Researchers in the Balanced Supply of Housing Node are working on several projects to make it easier to build housing suitable for the so-called “Missing Middle.”
That research was the subject of a Research in Progress webinar April 27 featuring architect Conrad Speckert and Nik Luka, an ethnographer specializing in housing, social practice, and landscape studies.
The webinar explored the topics of how to make real progress toward the elusive ‘missing middle’ of medium-density housing that sustainably shelters the middle classes and those of humbler means and how to get beyond NIMBYism.
Speckert spoke about the need to change Canada’s National Building Code to address the adverse impact on the design of small, multi-unit, housing caused by the requirement for a second exit staircase. Canada’s requirement for a second exit staircase in small buildings makes them much less efficient and costly to build and is much stricter than virtually anywhere else in the world, Speckert said.
Eliminating the second exit stairs increases the amount of floor area available for housing, he said. “But what it really is about is design flexibility: to be able to make more livable floor plans, cross ventilated, better daylighting, just better arrangements in general.”
“While a second exit is certainly appropriate for larger buildings, we’ve demonstrated that it is unnecessary and prohibitive for the smaller missing middle build,” Speckert said. “A rule that made a lot of sense when it was established when the first code came out in the 1940s has remained unquestioned in each revision to the building code since then, and it is clearly time to change that.”
Luka stressed the need for densification that is socially acceptable, politically viable and legally feasible at a reasonable cost by involving the community.
“Densification is something that can easily be done, but it’s very easy to do it badly,” Luka said. “Hopefully, what this work is really contributing to is how we build strong, diverse coalitions in support of context, appropriate densification, especially in post suburban contexts. And that’s to say, coalitions of people who are in the private sector and the public sector and civil society organizations.”
In that vein, researchers are asking people in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, and potentially Ottawa, what sorts of densification they would be comfortable with and their opinions on what is necessary for that densification to happen, Luka said. “What they’re afraid of, where they see there being problems, as well as advantages and disadvantages.”
The webinar recording can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LxebC92ojo
Filling housing’s “missing middle”
