The city’s proposals on illegal suites are one more session of the eastside-westside tango that defines Vancouver politics. Cutting up city hall’s policy dance floor is our power couple, those fellow fedora-adorers Jim Green from the east, and Larry Campbell from the west.

Eastsiders agreed in 1998 to legitimize what city planners call “secondary suites” in single family homes. But it is the west side that has long needed seduction, loudly protesting its suite-less virtue. West side neighbourhoods were wallflowers for the 1998 changes, worried, as most professional virgins are, about their reputations.

“What would the neighbours say?” they opined, convinced that waves of garlic-frying immigrant basement-dwellers and coach-house-minding miscreant mechanics might shave a couple points off their astronomical property values. What about those non-related kids living downstairs? Oh, that’s just the au-pair and, um, yes, we did help out some of those nice exchange students.

Far more University of B.C. students rent suites in Point Grey houses than are accommodated in on-campus residences, and it was ever so. For that diminishing proportion of westsiders who did not inherit their homes or the fat fortunes needed to purchase them (average house prices west of Granville now approach $700,000), renters with monthly cash are essential “mortgage-helpers.”

The new city policy produced from the Green-Campbell dance macabre will only recognize the obvious, grandfather the existing. The city estimates there are 4,800 illegal suites now on the west side, homes to nearly 12,000 residents, more than the entire population of Coal Harbour or Saltspring Island.

Campbell and Green’s regulatory swooning and bureaucratic deep bends will soften building regulations, hoping remaining landlords will join the party, paying $425 each for the privilege of going legit. If all 14,000 of Vancouver‘s illegal suites go for it, it will generate millions for the city, over and above the cost of inspection. I hope this goes directly to social housing, distributed city-wide.

The illegal suites policy change is a good one, and I support it, but not the overreaching claims for its impact made by Councillor Jim Green and others. He calls this bureaucratic adjustment “one of the most important things we have done,” a characteristic but forgivable burst of hyperbole from a politician who marks epochal breakthroughs every half hour.

Where Green and Campbell are vastly overstating things is that that their amendment will much advance the “densification” of the city, as they have stated.

The simple fact is the city long ago “densified” this way. Campbell and Green hugely overestimate Vancouver‘s population of potential landlords willing to lay out $425 each to have their single family house “cherry popped,” just to enjoy the presence of strangers inside for the first time. The residual virtue Green and Campbell imply is simply not there: most of us have been living in charnel houses for a long, long, time.

If Green and Campbell really want densification and not just more revenue, they should take a look at some creative ideas from Wellington, New Zealand. A quiet miniature of Vancouver, this pleasant port city is hemmed in by hills and resplendent nature, and like us, is newly attractive to talented young people.

Wellington is best known for its hobbit-like famous son, film director Peter Jackson, and his dwarf-like army labouring away in the mines of his Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, responsible for the superb production values and digital effects in The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.

While hobbits burrow deep into the ground, Wellington is home to a wave of new homes built on top of the roofs of existing office blocks, commercial buildings, industrial shops–even parking garages. The results are some of the most intriguing “densification without disruption” to be found anywhere, low-cost residential development that literally builds upon existing infrastructure–without displacing jobs or demolishing heritage structures.

The rooftop houses are concentrated in the Te Aro Electoral District, a zone that includes parts of the small city’s downtown, and a lower density area to the south, chock-an-urban-block with repair shops, small industries, bulk retailers, and service industries. Te Aro directly compares to Vancouver‘s similarly underperforming area between Main and Cambie, False Creek to Broadway.

Vancouver developers have long wanted the industrial zoning changed here, but previous Vancouver city councils rightly resisted, knowing the importance of downtown-related services and employment in a city that is leaking jobs quickly. I know dozens of buildings here (some that store bumpers on their roofs!) suitable for Wellington-style, new, lightweight-steel apartment blocks on their roofs — at Vancouver‘s best location with its most spectacular panoramas.

Gordon Holden is new head of Victoria University Wellington’s school of architecture, and has made a study of these rooftop houses. Recently arrived from Australia, he now promotes them as an idea that might spread across the rooftops of the Antipodes, and beyond. In a recent interview, Holden says New Zealand‘s late 1980s deregulation mania reformed planning and building codes, “but you do not need that kind of revolution to get rooftop houses going.” Instead he suggests what Vancouver needs is “more generous assessments of the possible, plus a lot of dialogue between inspectors, planners, politicians, developers and architects.” Sorry, Gordo, this is revolutionary in Vancouver.

The Wellington rooftop apartments range between four and 30 units. Some of these have structural supports discreetly cut through existing buildings below them, others have steel feet planted astride them on sidewalks and back lanes, leaving the Victorian, Edwardian and Art Deco buildings they loom over virtually untouched. This idea also directly applies to the densification of character buildings along our arterials like Main, Broadway, Commercial and others.

Holden showed me this photograph of this 24-suite apartment building constructed on top of what passes in Kiwi-land for Big Box retail, a project named The Gallerias-On-Tory. Speaking of tory, Vancouver‘s prescriptive building codes and conservative building inspectors would never permit this, but Wellington has a performance-based system — equivalencies preserving public safety can be, and are, approved.

Instead, Vancouver blows away extant urban character, fine heritage buildings and existing jobs, then brings in its tired squad of high-rise developers, as in Downtown South. Worse, with Vancouver‘s civic bureaucracy held on loose reins by current city manager Judy Rogers, our city inspectors are currently on a reign of terror, closing live music venues, stymieing new DTES investment, and fiddling with fire alarms while Rome burns.

Holden’s research indicates that rooftop dwellings have increased population in the area by 23 per cent in the few years they have been permitted in this mixed-use area, and many more are currently being proposed and constructed. Something for the dance cards of Jim Green and Larry Campbell: Next time you do the “densification tango,” why not put on your Wellingtons?

© The Vancouver Sun 2004