouver city planner Heike Roth believes the initial examples the city approved this winter, many of which will complete by spring 2010, will give the public some idea of what city regulations permit. Builders that have sought city approval for single-family homes would be helpful in taking laneway home applications through the approvals process, she said.
“Builders who do single family homes would be much more familiar with the city’s process and requirements, and wouldn’t be surprised by being asked to go to engineering to look at sewer depths and those kinds of things,” she said.
Homeowners should prepare detailed budgets prior to pursuing a laneway home, says Jake Fry of Smallworks Studio in Vancouver. Crunching the numbers will help homeowners gauge the size of home they can afford, as well as eliminate surprises that may come in the form of municipal fees, hydro connections, landscaping and the like.
“You want to take a look at the whole project,” he advises, noting that costs ancillary to the house itself may represent half or more of the project cost. “I think it’s going to be easy for people to say I can build that for $100 a square foot, $120 a square foot, but that’s really not going to be the cost of the project,” he says.
The good news is several financing options are available to homeowners who want to incorporate secondary structures into home renovations, especially if they’re adding the structures to accommodate seniors or other family members.
CMHC, through its Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program, provides funding for the development of self-contained units accommodating seniors and low-income adults with disabilities. CMHC will provide up to $24,000 for construction of the unit through its secondary/garden suites program, with an additional $24,000 available if the structure boasts accessibility features to accommodate residents with disabilities.
Applicants must receive approval for funding before beginning construction and ensure the project complies with municipal requirements (not all municipalities permit garden suites).
In addition, Vancity and other financial institutions offer financing programs that may be suitable.
While municipal engineering staff can help homeowners to determine infrastructure requirements for laneway homes, connecting to those utilities may incur varying costs.
One of the biggest hurdles publicized following the approval of laneway homes in Vancouver was the lack of understanding regarding connection charges to the power grid for the secondary unit. BC Hydro initially suggested the fee could be as much as $20,000 – a sum that on further discussion proved to be more than double what most laneway homes face.
The hydro connection charge will reflect the work required to establish the connection, and the load placed on the grid. Jake Fry notes that Smallworks’ energy-efficient studios typically require just 60 Amps of power. The amount is small enough that the firm’s initial laneway homes haven’t been hit with a connection charge of more than $1,000.
Homes requiring an underground connection would be more expensive. While most of the projects Lanefab has been pursuing have incurred fees below $1,500, one of its projects required BC Hydro to install a transformer in the neighbourhood – resulting in a connection fee of approximately $8,500. BCHM