Globe and Mail on family-size flats

Nov 06, 2025

Two 1BR apartments, 624 square feet and 418 square feet

One question I’m very interested in: if limited land in Vancouver means that it no longer makes sense to build single-family houses or even rowhouses, how do we build livable family-size apartments?

The Globe and Mail ran a very interesting long-read article on Saturday: The era of the shoebox condo is over, by Erica Alini. “Canada needs livable apartments to help fix the housing crisis. To do that, it must change the rulebook for both condos and rentals.” She talked to Conrad Speckert, Mike Moffatt, Brandon Donnelly, and Bryn Davidson.

The illustration above shows that if you can put up a four-storey building on a 25-foot lot (which in Vancouver and Toronto isn’t easy!), each floor can only have two relatively small one-bedroom apartments.

A significant amount of space is taken up by a common hallway and two exit stairways. For a small building like this, that’s a lot of space.

With a single exit stairway - common in Montreal, where you can have a shared spiral staircase at the rear of the building to serve as a second exit - you can have a three-bedroom apartment with a bit less than 1100 square feet. That’s almost the same size as the three-bedroom townhouse that my wife and I raised our two kids in. (According to BC Assessment, it’s 1255 square feet, and that includes two sets of stairs.)

A family-sized 3BR apartment, 1100 square feet

Bryn Davidson talks about how floor-space limits in the city of Vancouver are too restrictive:

For example, he said, take a 6,100 sq. ft. lot [50x122], a large but still common size in Vancouver. The city’s current density cap for multiunit buildings is one-to-one FSR ratio, meaning a maximum floor space of 6,100 sq. ft.
That could fit anything from a triplex with units of just over 2,000 sq. ft. up to a sixplex with units just above 1,000 sq. ft. Mr. Davidson estimates the units would sell for around $1,050 per sq. ft., based on current prices for new construction. For a total of around 6,100 sq. ft. in floor space, that would work out to roughly $6.4-million in revenue for the entire building.
Building the multiplex would cost around $3.33-million, including construction, permitting and financing costs. And the project would require at least $730,000 in profit, the minimum required for a builder to secure the necessary loans from lenders. That would leave around $2.3-million to purchase the land.
That’s where the math often stops working, according to Mr. Davidson. While it’s possible to find properties on lots of that size on sale for $2.3-million in some areas of the city, many are far pricier. In other words, density caps are still too low given current land prices for single-lot multiplexes to be financially viable in large swaths of the city.