How to build a lot of housing that isn’t ugly

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At first glance, the three new buildings that developer Adrian Lai is promoting – among the first proposals in Vancouver’s effort to turbocharge densification along its extensive east-west Broadway corridor – look like standard 18-storey apartment towers.

But a closer look at the full presentation reveals that Mr. Lai is trying something different as the city envisions unprecedented changes in building scale along streets once lined with only single-family or duplex homes.

His towers are proposed at three different spots along a side street parallel to Broadway that have not seen anything even remotely close to this height in the past 120 years. The plans are filled with language about how to help tenants in his rental buildings connect with the community.

They describe apartments at ground level that can provide “eyes on the street,” stoops and seating that face the sidewalk to allow for more interaction, garden plots on both the edges of the property and, behind the building, links to local parks. They bring a focus to fostering “informal connections” among tenants and between tenants and neighbours all around. There could even be a coffee shop built in.

Mr. Lai and his partner, Martin Rahn, said they hadn’t done anything like this before in their previous work. But they believe the proposals from their HAVN Developments company were needed to respond to the very different kinds of streets that could soon see these tower proposals.

“In those areas, you need something quite sensitive,” Mr. Lai says. “A lot of buildings sort of turn their back on the street. What we’re trying to do is break that landscape and make it accessible to the public. With this new generation of buildings, I think there’s an opportunity to build in a bit more accessible way.”

After years of keeping strict control on new development in established neighbourhoods, Canada’s largest cities are throwing open the door to massive increases in heights and densities. Mr. Lai’s approach represents a focused effort at building housing that small pockets of community planners, social activists and regular residents say should become a priority.

“All density isn’t good density. We have to figure out the tenets of good density,” says Jay Pitter, a prominent Toronto planning consultant. “Density has to facilitate some kind of contact with our neighbours. It has to be culturally responsive. Far too many places are being built where someone can’t even step outside.”

Ms. Pitter, who has been working with the City of Toronto on a new plan for Little Jamaica on Eglinton West, said this new-generation building boom is a chance to do things better.

Past efforts at densification ended up segregating poor people into areas of concentrated poverty, didn’t provide room for the different forms of family living in Canada’s many cultures, and cut many groups off from each other.

In Vancouver, two organizations have energetically joined forces to combat social alienation - Hey Neighbour Collective, which works to connect tenants with each other, and Happy Cities, a planning consultancy that focuses on enhancing social bonds through better design in new housing. The group has received money to run policy-planning sessions with six of the Lower Mainland’s municipalities in an effort to get planners thinking about how to set standards for neighbourhood connectedness in new buildings.

Like Ms. Pitter, Michelle Hoar, manager at Hey Neighbour, notes that federal, provincial and city governments are all scrambling for ways to address the country’s housing crisis by attempting to speed up new supply to get it to the levels it was at in the 1970s.

“This is a moment of immense change,” she says. “More and more of us are going to be living in multiunit buildings. If we’re building a whole bunch of stuff like the ‘50s … we’re missing an opportunity.”

She and Madeleine Hebert, who leads housing research at Happy Cities, emphasize repeatedly that fostering social connections among people as cities densify is not some feel-good thing: It’s a crucial component of resilient, healthy cities.

“There’s a huge rise in loneliness among young people. We know about the effects of social isolation. All of these are intersecting, saying our housing can do more for us,” Ms. Hebert says.

Changing anything means first figuring out what really encourages people to interact with others. What doesn’t work are boisterous social events in a building that turn off shy tenants; small lobbies that discourage lingering; and designs that produce dead spaces and limit opportunities to simply see other people out and about.

“Most people have different interests and tolerance for community. Just seeing people around is positive for many of them,” Ms. Hebert says. But apartments were often not designed with any of that in mind. “Big lawns in front of apartments, that doesn’t contribute to street life.”

Canadians aren’t the only ones talking about this.

The head of U.S. organization Strong Towns, which focuses on making cities people-centric with more housing and less spaces for cars, is also promoting “good” density.

But it will take work because the current system of development and approvals doesn’t emphasize that, founder and president Charles Marohn says.

Many new buildings in cities like Vancouver look the way they do because each one is an isolated business venture that needs to succeed primarily at the financial level.

“What people are looking at is a financial product that is very easy to trade. It’s a good, tradeable security,” he says. That’s different even from suburban developers, who understood they were creating a whole neighbourhood and so needed to think beyond just the boxes they were putting up.

As a result, the current model is to erect big buildings and then try to disguise them. It’s an attitude of “Let’s put together something ugly and out of context and then we’ll mitigate that by buffering,” Mr. Marohn says.

“We need design to keep connections. And better design to me, it’s all about that interface with the street.”

Creating that kind of connectedness is going to require a big shift in thinking from both developers and city approvals staff, Mr. Marohn says.

In the heyday of apartment building in the 1960s and 70s, the structures were often parked in the middle of large lawns, as though they were like houses but bigger. There was generally nothing included in the design to encourage tenants to use that space and cities certainly didn’t ask for anything better.

In more recent decades, especially as most new apartment buildings have been relegated in Canadian cities to high-traffic streets, they’ve been built as enclosed fortresses, with barricade-style landscaping surrounding them. Again, city planners have encouraged and sometimes mandated that kind of strategy.

As well, the “amenity spaces” that cities now frequently require in many apartment buildings are stuck out of the way, on a roof – the cheapest place to put them as they don’t use up any of the builder’s allowed floor space – instead of at ground level with a connection to a potential lawn or garden.

Ms. Hebert and Ms. Hoar acknowledge that many people who design or live in apartments might be worried about security issues if the property or building is too open to the public at the ground level. Or they may be concerned that things will get messy in areas of a property used by many.

But they say those issues can be worked out if there’s a focus on the goal of improving public connectedness.

One other barrier that the “better density” proponents are sometimes running into is a backlash from those in what is informally called the YIMBY – Yes In My Back Yard – movement.

Those advocates, battling NIMBYs who have frequently used hand-wringing over design in the past half century as one more tactic to slow down desperately needed housing, are often impatient with anyone trying to suggest improvements.

Ms. Hebert acknowledges that it can be hard to talk about how to make housing better without getting involved in the “really polarizing conversation” that currently goes on between the extreme poles of YIMBY and NIMBY.

Ms. Hoar emphasizes repeatedly that the first priorities for housing are always affordability and security. The best design in the world doesn’t help if apartments are too expensive or someone is constantly at risk of being evicted. But she says it’s possible to incorporate design that fosters social connection without stalling things or making them more expensive.

Mr. Lai isn’t sure how the city – or neighbours – will respond to his concepts. (He did not work with Ms. Hoar’s or Ms. Hebert’s organizations to plan them and they have not reviewed his proposals.)

There is still a significant contingent of city residents who are outraged at the density they say is being foisted on tranquil neighbourhoods. And Vancouver’s city planners don’t have any specific mandate to favour proposals that focus on community connections.

“Going into existing neighbourhoods, it’s a challenge,” Mr. Lai said. “We hope we can get support.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that Happy Cities and Hey Neighbour Collective are jointly running, and being funded for, their work with municipalities.