My Wet Coast Life

Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/the-incredible-shrinking-condo/article1443864/

Now i am not a fan of apartments after spending most of my life living in a house. Most apartments i did live in were fairly large 1 and 2 bedrooms on average 8-900+ square feet. I just prefer to open my front door and see lawn instead of a hallway, not have to do my laundry in a communal room and wait around so someone doesn't make off with my clothes and be able to go out the back door and enjoy a yard and BBQ.

I got to house sit for my sister in Yaletown area of Vancouver and started to see the shrinking domicile. Her one bedroom (with den) was just over 500 square feet and i felt confined. But it worked for her as she was hardly home and needed a place to eat, sleep and do laundry, other than that, she was out and about. If your a person who likes to chill at home, cabin fever sets in very quickly and if more than one person, doesn't take long to encroach on the others space...

Now why am i talking about that? well, to make affordable housing more affordable, they have come out with an apartment/loft measuring a mere 270 square feet!
That works out to be smaller than 2 parking stalls or about the size of a sailboat living space. Now for those on low income, this can beat the hotel/motel room until you see the price. They want $750/month for this or about $2.77/square foot where my 900+ square feet one bedroom in North Vancouver worked out to $1.12/square foot. and was 3 times the size for only $200 more a month! Now i understand it comes furnished with built-in wall beds, tables and flat-screen TVs but you kind need all the space saving designs available when the space is so small. It is is to be affordable, rent should be around $500/month and the $750/month price should include a separate room at the bare minimum...

Follow up:

Plus Vancouver is now one of the worst in affordable housing. This report looked at 272 metropolitan markets in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. 4 of the 5 least affordable cities; Vancouver, Victoria, Abbotsford and Kelowna are in B.C. Only Vancouver and Toronto fell into the severely unaffordable market in Canada but hey, that's where i live. The affordable cities were all in Ontario or east.

The Provincial government has one building under way with suites as small as 256 square feet as part of its push to build housing for the homeless, the mentally ill and the drug-addicted. I guess it comes down to quantity over anything else and getting people off the street and out of hotels and becoming contributing members of society.

Now what is odd is if a developer is building new a unit, then the minimum size is 400 square feet, unless they get special permission and then they can drop it down to 320 square feet. Still more than the in-progress 256 square feet provincial project or the available 270 square feet and even larger than what can be found overseas in land starved areas such as Japan. They have places around 220 square feet but they are also used to smaller living environments due to the lack of land. Someone coming from the western world might think otherwise when compared to living standard in North America. I guess it is just a sign of the times to allow smaller places to increase the availability of affordable housing. With the Olympics, we get the Olympic village which will have 250 affordable housing units. But with the blown budget and taxpayers paying for it, i doubt the price will be too affordable as i doubt the taxpayers want to be paying for this for the next 20 years....

I guess in the end, that is where society will be headed with land being used up, we can only expand up. And then with the cost of housing, now in the $750,000+ range for a decent, but small, detached single family home, these cubby holes look more appealing to the wallet and if you spend most of your time away from home, it makes more sense. For those who prefer the stretching room or just having more than one room (other than bathroom), you will be living farther and farther away from the city center and either dealing with a craptacular commute everyday or hopefully tele-commuting.

Now the next time you park your car, look at the stall next to it, put up imaginary walls and think, could i live in an area this big?

Do you think it is a good idea to make such small apartments? Could this be the beginning of the end for decent size accommodations?

Could you live in something this small?

I guess only time will tell...