Vancouver’s East Side suffers from The Mohawk

Writer Erick Villagomez beat me to a topic that I’ve been a little obsessed about for the last year or so. I began to document the matter in photos last January. I tagged new homes with small, one-room top floor extensions as having “peek-a-boo” rooms. Erick came up with a better label: The Mohawk.

Erick argues that as a result of Vancouver’s rules around “floor space ratio” home builders are squeezing an extra, ugly story to new homes to provide a view over surrounding homes (and trees). He nails it by calling it what it is: junk food architecture.   

I recently met with Vancouver’s Director of Planning Brent Toderian, and raised the subject with him during a conversation. He had read Villagomez’s article, and was aware of the issue. As senior planner of our city, it was a bit beyond his bailiwick. Vancouver approves about 2000 home building permits per year, most of which cross the desk of the director’s subordinates. That said, he did want to have the city’s planning department look further into the matter.

While we can’t expect all home builders to have good taste, we can create policies that don’t allow good homes to be replaced by badly designed ones. Outsiders like urbanist Andrés Duany are almost slack-jawed at the ugly homes we build too often in Vancouver. Read the excellent account of his words here, posted by former Vancouver Sun blogger Frances Bula. You can see Duany’s speech here, now that Frances’ blog has been removed by the Vancouver Sun.

Thanks to the EcoDensity debate, and the great work around Vancouver’s public realm (the new seawall in the Olympic Village, for example), I feel that Vancouver is placing a stronger emphasis on urban design. As part of this trend we mustn’t ignore that single-family residential makes up most of our landscape, and we should expect that home design must meet the standards we place on commercial and public buildings.