When I was at a Bulablogger brunch organized last spring by jenables, I heard the story about this family living in an artists’ loft with two kids. It stuck in my head. Well, really, it would for any of us who have lived with kids and locked ourselves in the bathroom for a little privacy, even in relatively spacious, three-bedroom houses.
Could I do this, I wondered? Probably not, was my conclusion. But Kirk and Elaine, along with hundreds, even thousands, of other parents do in the city. Here’s their story.
Instead, they’re living the anti-suburban life. The four Jongs (and a cat) live in what is essentially a large, open room – a 1,000-square-foot loft near Vancouver’s downtown and its rail-related industrial lands. They bought the condominium unit in 2003 for $269,900 (it’s now assessed at $481,000). Their three beds are within inches of each other on the upstairs half-floor. Kali’s play area has been carved out of space under the staircase. And a family’s worth of stuff is stacked tidily in cabinets, on shelving, and in plastic boxes as high as they’ll go along the walls.
“I get told a lot that I’m crazy, that we need to move,” says Kirk, who works at a high-tech business in nearby Richmond. Adds Elaine, while the two kids fence beside her with rubber swords: “My parents don’t understand why you’d live in an apartment.”
But the Jongs, who both grew up in bucolic southeast Vancouver, say they’re not willing to leave their central Mount Pleasant neighbourhood and they feel that buying anything house-like in the area they’ve come to love would mean too big a jump up the mortgage ladder. This week, the cheapest duplex on sale in the area is listed at $599,000; the cheapest house that isn’t a tear-down or on a major traffic street is $899,000. Their building, an artists’ live-work loft that was developed in the early nineties, gives them a spectacular view of the city. It’s just a few blocks from the comic-book store, the cafés and the other businesses they visit regularly on Main Street. They won’t even consider the suburbs.
The Jongs are part of a small but noticeable trend in both the United States and Canada – middle-class families who are so determined to hang on to the central-city urban life they got attracted to in their 20s that they’re refusing to follow the normal migratory flight to the land of the split-level and double garage.
Vancouver’s chief housing officer, Mukhtar Latif, in a presentation on affordable housing to city council last week, reported that more than 11,000 families with children are living in studios or one-bedroom units in the city. The trend is so pronounced that it’s skewing school planning. A new school that is about to be built near Chinatown has had to have more space tacked on at the last minute. Planners never expected that so many children would appear in the areas nearby, because most of the units were small. It turned out they were wrong.
While many of the city’s crowded households are undoubtedly the traditional poorer families who’ve always packed into small spaces, some are not.
Instead, they’re middle– to higher-income families. A recent New York Times article on a similar trend noted that the number of white professionals with one or more children living in one-bedroom condo units in that city had jumped by almost a third between 2000 to 2006. Prof. Andrew Beveridge, from Queens College of the City University of New York, said the pattern was showing up in other expensive American cities. In Toronto, the 2011 National Household Survey showed there are about 72,000 families living in 71,500 units in buildings with five or more storeys – undoubtedly many of them the new, tiny condos proliferating there.
Vancouver has made an effort to attract families to its downtown and central areas, pushing developers to provide daycare spaces and parks and, not always successfully, three-bedroom condos. Developers have tended to prefer building smaller studios and one-bedrooms, which are snapped up by first-time buyers and investors. There’s been a boom in children downtown, but many couples in the past have only lasted a couple of years with an infant or a toddler in 600 square feet, before moving on.
What’s different now is the way the parents are hanging in past toddlerhood in the relatively small downtown condo units, people like the Jongs, several of their neighbours in the building, and a host of others.
It takes some strategic planning to live in that small a space, they acknowledge. Kirk and Elaine wear headphones to watch TV while their children tumble around the living area. When Kyle was a newborn and started crying, one parent would have to decamp to the bathroom and shut the door to try to keep the noise level bearable. Kali has never had school friends over because there’s just not enough room, although she loyally says that she copes. “I find it more comfortable. I have my brother here all the time.”
Kirk describes it as “kind of like living in a hotel room.” But he and Elaine also say it allows them to spend real family time together, not the kid-activity-oriented lives they see others embroiled in. The four spend a lot of time outside the condo, eating out and walking all over the city, rain or shine.
“On the weekend, we’ll leave here in the morning and we won’t come back till 9,” says Kirk. They walk to Stanley Park, Gastown, Chinatown, Science World. Since they’re so close to Main and Hastings, they frequently walk past the city’s most notorious drug corner. But the people hanging out there will call out, “Kids on the block,” and everyone is on their best behaviour while the Jongs pass.
That’s what they, and many other middle-class families, like – the sense that they’re living in a walkable place that’s almost like a village and where there’s a tolerance for all kinds of people. The Jongs’ children know most of the store-owners along Main and can call on them any time if they need help.
And what about adult alone time? Well, that too takes some strategy and planning but it all works, say the two diplomatically.
Like many other city families, Kirk and Elaine are always wondering how long they can hang on living in such a small space. They thought they’d move when the first baby was born. Then the second. “Even now, we keep saying we’ve got to move eventually,” says Kirk. But they also keep putting it off.
In Yaletown, on Vancouver’s downtown peninsula, Melanie Osmack says she and all the parents around her have gone through the same angst. Ms. Osmack, who runs a business targeted at the swelling population of middle-class families around her (pre- and postnatal fitness and yoga classes), said there’s been a sea change since she had her son 10 years ago. Her family and friends in Langley used to think it was just weird that she stayed living downtown with two kids (her daughter is 7) in a 700-square-foot condo unit. Even when she moved to her current abode, 1,100 square feet with – gasp – a second bedroom, it wasn’t seen as a huge improvement. But she’s stopped hearing the suggestions that she should move to a real house, after years of her enthusiastic descriptions of the close community she lives in and the many parks and activities she and her children have access to.
“I don’t get the pressure any more.” But she does wonder what she’ll do when her son is a teenager in not too many years and maybe not so eager to share a bedroom with his sister.
83 responses so far ↓
1 Bill // Jul 31, 2014 at 5:17 pm
@Chris Keam
Perhaps I was too quick to let the government off the hook:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-07-16/mommy-police-with-real-handcuffs
2 Chris Keam // Jul 31, 2014 at 5:26 pm
Your conclusions Bill are certainly in keeping with your general perspective on the world near as I can tell, and you are welcome to them, but there’s little evidence to support your contention.
Providing access to nature and freedom of movement for children isn’t the same thing as providing social support to people who make bad decisions. I don’t think any valuable corollary can be gained by trying to equate the two.
3 Roger Kemble // Jul 31, 2014 at 9:17 pm
Just one other thought Michael @ #28 about your vid “through a young lens”.
Fine, sneering at sprawl from the top of Burke Mountain but your efforts in False Creek North are only sprawl with a hard on!
4 Michael Gordon // Aug 1, 2014 at 12:39 am
Roger@53
Hey Roger, I really appreciate that you took the time to look at the doc we did. Also, I think that if we ever have the chance to sit together and chat we would find we have a lot in common about what we are looking for and value as good places for people to live….
A bit of an anecdote to expand on the above….20 years ago I took an urban design course and Arthur Erickson was one of the instructors….so I asked Arthur….what do you think…should we have looked at options to the point tower for the north shore of False Creek…Arthur…cut me off in mid sentence and was very dismissive with me….he said that Vancouver was about a scale that was about towers north of the creek in the downtown and lower buildings south of the creek. I did leave that moment quite disappointed we could not have more explored the question I had raised.
So Roger, just letting you know I still wonder about these questions of appropriate scale and still asking them whether in the downtown or outside our downtown.
5 Everyman // Aug 1, 2014 at 12:58 am
@rph 49
Ladner has been hoping to be the next Steveston for some time. It is unlikely to happen for a host of reasons.
6 Roger Kemble // Aug 1, 2014 at 5:53 am
“Arthur…cut me off in mid sentence and was very dismissive with me….he said that Vancouver was about a scale that was about towers north of the creek in the downtown and lower buildings south of the creek.” Michael @ 54
The issues in urban design are not about towers: towers are a defacto part of the built urban typology.
Urban design, and I hope I am not pontificating, is the most important element of urban planning and should be treated as art: i.e. figure ground inter-relationships, plastic form, colour, texture, all the ambulatory experientials.
The neglected party wall, etc., so much a part of that urban experience we spend millions to see in Europe.
Vancouver is not alone:
We have a long way to go!
7 rph // Aug 1, 2014 at 9:02 am
@Everyman #55 – why is that you think? I have a couple sets of friends who have recently moved there (Captains Cove area) and they rave about the sense of community. The waterfront has so much potential although I do know there is some bickering over what is the perfect form of development for it.
8 Everyman // Aug 2, 2014 at 8:10 am
@rph 57
As Gertrude Stein famously said “There’s no there there”. There is no locus of attractions or restaurants as there is in Steveston. Ladner also has the added barrier of the tunnel (for now) and possibly a toll bridge in its future.
9 jolson // Aug 2, 2014 at 10:07 am
Roger @56
Urban design is about much more than a few artistic elements and a stroll through the lobby. Its practice requires the integration of many disciplines including architecture, landscape architecture, engineering of various sorts, transportation planning, and infrastructure design. It is responsive to the biosphere, the rotation of the earth, the dynamics of the atmosphere, the orbit of the moon, the geography and topography of place. Urban design takes place with-in an historical context which is both static and evolutionary. Add to this a social milieu, a technological means of construction, a regulatory regime and the realities of economics unfolding in real time and you will have the raw elements of urban design. Urban design is a complex process and not easily accounted for by an artistic analysis.
Urban design is actually the only means available for humans to achieve a balanced and harmonic relationship with the biosphere and this is so ever since the mass migration from the country to the modern city. Urban design shapes our lives and our future and as such needs to be taken seriously.
10 Roger Kemble // Aug 2, 2014 at 10:31 am
“Urban design is about much more than a few artistic elements and a stroll through the lobby. Its practice requires the integration of many disciplines including architecture, landscape architecture, and engineering of various sorts, transportation planning, and infrastructure design. ”
No it isn’t Jolson @ # 59!
Reminiscent of so many pseudo authorities whose object is to expand and complicate the subject out of existence you fall into line!
I almost expected someone to come up with your drivel
Urban design requires artistic talent and it application, a dearth so prevalent in todays over professionalized phony (“no one is doing what I am doing” and “this will be the most sustainable‘ etc. etc.)
You like so many Vancouver’s planners have taken the Kool-Aid because you don’t have the balls to live up to your pretensions . . .
Vancouver’s developers and developments are not bad! They are just small-minded money hungry mediocrities repeating what they read in the trade magazines.
Urban design is art, risk taking in its most sophisticated form but I guess Jolson you wouldn’t know anything about that. Would you?
11 Roger Kemble // Aug 2, 2014 at 11:33 am
PS: Jolson @ #59
The issue of form and urban relationships has its antecedents in the closure laws of the latter part of the eighteenth century.
At that time there existed an element of aristocratic elan that allowed for much of the European urban elegance we expend millions to enjoy on our touristism jaunts today.
Alas that elegance has yielded to the frantic rush to keep up with exponentiating debt.
The wags promoting the new Oakridge development even pushed some nonsense about incuding a Parisienne street, I suppose, to bolster their lack of local creativity: I don’t know where that went!
Today’s CD zoning is an attempt to coordinate the disparate elements of built form but that only controls one ownership, on site relationships.
Inter-title relationships have yet to find expression and given the current deeply denied debt situation that expression is yet a long way off!
Mucho suerte
12 Everyman // Aug 3, 2014 at 7:37 am
@Kirk 43
There is a third choice you did not mention: Packing up and leaving Vancouver.
Many friends have had their kids leave for Alberta with it’s better job market and less ridiculous housing prices.
13 Jay // Aug 3, 2014 at 12:13 pm
43 – “Unfortunately, Vancouver’s walkable communities are all in the core, so they’re really expensive. Looking at Seattle, they have a downtown with Belltown and nearby Capitol Hill. But, they also have Ballard, Greenlake, Fremont, etc. that are like small towns on their own. Hopefully, New West will continue to grow, and Surrey will gain some walkable areas too.
Just wanted to mention some Vancouver neighbourhoods that are outside the core and are easily comparable to Seattle neighbourhoods. Those Seattle neighbourhoods you mentioned are not very extensive by the way. Burnaby Heights is very walk-able with an over 1 km stretch of various shops and restaurants. Fraser street between 41st and 49th is an interesting fusion of cultures. Uptown/downtown New West, Upper and Lower Lonsdale, Kerrisdale, Hastings Sunrise, even Marpole would meet Seattle’s criteria for a good neighbourhood. I guess Main St. is considered to be in the core of the city, but it goes for over 2 km’s (the interesting parts anyway), well out of the core. Really, Vancouver blows Seattle out of the water. Still expensive though.
14 jolson // Aug 4, 2014 at 11:09 am
@Roger
The truth of an argument is not dependent on the biography of the author.
15 jolson // Aug 4, 2014 at 2:38 pm
PS@ Roger
North American planners are much enamoured with the old world street wall. You can find remnants of this thinking along Hastings Street in the Downtown Eastside. It did not produce housing of quality, which is the subject of this string. It did however satisfy the artistic sensibility of the day. This illustrates the bankruptcy of the claim that urban design is all about artistry. Such a claim does much to mystify the public and advance the interests of contracting designers, but little else.
Urban design is about the future not the past. In practice it needs to accommodate the issues of tomorrow which can be understood by reading the news today.
16 roger Kemble // Aug 4, 2014 at 3:19 pm
There are some very interesting contemporary examples of urban design Jolson @ #65 even local, even though I really have to stretch my memory.
Locally Millennium Waters, alias Olympic Village, on False Creek.
Also around the world, I know from personal experience, St. Lawrence Centre, Toronto; Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires; and La Condesa, La Ciudad de Mexico!
17 jolson // Aug 4, 2014 at 5:01 pm
Thanks Roger I’m very glad that you like the Olympic Village
I am quite familiar with that project having spent a decade inventing it beginning with original research leading to a green transportation plan, a land use plan, a public realm plan, a rainwater recycling / storm water management plan, a net zero energy plan, an urban agriculture plan, and the restoration of a heritage building.
I went on to co-ordinate a zero emissions energy plan based on sewer heat recovery, geo-exchange storage, heat pumps, hydronic slabs, and high thermal performance buildings. This work led to the district energy system in place today.
I led the Stantec team in the development of the green infrastructure systems and the Public Realm Plan. I am the designer of the Canoe Bridge which has become an iconic element and much loved stop along the seaside walkway system. (Yes, there is a place for art!)
My observations on urban design are based in experience. Although the OV has won many awards for sustainability, there is much more that can and needs to be done when constructing the built environment. My interest today is in redefining how we think about urban design.
Happy BC Day
18 Roger Kemble // Aug 4, 2014 at 5:06 pm
Congrats Jolson on your OV work: great.
Happy BC day 2 U 2
19 Kirk // Aug 5, 2014 at 9:08 am
@62 Everyman
Timely article about Americans leaving expensive cities for more affordable cost of living. Since Vancouver is the second least affordable citiy on the entire planet, it makes sense some people are starting to leave.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/business/affordable-housing-drives-middle-class-to-cities-inland.html?_r=1
20 Brilliant // Aug 6, 2014 at 7:54 am
@Chris Keam 24 Calcutta is the logic conclusion of your premise. Let us know ow when you’re having your housewarming.
21 Chris Keam // Aug 6, 2014 at 8:53 am
Urban design that facilitates children being able to move in public space without being driven by their parents will result in Calcutta? LOL
22 Bill // Aug 6, 2014 at 10:52 am
@Chris Keam
What you are describing in #35 is more about people choosing how they want to live and raise their families rather than any lack of transportation options.
23 Chris Keam // Aug 6, 2014 at 11:16 am
@Bill – comment #70 clearly references my remarks at #24. Not that it makes a lick of sense in either case.
24 Bill // Aug 6, 2014 at 11:41 am
@Chris Keam
I’m not surprised the concept of people making choices for themselves makes no sense to you.
25 Chris Keam // Aug 6, 2014 at 1:05 pm
Don’t troll Bill. You’re better than that I hope.
I’m pretty sure you’ve paid enough attention to know that my default position is giving people as much choice and freedom as can be managed. I have no idea why you consider my remarks so dangerous that not a single one can go unremarked by you, but it’s in your own best interest and credibility to at least make those comments somewhat worthy of reading.
thanks,
CK
26 Jenables // Aug 9, 2014 at 8:14 pm
Hey Roger, when did you live by lighthouse park? My grandparents lived in the 5600 (I think) block of marine drive until they died. The lot cost my grandpa $2200 in 1950, they moved from kits.
27 Jenables // Aug 9, 2014 at 8:17 pm
Boohoo you could always rent and probably save a lot of money. No strata required.
28 Roger Kemble // Aug 9, 2014 at 8:22 pm
Hi Jenable @ #76. My family and I lived at 5070 Marine Drive from 1962 to 1970.
Our neighbours were the Millwards and Rays.
29 Jenables // Aug 10, 2014 at 1:03 pm
My grandparents, Ken and Violet were at 5620. Had you lived there a decade earlier my dad would probably have been your paper boy lol! My dad was at ubc in 1962, still living at home.. Wonder if he drove to school? It’s a small world and I guess it was smaller then.
30 Roger Kemble // Aug 10, 2014 at 3:01 pm
From 5620 Marine WV to UBC is a long haul Jenables @ #79: your Dad must be a real trooper.
I was ancient pistol living at 16th and Granville by the time I got to UBC’s SCARP: walked to the bus @ Broadway, then nice ride all the way to UBC. (who needs a toob?)
31 Kirk // Aug 13, 2014 at 5:20 pm
The good news: someone finally looked at the psychological effects on kids in small condos.
The bad news: the kids are messed up.
Vancouver was recently told that we “succeeded” in having families cram into the core. As such a fore front leader, you’d think someone here would’ve studied if that’s such a good idea in the first place..
http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/the-health-risks-of-small-apartments/282150/
32 Jenables // Aug 15, 2014 at 3:40 pm
I meant to add my grandparents house has been gone for over a decade, the forested area at the front of the property, the long driveway and the neighbours next door have been developed into a new cul de sac with four or five houses. My grandma used to take me on little walks when I was young.. Just to the very edge of their property. There was a little pet cemetery there with little marked Graves. I was morbidly fascinated by this. In the coming years I and my brothers had many pets, and I had my own little pet cemetery (mostly gerbils, lizards, and fish iirc) though it was never quite as illustrious or creepy as the one on the edge of my grandparents house. I wonder if it is still there, or if it’s inhabitants suffered the same fate as the animal skeletons that showed up in a ton of dirt my grandpa had trucked in sometime in the fifties. Sunrise, sunset. So where do you bury small animals when you are in a condo?
33 Jenables // Aug 15, 2014 at 6:30 pm
I just re read that and realized it sounded pretty disturbing at the end. As someone who had two gerbils that continually bred, who took the babies (when they were old enough) to the pet store and asked them not to feed them to the snakes, but who also had rabbits, fish, mice, salamanders, lizards, a dog, turtles, as well as the snakes and tadpoles we’d catch and release, i of course had to deal with their deaths as well. So my question was actually sincere but really looked disturbing when I re opened my browser. Sorry.