Reusable housing designs.

A Dec. 21, 2023, op-ed in my local paper, "Higher density means losing trees, gardens and more," argues that cost savings enjoyed by reusing a few standard housing designs and adapting each minimally as necessary to specific sites are illusory.

A few days later, a letter to the same paper asked,"Do … buyers want to buy horrible boxes with no amenity?"

Certainly plopping down a prefabricated cookie-cutter building with no consideration for the topology of a particular lot would be a bonehead approach. But so would shelling out large sums to craft an architectural masterpiece for each of thousands of units of housing built specifically to reduce housing prices.

According to the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, "The Vancouver Special is the only house style that developed in Greater Vancouver, found nowhere else. They were built by the thousands between 1965 and 1985." Further:

Vancouver Specials are front-gabled, 2-storey, boxy houses built on grade with very shallow-pitched roofs that are sometimes split to create a clerestorey. They have a distinctive shallow balcony on the second floor accessed from sliding glass doors. On the main floor, the front door is usually set to one side, making them very easy to split into up-down duplexes. Cladding is typically decorative brick on the ground floor front façade, stucco above.

Strawberry Box houses, built during and after WWII to house returning veterans and continuing through the 1950s and 60s, are another example of a set of widely reused housing designs that enabled Canada to produce badly needed housing on a large scale.

A December 13, 2023, Global News article, "Strawberry box homes? How Ottawa plans to make an old strategy new," reports this history in detail.

Vancouver Specials and Strawberry Box houses obviously are single-family housing designs appropriate to a distant past. But a few practical, environmentally friendly, reusable multi-unit dwelling designs, particularly now, when rents and condo prices have been inflated beyond all reason, would go a long way toward keeping construction costs in check and ultimately ease the pain of Canadians needing to find an affordable abode.