Honestly, I believe that we just need to change the definition of the single residential unit so that it only restricts to residential units of a certain size. Allow townhouses and low-rise apartments in the same area. They’re about the same height and their appearance doesn’t have to deviate much from what’s already being done to single units.
A properly made town-house making the most use of a single unit lot can easily house four families. Take a double lot and you can quadruple it by making some concessions on each unit.
People might complain about three or four story buildings suddenly popping up everywhere, but in reality most houses are as tall as three and four story buildings already. They just waste the extra height with a triangular roof. Modern materials make a flat roof work fine even with how much snow we get, and you can multi-purpose the roof as a patio space on top of that. No more yards needed to waste space not being used for anything.
Great idea! I don’t think anybody has a problem with the fact that a building houses more than one family… The troubles begin when a castle tower pops up next to their pool!
How would you manage car traffic in a neighborhood that is slowly converted to houses 3 or 4 times as many families with as many cars?
I don’t think anybody has a problem with the fact that a building houses more than one family…
It is because of parking. Every additional unit will require parking spaces, those units will have guests who must likely will park on the street and that’s what gets the neighbourhood pitchforks out. They will scream how there will simultaneously be too much congestion and no parking spaces but also that people will speed down the street and make the neighbourhood unsafe. Parking and building height (neighbourhood character) are the two bullets nimbys use to kill a lot of housing projects.
BC will be introducing legislation in the fall that permits up to 4 units per parcel on all parcels. I’m interested to see how its handled by zoning and what things will look like in a few years. Hopefully this gets cities to start investing in transit as the higher densities might be able to support it.
With density, which enables adequate public transit, we need much less parking. Get rid of the parking requirement, and a lot of that problem goes away. I’d love to be able to buy a place without a useless-ass patch of concrete attached to it that’ll cost me an extra 20k for no damn reason.
Honestly, I believe that we just need to change the definition of the single residential unit so that it only restricts to residential units of a certain size. Allow townhouses and low-rise apartments in the same area. They’re about the same height and their appearance doesn’t have to deviate much from what’s already being done to single units.
A properly made town-house making the most use of a single unit lot can easily house four families. Take a double lot and you can quadruple it by making some concessions on each unit.
People might complain about three or four story buildings suddenly popping up everywhere, but in reality most houses are as tall as three and four story buildings already. They just waste the extra height with a triangular roof. Modern materials make a flat roof work fine even with how much snow we get, and you can multi-purpose the roof as a patio space on top of that. No more yards needed to waste space not being used for anything.
Great idea! I don’t think anybody has a problem with the fact that a building houses more than one family… The troubles begin when a castle tower pops up next to their pool!
How would you manage car traffic in a neighborhood that is slowly converted to houses 3 or 4 times as many families with as many cars?
It is because of parking. Every additional unit will require parking spaces, those units will have guests who must likely will park on the street and that’s what gets the neighbourhood pitchforks out. They will scream how there will simultaneously be too much congestion and no parking spaces but also that people will speed down the street and make the neighbourhood unsafe. Parking and building height (neighbourhood character) are the two bullets nimbys use to kill a lot of housing projects.
BC will be introducing legislation in the fall that permits up to 4 units per parcel on all parcels. I’m interested to see how its handled by zoning and what things will look like in a few years. Hopefully this gets cities to start investing in transit as the higher densities might be able to support it.
With density, which enables adequate public transit, we need much less parking. Get rid of the parking requirement, and a lot of that problem goes away. I’d love to be able to buy a place without a useless-ass patch of concrete attached to it that’ll cost me an extra 20k for no damn reason.