THE MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND: PART 1
Life in a basement suite: An Introduction
How our family of four ended up underground
When my husband and I began renting our basement suite in Vancouver’s sleepy Kensington neighbourhood, we made a pact: two years. I was six months pregnant with our first child, and we wanted to get into a two-bedroom place before the stress and exhaustion of new parenthood.
April 2021 marked five years in our basement suite. We now have two kids, who fill up our small space with their passion for block towers and drumming, often at the same time. Yes, that’s three years longer than we agreed. And, thanks to COVID, it’ll be at least one more.
If there’s one thing you should know about living in Vancouver, it’s that the housing situation is absolutely cuckoo-bananas. Townhouses are well over a million dollars in most neighbourhoods; our rental vacancy rate is consistently less than 1%. Economists disfavourably compare us to New York and London; as in, our housing is somehow worse. It is really freaking hard to find an affordable, long-term place to live.
Every young family in Vancouver has an exit plan, and at this point, most of our friends have pressed the red button on theirs. Cross-country moves to cheaper housing markets, co-buying with well-off family members, townhouses in the suburban maze. Ours has always been Bellingham, a city about an hour and a half south of us in Washington State. The plan was to move this summer, and finally live above ground. But COVID has slowed my husband’s visa process. (I have American citizenship.)
Depending on who is visiting (or who was visiting, in the past version of reality), our basement suite is either the biggest steal in the city or something that makes us very worthy of pity. Anyone coming to visit who lives in Vancouver adores our basement suite. “It’s so big!” they say. “Oh my gosh, is that a dishwasher?!” Anyone from everywhere else is…polite. “Well. It does seem cozy,” they may say, searching for a complement.
It does have good qualities: thanks to our very particular landlord, it is meticulously well-maintained. It has lovely wainscoting, a perfect paint job, and enviable closet storage solutions. The large built-in desk that I once resented for taking up so much space has become a convenient office space during the pandemic. It is clean, quiet and safe. And the front half of the suite is only half underground, meaning our windows, while smaller than those in houses, are about double the size of those found in most basement suites.
The bad: The ceilings are only 7 feet high (6.5 in a few spots), meaning when my 6’4” father comes to visit, he has to be very careful. The living room is in fact cozy, like, very cozy, and also the only place to be in the house. Because basements are rarely designed to have all the parts of a house in them, many spaces are oddly laid out, like our long narrow bathroom and side-by-side hallways. Yep — we have two hallways. That share a wall. Our suite is freezing nearly year-round, and our control over the heater is confusingly limited.
As a renter, we have very little say in our space. The exterior spaces are owned by our landlord. We make use of our grassy front yard, but can’t let the kids do any kid things there, like dig, or pull leaves, or hit plants with sticks. There is no external storage, so my husband Joel’s bike sits tied up next to my desk, my son’s is hanging from the wall behind me (my default Zoom background these days). My bike has been sitting in my in-laws shed for five years. We don’t own anything that one would normally store outside — barbecue, wagon, basketballs.
There is plenty to love and plenty that needs improvement. And we are well aware that having a bbq is not a human right. Many people in this city have less square footage than us, some of whom have more kids.
I think the thing that continually gets us about our basement suite is that, frankly, it’s not the type of life we ever expected to live. Case-in-point: when we began looking for a 2-bedroom when I was pregnant for the first time, the one rule we had agreed on was: no basement suites. But the rental market had shifted so much in the four years we’d lived in our apartment that it felt like the ground had moved beneath our feet.
When we moved in, I felt guilty. Joel and I both had high/middle-income professional jobs. I felt like we were taking housing away from people who needed it more: students, newcomers to Canada, newlyweds who hadn’t started their careers yet, low-income families who needed shelter. In my mind, that was why basement suites even existed: comfortable, attainable housing for people to get on their feet and then move on to better things.
Now that we’ve been here five years, I have a different view, though it changes like the weather (literally: if it’s rainy or gray, I have a much more negative opinion of my home; on sunny days, I’m much more apt to appreciate it’s charms). I understand now that basements suites are legitimate housing for anyone (I’ll have a post on the privilege of this realization later on in the series.) I’ve grown to appreciate the way it binds me to other underground neighbors. I love the limits it sets on our consumption and our expectations; the way we are free to pursue other dreams and aren’t bound solely to maintaining a “real” home.
But, at the end of the day, people aren’t meant to live underground forever.
It’s mentally and emotionally destabilizing to have so little light, such low ceilings. As our family grows, we can’t even legally live in here for much longer: I have a girl and a boy, who, according to Vancouver bylaws, can’t share a bedroom past a certain age. Also, if I bump into the wheel of Joel’s bike one more time, I might just run over it with our car.
We’ve been on a bit of a roller coaster of emotions processing a potential extra year underground, so I’ve decided to blog about being a millennial family in a basement suite: the good, the bad, the ugly: the horror show of house hunting in Vancouver; how we live in a small space with small children; how our feelings about basement living — and our own “rights” and expectations when it comes to housing — have shifted over the years. If you’re interested, come join me: it’s the side entrance on the right.
This is part one of a six part series about living underground in Vancouver, BC.
- Part 1: Life in a basement suite: an introduction
- Part 2: What you might find when rental hunting in Vancouver, 2016
- Part 3: Are basement suites good enough for Canadian families?
- Part 4: Seven tips for living well in a small space
- Part 5: The beauty of the basement
- Part 6: “Why don’t you just move?”
- Bonus Update: Emerging from the Underground
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