Vancouver property owners bringing wrecking ball to character homes

Teardown. It's a dismaying word for many residents of Vancouver, where sustained high real-estate prices have sacrificed a lot of older homes to the wrecker.

Teardowns used to refer to mouldy old shacks but in Vancouver, hundreds of solid, even fully updated homes are being bulldozed.

Statistics from the Canadian Real Estate Association show the average sale price of a Vancouver single-family home in June was $796,714, compared with a national average of $413,215. Most of the value is in the land which is so high that owners feel compelled to replace smaller homes with ones that max out the square footage.

The problem is affecting other active property markets like Calgary (average price $466,994) and Toronto ($568,374), but Vancouver's white hot market has altered the character of many neighbourhoods at a startling pace.

Novelist Caroline Adderson's family has lived in the upscale westside neighbourhood of Kerrisdale for 15 years. She became alarmed at what she saw as she took her dog for its daily walk.

Houses with "sold" signs, instead of welcoming new residents, were fenced off and demolished regardless of condition.

“As a writer, I see these old houses as repositories of narrative," Addison told Yahoo Canada News. "When you look at an old house you see all the lives that were lived there, the stories of all the people who lived there.

"The people who built our city, contributed to it and made it what it is lived in these homes and they’re being demolished one after another and with them go all these stories.”

[ Related: Demolition ban could require recycling of older Vancouver homes ]

Adderson started taking photos and sending them to city councillors but said she was largely brushed off. She said the role of the governing Vision Vancouver civic party is ironic. It wants the city to be the greenest in the world by 2020 but is allowing demolitions that each add about 50 tonnes of waste to the landfill, not including concrete foundations.

Frustrated, she had a friend help her set up a Facebook page, Vancouver Vanishes, which has been documenting the phenomenon for the last 18 months. It features photos of the condemned homes, some of them looking move-in ready, with a notation that they've been demolished. The page has almost 4,800 likes.

Adderson also launched a petition on change.org, Save Vancouver's Character Houses, which has garnered more than 4,000 signatures. It calls for the city to revise bylaws and zoning that make it easier to demolish homes instead of updating them and taking a closer look at development projects that tear down pre-1940s homes while prioritizing those that retain them.

The effort seems to be paying off with higher visibility. Some demolitions have even attracted protesters, which may have helped save two faux Tudor homes known as The Dorothies, from the wrecker. They were purchased intact and trucked off to new locations.

The issue is now on the radar of Heritage Canada The National Trust, a preservationist group that has put West Side Vancouver's character homes and gardens on its Top 10 Endangered Places List. Adderson notes it's not just the high-end west side; the blue-collar east side may have been hit even harder.

The municipal government has responded, announcing a Heritage Action Plan last December. It calls for a review, streamlining of zoning and permitting rules to make heritage retention applications easier. This will increase demolition fees for pre-1940s houses and update the city's heritage registry.

But Adderson said the process will take up to three years. Demolition will continue, with 866 houses destroyed last year and some 2,400 in the last three years.

Heritage designation may flag some houses but Kathryn Morrow, communications manager for the Vancouver Heritage Foundation said so-called character homes fall into a kind of grey zone that makes protecting them hard.

"Just because it hasn’t been designated or isn’t on the registry or there may not have been somebody famous that lived there doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in that home," Morrow said.

With west side lots worth upwards of a million dollars just in land value, and taxed that way, buyers and developers feel pressure to build big, destroying gardens and cutting down trees in the process.

“A lot of the smaller bungalow homes, even at 1,500-2,000 square feet, they don’t necessarily make sense for people financially," Morrow said. "They’re just basically demo bait.”

She said that in destroying these houses, they destroy the texture of the neighbourhood, the things that made it attractive and liveable in the first place.

All major cities facing population growth and high property values are facing the same pressure to some extent.

Lynda Macdonald, a community planning manager, says she sees it happening in Toronto as well.

"The land values are so high. If you’re going to spend a million dollars on a piece of property and it’s got an old bungalow on it, that bungalow may be a perfect response to the neighbourhood . . . but generally people are saying the real estate is so valuable I need more house to justify it.”

Ontario has strong heritage legislation that allows municipalities to designate individual homes and even entire neighbourhoods for protection, including the size and character of replacement buildings. Macdonald said developers rarely win challenges before the Ontario Municipal Board.

But the law says nothing about character homes that don't have an identified heritage element. Municipalities need tools to define character homes so they are around long enough to become heritage houses that give people a snapshot of the city's history.

With pressure on for higher residential density close to downtown, property owners who find themselves taxed on best use of the land feel compelled to sell and redevelop. Individual buildings with heritage designations can sometimes get tax breaks but the same can't be said for character neighbourhoods.

We haven’t solved that problem yet," Macdonald said. "We hear people saying 'real estate is so valuable I can’t afford to keep a smaller building on it anymore.'”

She's seen it in her own neighbourhood, the Beaches, where lots are subdivided and a single home replaced by two tall, narrow units.

“It’s not a wholesale demolition of the neighbourhood but this slow replacement of the character homes with these brand new homes," Macdonald said.

"A developer starts working in a neighbourhood and the formula works, and you get this same house showing up over and over again, which is replacing houses that were much more diverse.”

[ Related: Historic Dennis Building in Halifax facing demolition ]

The drive to demolish and rebuild is a characteristic of a comparatively new country like Canada, where only a handful cities have buildings more than a century or two old.

Gordon Price, a former six-term Vancouver city councillor who's director of Simon Fraser University's City Program, said that's especially true in Western Canada, where heritage is measured in decades, not centuries.

“The turnover to some degree is inevitable for any city our age or any Canadian city, for that matter, where you are likely going to see an evolution of a city over time, and a century or so is not very long," Price said in an interview.

What causes people to take notice is when the rate of change itself changes.

"What is distressing to people is that they are seeing the turnover happen so fast," Price said.

Price agrees regulations make it very hard for people to justify spending money to bring an older home up to modern building and safety codes.

"You’re asking a lot of people in terms of applying stringent bylaws, constraints or disincentives to to keep a character house," he said.

Price said taxation and regulatory structures would have to be created to give property owners the incentive to preserve a character home. But any breaks they get might come at a cost for others who could see their property taxes rise.

How many voters would sit still for that?

“That’s why politicians get very wary," Price said. "They can intuitively or directly sense that this inequity question is going to come back to bite them quickly.”

Preservationists in Calgary, Canada's No. 1 boom-town, are using an approach that's meeting with some success. It's called Century Homes Calgary, which is geared to recruiting owners to research the history of their homes and maintain their character.

I stumbled on it myself last year while visiting Ramsey/Inglewood, the east side neighbourhood where I grew up. Expecting to see streets bulging with new, zero-clearance houses, I was surprised to find them largely unchanged.

The project was launched in 2012 to mark the centennial of the Calgary Stampede and the peak of Calgary's pre-First World War building boom.

“We started to hear from people who were interested in celebrating the 100th birthday of their houses," Bob van Wegen, a former city planner and member of the Calgary Heritage Initiative Society board said.

A funding grant helped provide homeowners with tools to research their houses' histories and banners to designate their century-old homes. The project's web site also provided a map of the locations, with many owners putting posters in their front yards detailing the home's history.

“In that first year we did it, we got a huge response," van Wegen said. "We had over 500 households participated in that time. We estimated that was about 10 per cent of the extant of homes from that pre-World War One era."

He said the effort was repeated last year, though it was hampered by the flooding in the city. People have signed up again this year.

The Century Homes Calgary project points to a key element of preservation in the absence of official protection – you need to recruit the residents by helping them discover their homes' history.

“One of ways our group wanted to work to preserve older homes in these neighbourhoods was by increasing people’s attachment to them," van Wegen said.

Older homes are still coming down – such as a row of colourful houses known as the Painted Ladies – but there's a growing realization that boom-and-bust Calgary has something worth preserving.

“If we tear down 50-year-old homes we’ll never have 100-year-old homes," van Wegen said. "If we tear down 100-year-old homes, we’ll never have 200-year-old homes.”

Price agrees.

“Over time what is initially seen as character becomes heritage, and that distinction is important because it has legal and economic ramifications and expectations," he said.

Removing a serviceable character home can diminish an entire neighbourhood, but Price also cautioned that preventing someone from realizing the value of their property can also create a backlash.

Finding the right balance takes consultation and a willingness to take a political risk. Price said most of all, citizens have to be on board.

“Basically it has to come from the bottom up," he said. "This is not something that can be imposed by a political group, a council.”