| |
Posted May 31, 2008, 5:39 PM
|
 |
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Posts: 4,599
|
|
An interesting article on the challenges (and benefits) of purchasing small condos in a downtown environment. It also discusses some of the trends in construction in that we are (finally) starting to build smaller homes in the 'burbs as well.
Quote:
Small is the new big
Young urbanites are migrating to downtown condos where every bit of space is vital. Even some suburban homes are shrinking in the name of convenience and price
Patrick Langston
The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, May 31, 2008
OK, so Lisa Petalek does truck her off-season wardrobe to her parents' home for storage. But that proviso aside, Petalek gets along just fine in her compact -- as in 546 square feet -- condo in the ByWard Market.
Heck, for a year she even used it as a home office.
Petalek, a business analyst with the federal government, is one of many buyers snapping up small downtown condos faster than they can be built. Even out in the 'burbs, there's a new market for Lilliputian (at least by McMansion standards) singles.
"I have to limit my purchases," admits Petalek, adding that "the closet is still a bit of a problem." And clutter is a no-go in her Spire, one of the pint-sized models in Urban Capital Property Group's east market development on George Street. "If you leave stuff out, it's obviously messy."
Products, including a closet system and under-the-bed hideaway baskets, help Petalek keep the space tidy. And although few retailers carried it when she moved into her condo in 2003, she says the sleek contemporary furniture demanded by mini-condos is now easier to find.
None of these tricks of the trade would help if her one-bedroom condo weren't well-designed. Nine-foot ceilings, an open-concept kitchen/living room/dining area, generous windows, and a sweeping balcony breathe light and space into the urban home in the sky. Neutral shaded walls decorated with mirrors and large paintings push the space outward, while stainless-steel appliances and dark cabinetry add drama.
"All my friends are trying to get me to move to Barrhaven," says Petalek, but she delights in avoiding "all that business" of snow shovelling and grass cutting.
And while she couldn't host a 30-person party in her place, she revels in the fact that her life is "a five-block radius: You go out and play; you go to work, you go home and rest."
Petalek paid an affordable $150,000 when she bought her condo in 2001. Paying relatively little for all that a downtown location offers is one of the big draws of small condos, especially for young professionals.
Baby-boomer couples selling off the family ranch for a hip spot downtown usually go for bigger living spaces. After all, why blow 30 years of marriage by being constantly face-to-face with your beloved?
No figures are available on the number of small condos across Canada, but a glance around Ottawa finds plenty, especially in buildings under construction.
East Market, the Mondrian and Central -- the latter two on Bank Street and all by Urban Capital -- offer small condos. So does Domicile's project known simply as "g" and EcoCité, both on Bank Street; ditto Charlesfort's Hudson Park Phase I, and others.
"The growth is for small types of dwellings," says Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.'s Sandra Perez, senior marketing analyst for the Ottawa region. As evidence, she points to the 40-per-cent leap in condo construction forecast for Ottawa this year over last year. Half of that will be downtown, where high land costs favour plenty of small units.
By contrast, single-family home starts in the region are expected to drop seven per cent from 2007 levels. Trends are similar in Toronto, says Perez. Across Canada, meanwhile, CMHC reports that single-family homes in cities of more than 10,000 people dipped to 52 per cent of the construction market last year from 61 per cent in 2002. A blend of town and row homes, apartments and condos has picked up the slack.
"Things are changing, people are downsizing," says Maureen O'Connell, who sold out half the condos in Central, a condo slated for the corner of Bank Street and Gladstone Avenue, in an astonishing four days earlier this year. The small condos, like the tiny, perfect Vancouver -- 468 square feet, $196,900 -- went first. "A lot of people don't even buy the parking," adds O'Connell.
Making small spaces work requires, well, work. For the buyer, says O'Connell, it means thinking smart, like the condo owner who attached an industrial arm to her plasma television so she could swing it around from the living room to watch it in bed. Bingo. Space saved in the bedroom.
For the designer, it means "everything is tight, scaled-down," says Ottawa architect Barry Hobin. His projects have included small condos, including the 463-square-foot Berkley in Phase 1 of Charlesfort's Hudson Park tower now under construction on Kent Street.
"The focus is on things like sliding panels instead of swinging doors, having integrated cabinetry in the kitchen," says Hobin. "The first thing is making them as bright as possible, and the space needs to be big enough to flow. One thing you lose is your flexibility: You have to pre-judge where everything is going to go, what length of wall you can put a bed on."
A buyer of a pocket-sized condo almost needs an interior designer, he says, adding that "in a small place, there's no room to be quirky."
And while slimming down usually means greening up, no one mentions the environmental advantages of living more compactly. Cost and convenience seem to be the driving forces behind the growth of small.
What we're not seeing in Ottawa are micro-homes, many of them pre-fabs, which are popping up in more crowded cities, including London, England (see 'Smallest of the small' on page 3). These wee places -- featured in magazines, including Dwell and touted by reduced living advocates, including Jay Shafer, co-founder of the Small House Society -- are as small as 96 square feet. They perch everywhere from rooftops to microscopic vacant lots, and they toe the small-is-better line, if perhaps a little literally, of downscale boosters like writer/architect Sarah Susanka, author of The Not So Big House.
With downtown land prices in Ottawa still relatively low compared to other major cities and not a lot of infill or severance opportunities, there's simply no market for such places here, the experts say.
But there is shrinkage, if not miniaturization, going on in the suburbs.
Mattamy Homes, for example, has included the three-bedroom, 1,279-square-foot Ashford in its Fairwinds project in Kanata -- the first Ottawa build for the Toronto-based developer -- and at Half Moon Bay in Barrhaven.
The home combines functionality with less space by doing away with a formal dining room but including a kitchen with an eating area that flows into a great room.
Starting at $234,900, the Ashford fulfils the observation by Frank Cairo, Mattamy's vice-president of land development for Ottawa, that increased land prices are forcing developers to downscale houses if they want to meet the still-healthy hunger for singles. "Square footage rules," Cairo says, thinking of bigger townhomes, "except if you can get into a single."
Minto Group Inc., meanwhile, has introduced the Anderson, a three-bedroom, 1,365-square-foot home at $243,400, in its east-end Avalon project. Buyers, says Minto's marketing director Catherine Shea, tend to be first-timers or people trading up from a terrace or townhome.
The situation is a far cry from that described by Minto's vice-president Robert Greenberg in 2001. Back then, he told the Citizen that, for Minto, a 1,500- to 1,600-square-foot single was the minimum size that made financial sense.
He added that Minto hadn't built a 1,200-square-foot single since 1983.
The early '80s, in fact, was just about when we got hooked big-time on big living spaces.
Prior to that, houses had been mostly modest. At the minute end of the scale, tens of thousands of bungalows, some as small as 500 square feet, were built by the federal government's Wartime Housing Ltd. during the 1940s for labourers and Second World War veterans across the country. (You can spot these homes, some now expanded, in neighbhourhoods including Carlington and at the corner of Carling and Fisher Avenues.
By 1950, North American homes were averaging about 900 square feet.
Suburban development flourished in the 1950s and '60s, with Ottawa companies, including Minto and Campeau Corporation building slews of suburban singles in Elmvale Acres, Parkwood Hills and similar areas, many of them in the 1,200-square-foot range.
Through the 1970s and '80s, says Hobin, real estate increasingly became "the embodiment of wealth collection and the dominance of baby boomers. The house became a vehicle for playing. People were saying, 'Why not have some fun with it?' It's also true that we're a consumer-oriented society -- status and all that other crap."
Hence the current crop of sprawling homes that owners adore and many others scorn as wasteful and ostentatious.
No Canadian figures are available, but according to the U.S. National Association of Home Builders the average American home is now over 2,400 square feet -- double what it was 50 years ago when families were larger. Observers agree Canadian houses have kept pace.
It's worth noting that Hobin, including many others contacted for this story, emerged unscathed from a childhood where bedrooms were shared and the bathroom battle a morning ritual.
In addition to whatever bragging rights even a 2,400-square foot-home confers, there are practical reasons for avoiding small. Because many costs -- a garage door, for example, or a staircase -- are the same for a small or bigger home, economies of scale kick in, and developers wind up charging more per square foot for a small home to realize a profit. As well, jumping from $250,000 to $270,000 to gain a few hundred square feet won't boost your mortgage by all that much.
No wonder Hobin hasn't designed a 1,200- or 1,400-square-foot home in two decades.
But Diane and George Hanson moved into one, even if it's not a custom job.
The retirees sold their 1,800-square-foot Cadillac-Fairview home and, seven years ago, moved into their 1,335-square-foot Yellowstone bungalow in Tartan Homes' Findlay Creek development off Bank Street South near the community of Leitrim. The same model, now priced at $333,900 and with a larger porch, is also available at Tartan's west-end community in Stittsville's Jackson Trails.
"All our children were married and we wanted to downsize," says Diane Hanson. "It's a lot easier to look after. There's a smaller lawn to cut. You don't collect so much junk; you have to have everything in its place."
The Hansons have turned one of the two bedrooms into a den and finished part of the basement, providing a little more elbow room when their children, their spouses and grandchildren descend.
An open-concept design, a half-wall between the living and dining rooms, and other features give the home an open feeling.
While George says there's "nothing too much" he misses about their big home, his wife does long for the good old spacious days when the whole family piles in at Christmas.
And she still remembers watching the new house being built. "I thought, 'Oh, gosh, it's so small. We'll never be happy here.'"
Is she? "Oh, yes!"
Patrick Langston is an Ottawa writer.
|
|
|
|
Prev
.
Linear Mode
