Could You Move In Next Door?
Norman Van Eeden Petersman is a Strong Towns member in Delta, British Columbia. This article originally appeared in slightly different form on his blog, On the Fence in Ladner, and is republished here with permission.
Chances are good, statistically speaking, that the house next door to yours is broadly the same as the one you live in now. If you own or rent a single-family detached home in my city of Delta, British Columbia, there’s an extreme likelihood that the place next door is also a detached home. Vast swathes of the city are zoned for single-family detached homes and will remain like this unless we start to reconsider our approach. Apartment blocks tend to be clustered in places where you’ll find other apartment blocks next door. Townhouses, wherever they’re popping up in Delta, have other batches of townhouses next door. But as you can see in the images below, those sites for medium-density housing are few and far between.
But why would we seek to change anything? Should Delta maybe just stay the way that it is? An auto-oriented suburban community that has lots of perks?
I mean, why would anyone actually want to move into the house next door?
Well, unless you are the rare person who plans to die in the same house you were born in, you will need to make at least a few changes of where you live along the way. And I suspect, if you had a choice, you would choose to stay in your neighborhood where you are known and valued. You would choose to stay in the neighborhood that is home. You would stay in a place that is familiar to you.
So many possibilities—yet they are forbidden in Delta, BC, and any many towns and cities across North America.
The Problem: Our pattern of development in Delta—and most everywhere else in North America—hinders our ability to find appropriate forms of housing for us in the different stages of our lives within our community.
Renters: Can renters move to a new place close to where they just were? Nope! And what a loss for both the neighbors and the renters! What a loss for the community.
Retirees: Can you downsize to a home next door? I mean, some people are happy to head out of town once your mill shift is over, but what about the people who want to stay here? In most cases, they won’t be able to find anything suitable within a five-minute walk from their current home.
Divorcees: Headed to Splitsville? Any chance that the proceeds of the sale of your share of the house will be enough to find a suitable place for you and your loved ones in the immediate area? Not if the vast expanse of Delta is zoned for single-detached housing, with isolated pockets of multi-family units and affordable spaces for families.
I know, I’m being overly romantic about the idea of gradually transitioning through the stages of life while remaining in the same neighborhood, with the same people around us. This romanticism comes from three sources:
My own experience
My grandfather’s experience
My hope for my own future
This variety of housing is the exception in Delta, BC, not the norm. Image via the author.
I’ve had a very hard time finding housing for my family while living in California, Ontario, and in BC again. Our costs to rent have always taken a much larger share of our household income than I would like and it has hindered me from being able to set aside funds for a future down payment for a home purchase. We prioritize housing and sacrifice many other potential types of savings and accumulation of wealth. If there were more types of housing in our city, it would provide a lot more choice for families like ours.
My grandfather, on the other hand, experienced a very different transition into housing after my Oma died. After living for a year on his own and feeling rather lonely, he moved into a senior’s home that was a few minutes’ walk from his home and it breathed new life into his final decade of life. He stepped into a home that was still familiar and into a neighborhood he was already oriented to. The added bonus of living with others meant that he suddenly found fresh purpose, and he was a willing volunteer whenever someone needed assistance or help with groceries and the like.
As for my hope for the future, I’d love to enjoy a deep and sustained connection to this place we’ve settled into. I’d like to stay. I’d like to have options when downsizing or changing rentals (if the need ever arose) or buying into a co-op or purchasing a home for our family. There aren’t many choices in our neighborhood at present. Hopefully in time there will be.
How did it get this way?
Eclecticism and Variety Has Been Killed by a Monoculture
In the pre-WWII development of our cities, we made room for a full spectrum of housing types in our neighborhoods. As Strong Towns senior editor Daniel Herriges explains:
If there was a market for something, somebody could more or less build it. This accommodated different strokes: not every home works for every household’s price point, lifestyle, or needs.
Over time, this eclecticism has been replaced by a monoculture. Outside of high-rise downtowns and tightly clustered areas of large apartment complexes, most American cities are dominated by single-family houses. This is not a natural outgrowth of the market: it’s the result of policy—put simply, of widespread bans on building anything else.
Michel Durand-Wood, also known as “Elmwood Guy” on the Dear Winnipeg blog, writes of his neighborhood:
Unfortunately, for reasons only known to the planners and politicians of yesteryear, we went backwards over the past 40 years. And instead of continuing to allow variety of housing to be built, according to the continually evolving needs of the people of the neighborhood, planners clamped down and started heavily restricting what could be built. As a result, not a lot of new stuff got built. People moved away. Businesses struggled. But somehow, the neighborhood plowed on.
What does Elmwood Guy suggest we do? “I’m advocating for a return to the zoning from 1981, because the flexibility and variety that zoning provided is what made my neighborhood and gave me my neighbors. And if you love your neighborhood as much as I do mine, you should advocate for the same, lest you be forced to move away from it someday once it can no longer meet your housing needs.” (emphasis added)
What Can You Do?
If you own a home with room to spare, consider how you might make your spot in the neighborhood the site of a three- or four-unit building that would be suitable for you and a few of your friends who are also ready to downsize.
If you own or rent a home next to a building that is ripe for redevelopment, encourage the owners to consider adding several different types of units to the rebuild. Encourage granny suites, laneway houses, and attic apartments—you just might decide you want to live in there, someday!
If you have the time and energy, tell your local leaders you are in favor of efforts to fix housing problems. Let them know it’s time to change the stifling zoning rules that currently designate so much of our cities as single detached dwellings only. If we care for our future and our neighbors’ futures, we should be interested in seeing a wide range of places to call home in our city.
Help make “Missing Middle Housing” less missing.
Cities need a variety of housing types. To fix the broken housing market, build towns that work for everyone, and grow stronger and more financially resilient, cities need to rediscover the “middle housing” options—duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes, accessory-dwelling units, courtyard cottages, and more—that were once commonplace but are now often zoned out of existence. Strong Towns members are on the front lines of this work. Help grow this movement by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman is a pastor and a Strong Towns member in Delta, BC, who blogs about local issues at www.onthefenceinladner.ca. He's also the co-founder of Del-POP (Deltans for People-Oriented Places) . You can connect with Norm on Twitter at @normvep.