Vancouver Tests Cheap Alley Housing

BLOG POST posted on September 17, 2011 by Gwalgen Dent

Newsweek blogger Andrew Sullivan has an interesting link to projects going on in Vancouver that involve transforming garages or small alleyway guesthouses into full-scale, super-dense accommodation.

Laneway homes are basically miniature versions of single-family homes – in the range of 500 to 1,000 square feet – that are built in what has traditionally been the garage location of a single-family lot: in the backyard facing the lane.

In Vancouver, the revival was spawned by sky-high real estate prices, a lack of affordable housing, and an ingenious plan to create ‘hidden density’ in the city’s most desirable single-family neighborhoods.

While laneway house-conversions are almost exclusively created for rental income and exclusively cater to people with higher incomes, they are a welcome alternatve to current urban housing  expansion in Vancouver (and in other majorcities in Canada): the condo.

They also are a higher-priced example of other projects aiming to tackle cheaper and small forms of housing.  Several years ago, Dru from the Montreal Media Co-op highlighted the hexayurt project, while Kim Aronson in California has recently been focusing on other micro-housing unit projects in Berkley.