A Place Downtown for Little Ginny?

A chart showing the average floor space of a new apartment in the GTA. Graph from "Toronto's Condo Blog"

I had a small twitter conversation with Brent Toderian, the former Director of Planning in Vancouver, about building spaces downtown for families. The conversation was in regards to a recent article about downtown housing in Ottawa. Toderian's contention was that a condominium that was "1300 sq ft" (the number listed in the article as being a "comfortable" size for a family) was "suburban" thinking. His point, as I gather, is that declaring a space to be too large/too small to raise a family within is a silly way of measuring the "livability" of a space. As he tweeted to me, "Its more about the layout/bedrooms than sf, & affected by quality/amenities of neighbourhood. Not a math exercise." Toderian is (if I might be presumptuous, judging by another tweet he made) trying to
 argue that the formula should be "value for your money" rather than "space for your money".

This is an undeniable truth to such a statement; if you have a grocery store nearby, you can probably forgo a giant freezer for bulk purchases. Creative use of space can allow you to do a lot in a relatively small area. Thinking of "space" as nothing more than a raw footprint can be very misleading. Still, even if we can imagine a family using a relatively small space (and it's certainly a fun exercise to think how you could accommodate a three bedroom place in say, 1000 sq ft), that is generally a concern for someone other than the developer. After all, they absolutely have to deal with the "math"; most zoning by-laws are going to be quite explicit about things such as height, density, and the number of units they want to build.

The problem that Ottawa (and many other places, such as downtown Toronto, and I assume downtown Vancouver) is that "family" sized units -- however you wish to define them, but let's just be very broad and say "three bedroom" -- are not a hot commodity. As a recent CBC article discusses, the market is demanding one bedroom (and one bedroom + den) places that are barely cracking 800 sq ft of space (and often, not at all). The long term implications of this market demand is a very transient population, that often must move to find space that can handle a burgeoning family. Couple that with the high cost of living downtown (and the subsidization of the suburbs... another topic I'll try and address in the future) and it's no wonder that some think that downtown is no place to raise a family.

It is therefore not surprising that the answer from most cities is to force developers to include affordable "family sized" units via a ZBL (or a ZBL amendment). Letting the developers decide what should be built (which subsequently will determine who will live there) isn't going to diversify the housing stock, at least not until the market shifts.

But that still begs the question: if the problem from the developer perspective is a math problem, how do you, as a city planner, influence the equation to produce the "answer" you're looking for? Even if the result you're trying to deliver is "value for your buck", without a strong ZBL, you're going to have to "convince" a developer that it's worth their time to build units made for a family, rather than young professionals.

I ended up asking Brent Toderian whether he had any specific examples he'd point to as spaces where families can live in "less than" 1300 sq ft. His answer was that there are thousands of kids living in downtown Vancouver, because "families pick neighbourhoods". That may be true, but what are the developers picking?