British Columbia Premier David Eby’s new housing plan calls for more missing middle housing – a new term for a throwback type of housing when families lived in bungalow courts and fourplexes, and enjoyed an affordable lifestyle surrounded by gardens and play areas.
In California, bungalow courts proliferated in the 1920s and 1930s, often situated within single-family neighbourhoods or as a transition into higher-density apartments. The housing type consisted of small bungalows in a U-shape around a courtyard. They co-existed with other housing types such as stacked triplexes, courtyard buildings, fourplexes and rowhouses.
Vancouver has a few such examples that remain from the period, in Strathcona, Mount Pleasant and Kitsilano. In Los Angeles, much of these types of housing disappeared by the 1940s because of parking requirements, says Aaron van Schaik, founder and principal of Los-Angeles based architecture and development firm SuperLA.
It’s one thing to add supply, but it’s another to create well-designed, sustainable housing that people want to live in for the long-term. Inspired by the bungalow courts of yesteryear, Mr. van Schaik has designed a “SuperBungalow” that takes the idea of a bungalow court and structures it vertically, while maintaining the original high livability concept of abundant garden space and exterior entry ways. And there are no shared walls, which give the units a detached house feel. He’s updated the concept with a high degree of sustainability, using prefabricated Canadian mass-timber panels, as well as a quicker construction timeline to keep costs manageable.
“[Bungalow courts] were a great product, and they were a ‘set product’ most of the time and repeated [design] across multiple projects,” says the Australian born designer and builder. “They quickly got pushed out when parking requirements came in, and now you can’t build them anymore based on that.”
Mr. van Schaik worked on development projects in Australia before working for a dozen years in Brooklyn on multifamily and industrial projects. He moved to Los Angeles to realize his vision for a low-density, walkable building type that goes against development industry convention.
New York buildings were too dense to redevelop, but in Los Angeles, he says, he could easily find single-family house lots to densify with his SuperBungalow.
Mr. van Schaik’s company does every aspect of development, from acquisition through to design, construction and management of the rental building. They completed their nine-unit Marathon Street project in August, and later this year they get started on their 15-unit Hyperion Avenue project, which will include two affordable units for very low incomes, mandated by the city. The affordable units will be identical to the market-rate units, with no physical division between them. They’ve also included required parking spaces.
Both buildings are in the walkable Silver Lake neighbourhood, and both sites were formerly single-family houses that were already zoned multifamily.
Late last year, his designs trended for a few days on Twitter.
“The mayor’s office has reached out to us after hearing about our projects,” Mr. van Schaik says. “We have been talking to different groups. It’s definitely a focus of Los Angeles and pro housing groups, to create a walkable neighbourhood.”
Single-family zoning has become a controversial topic in recent years in major cities in the U.S. and Canada. Oregon made single-family zoning illegal in cities of more than 10,000 people. California adopted a controversial law that allows up to four units on a single-family lot. In Los Angeles, 74 per cent of residential land is zoned for single-family housing, according to University of California, Berkeley.
In Vancouver, about half of the city is zoned ‘single-family,’ which is a misnomer because for several years the city has allowed secondary suites and laneway houses. Premier Eby’s four-point housing plan includes allowing three or four units on a single-family lot. Once passed, the new legislation will mean that if a multiunit project meets setback and size rules, the local council must pass it. The premier said condominium units aren’t always as suitable for families, and neighbourhoods need more small-scale multiunit projects.
In its quest to find missing middle housing types, Vancouver developers could look to SuperLA’s efficiencies through standardized, prefabricated design, rather than one-off customized designs and traditional construction methods that take a lot of time to go through permitting.
The irony is that mass timber panels are readily available in B.C. However, the local industry generally takes a traditional approach that’s served it well, and that usually means concrete towers, which are criticized for their lack of sustainability and lack of livability compared to ground-oriented housing. The 30-year Broadway Plan includes a significant number of 18- to 40-storey towers but without requirements to build with mass timber, which can go to 12-storeys. Instead, there are vague policies to make it easier to build with low-carbon materials.
Architect Alan Boniface, who works on master-planned communities with large developers, argues that the concrete tower is the best way to add density, which is urgently needed in a region that added an estimated 55,000 new immigrants last year.
“To be honest, the concrete tower is pretty efficient. It goes up quickly,” Mr. Boniface says. “A floor gets poured every six days or so, because the industry here knows how to build that quickly. And that isn’t where the expense is – other than the construction and labour [costs] going up. We have to build taller in Vancouver, based on land costs.”
Land costs, he says are exacerbated by development levies and community amenity contributions, which can be considerable. As well, there is the inflated cost of a land assembly when homeowners are paid a premium for their properties.
Mr. van Schaik hopes to scale his business model so that he can bring it to other North American cities, maybe even Vancouver one day. He wants to revolutionize the development industry so that instead of cranking out square footage, there’s more focus on bright and airy spaces and health and wellness.
SuperLA units incorporate exposed timber throughout and use solar power and heat pumps, filtered air and water, rainwater capture and low VOC-emitting materials. Importing mass timber panels from Quebec isn’t ideal for reducing carbon, he admits, but these are early days and Quebec’s Nordic Structures manufactures a particularly strong black spruce cross-laminated timber which results in a finely grained, blonde wood, beautiful for exposed applications.
In the spirit of the old bungalow court, they are developing their one- and two-bedroom projects as standardized designs intended for prefabricated reproduction, as opposed to the one-off customized design. Their one bedroom and one bathroom unit is 660 square feet. with a 150-sq.-ft. terrace. The two bedroom unit is 1,320 sq. ft. with a 250-sq.-ft. terrace.
“We have two set home types that we are repeating across all of our projects. And the efficiencies we gain from that is, from a design standpoint, we don’t need to spend hundreds of manhours designing every single feature of that building.
“We take our home type and we copy it across to the next project and then backfill around the units themselves with circulation and egress,” he says, referring to the breezeway passages between the units, the large terraces, the void spaces to allow trees and the external staircases at each end of the complex.
“So the design timeline for us means we can really design a full building in a couple of weeks as opposed to six to eight months.”
The schedule for framing the five-storey Hyperion is four weeks, using panels that have been pre-routed to allow for mechanical, electrical and plumbing. SuperLA has their own small manufacturing facility for doing millwork and some prefabrication. The majority of the design for Hyperion had already been used on their first project, so they’re moving through the permitting process quicker. That process will get faster once they’ve nailed down the design and standardized the model.
“And long term, we want to work with the city of L.A. and other jurisdictions to approve our homes.
“L.A. has a standard plan program for additional dwelling units so if you want to add an additional dwelling in your backyard you can use one of the L.A.D.B.S. (Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety) approved standard plans. So we want to be the first to basically take that standard plan model and apply it to a multifamily product type, and that would allow us to skip most of the permitting on our homes as well, in the long run.”