A few days I retweeted the above home from Dwell Magazine. Then yesterday I was driving through midtown Toronto and I stumbled upon it. And that got me thinking more about this kind of project.

The house is a triplex with, presumably, one unit in the basement, one unit on the main floor, and one unit across the 2nd and 3rd floor. The existing detached house was only 2 storeys and so a third floor was added to create what is likely the “owner’s suite.”

It’s not uncommon for many of the houses in central areas of Toronto to be converted into duplexes and triplexes or to flip back into single family homes after being subdivided for rentals. It goes to show how adaptable the single family house can be.

But it’s not everyday that you see such a high end triplex being built as, what seems to be, a permanent residence and kind of dream home for the owners. Historically, when people built their dream home it has meant a single family home.

This might not seem like an important distinction, but I think it demonstrates a growing acceptance of intensification within low-rise single family neighborhoods.

Part of this I’m sure has to do with rising housing costs. But I think it also has to do with valuing location over raw space and with an acceptance of urban density.

I don’t know about you, but I would have no concerns with permanently laying down roots in a house like this. It’s beautiful.

Image: Dwell

The Old Urbanist (Charlie Gardner) recently published an interesting post talking about the origins of American zoning using the work of Professor Sonia Hirt and her new book, Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation.

One of the central themes in his post is the American (and Canadian) fixation on single-family homes:

…the United States is the only developed country of those surveyed, apart from Canada, to widely employ single-family detached residential zones that bar all commercial and multifamily uses.

And the reason for this is largely because of two longstanding beliefs in American (and again Canadian) culture: Your goal should be to become a homeowner, and that home should ideally be a single-family detached home.

But there’s lots of evidence to suggest that these legal protections (and many of the other things being done to encourage/subsidize homeownership) aren’t actually that effective at driving up homeownership.

In his post, Charlie includes a chart showing the percentage of detached homes and the homeownership rates for various countries (data is from 2013/2014). I sorted it based on homeownership and added urbanization rates to see if there was any correlation (doesn’t appear to be).

Source: Charlie Gardner & Wikipedia

The US and Canada are quite good at putting lots of people in detached housing (though not as good as Australia!), but the homeownership rates are nowhere near the top. In fact, the US falls in the lower half.

Did you think the homeownership rate would be higher in the US?

In yesterday’s post about the 3 stages of intensification, I mentioned a project in Vancouver called Union Street EcoHeritage by SHAPE Architecture. I used it as an example for sensitive low-rise intensification.

Since it’s a very cool project (and most of you probably didn’t click through), I thought I would dedicate today’s post to explaining the project.

The picture at the top of this post is what it looks like today (the front elevation). If you were to pass by it, I suspect most of you would just think it was a pair of renovated single family homes. But there’s much more to it. What started out as only 2 dwellings, ended up as a site for 7 dwellings.

Here’s the before shot:

The homes were moved and actually raised up in order to accommodate additional density. Here’s a section that better explains what was done (black is existing; green is new):

The 2 existing homes were raised up so that an additional dwelling unit could be placed beneath each one. At the same time, additional units were added in the rear, both attached to the existing homes and at the back of the site facing the laneway. And so this project is actually one part laneway house.

Here’s a photo of what that rear interior space looks like (it’s stunning):

Not surprisingly, this project won a bunch of awards and has been widely celebrated as an affordable housing solution. It’s exciting to see Vancouver take the lead on low-rise intensification. It’s one of the reasons that I think it’s only a matter of time before Toronto starts to look towards similar solutions.

Images: SHAPE Architecture Inc.