Image of the day: a five-storey condo building
Adjacent to Little Mountain
Rezoning report. City website for the rezoning.
Timeline:
Preparing to submit rezoning application
Waiting for rezoning - application submitted October 2015, public hearing and approval July 2016
Waiting for development permit
Waiting for building permit (BP-2017-03751) - permit number created July 2017, permit issued April 2018
Construction - completed in 2019
Land is both scarce and underused
Land in Vancouver is scarce, and therefore expensive. But there’s no good reason for apartments to be so scarce, expensive, and tiny. There’s nothing physically stopping us from building a lot more floor space. The more we build, the more downward pressure we put on price per square foot, as floor space becomes less scarce and expensive.
Of course you’re not going to see the needle move if you’re upzoning and redeveloping one parcel of land at a time (which is why people like Patrick Condon think that upzoning has no effect). To make floor space less scarce and expensive per square foot, you need a lot more of it, which means upzoning and building a lot of projects across a wide area.
This particular five-storey apartment building provides more than 3X as much floor space (2.3 FSR, about 18,000 square feet) compared to what two maximum-sized single-detached houses would provide (0.7 FSR, about 5,600 square feet), on the same land.
Looking at assessed values, the condo prices are a bit over $1000 per square foot - about $1.28M for a 3BR, 1100 square foot condo, requiring a household income of about $250,000/year to be affordable.
Of course that’s expensive. But single-detached houses, occupying a big chunk of scarce land, are even more expensive. Even when they’re really old:
This single-detached house at 4955 Quebec Street, built in 1936, is assessed at $2.16M. It’s 1500 square feet (about half on the main floor, half in the finished basement). Almost all the value is the opportunity cost of the land, a 33-foot lot: that’s how much someone would pay to tear down the existing house and build a new maximum-sized house, with about 2800 square feet of floor space.
Something like this:
This is a newer single-family house at 4890 Quebec Street, built in 2011. It’s assessed at $3.3M, requiring a household income of roughly $660,000/year to be affordable. The lot is somewhat larger (43 feet wide), and the land is assessed at $2.24M. Total floor space is 3270 square feet, which is basically the maximum allowed. It has seven bedrooms and five bathrooms.
When we talk about preserving the character of a neighbourhood, that’s what we’re talking about: continuing to reserve scarce land for building super-expensive, maxed-out houses.
More
Land cost - using broad upzoning to reduce the cost of land per square foot of floor space
Shrinkflation - when price per square foot goes up, apartments shrink
The need for excess capacity - when people are building right up to the limits, that means restrictions are too tight