Are basement suites good enough for Canadian families?
THE MILLENNIAL UNDERGROUND: PART 3
My friend Tim lives in the smallest apartment I have ever seen. A single bed lines one wall, from which you could easily touch the opposite wall. When I asked if he’d been writing much lately, he told me he couldn’t because his desk was too small for a pen and paper (to be fair, he also mentioned he’d been watching a lot of Gunsmoke). My guess is the apartment is 150 square feet.
Tim doesn’t live in this apartment due to some commitment to anti-consumerism, minimalism, or the environment. He’s just very, very poor. He lives in that apartment because it’s safe, warm, and in a part of the city that gives him distance from his past.
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Throughout the pandemic, there’s been a large tent city in Strathcona Park. The community had grown over months, home to hundreds of residents without permanent homes to stay warm on freezing nights or shelter-in-place when pandemic restrictions closed shelters and community resources. When the camp was dismantled in April 2021, many were given places to live in shelters or hotels acquired by the City of Vancouver. It sounded like a majority were grateful to have a safer, slightly more secure place to be, though some said they mourned the loss of the park-based community, and with it, their ability to live free from the attachments of contemporary life.
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A local church works with newcomers to Canada through a non-profit that provides temporary housing for refugees. Many, if not most, of the families end up moving into basement suites, the underground units becoming a soft place to land after fleeing violence and political unrest. A place to start anew.
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Until last summer, my friend Robyn lived in a basement suite with her husband and two mischievous daughters. Like ours, it had a strange layout, a kitchen more like a hallway, and an elevated living room in which they had somehow fit a small trampoline. She’d painted the walls a warm, weightless shade of pink.
Last June, the family moved to Saskatchewan. When Robyn posted about it on Instagram, she noted how much she’d needed more light.
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A few weeks ago, I dropped food off for a family who was quarantining for two weeks in a basement suite rented on AirBnB. The large, blue house sat just off a main intersection near our city’s most moneyed mall. The generous front lawn was split in two with a footpath and edged with a cast-iron fence. It is, in many ways, an average single-family home in Vancouver.
I walked through the metal gate and followed the footpath around the back of the house, where a full flight of stairs cut into the ground leading to the entrance of the suite — one of two identical dwellings carved out of the earth. I peeked inside, not able to go in because of COVID, and saw a tiny living room with a single couch and an apartment-style kitchen. I looked up at the main house, towering above, a back patio rising over both sets of stairs. The house proper was easily six times larger than either of the suites.
Who gets to live upstairs? Who belongs downstairs? And why?
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There is no one story when it comes to basement suites. I barely have one story about them for myself. Sometimes they are soft places to land; sometimes they seem to embody a kind of modern feudalism. My own suite gives me both a nagging sense of frustration and helplessness, alongside a comfort and gratitude for this haven, a safe place to which I’ve brought home two babies.
Sometimes, I still sense my ingrained expectations that “people like me” shouldn’t be living in an underground house. I recognize, five years in, that before I lived in a basement suite, I subconsciously assumed they were for other people; poorer people, maybe, younger people, people without my same white, middle-class, North American assumptions of what life should be like.
I regret that. And I’m grateful for what my five years underground have taught me about my own housing expectations. Today, I can honestly say that as long as people in this city are going to have to live in basement suites (because building affordable three-bedroom above ground rentals in this city is not and has never been a priority) my family may as well be some of them.
But beyond my prejudices is another, more visceral reaction: basement suites simply aren’t a good answer to the affordability crisis. Even if they are available, it is too high of an ask to expect families of any income to live in them long-term.
In Vancouver, very few middle-to-upper middle class people can afford a single-family home without an income suite to help pay for the mortgage. People like us, born a few years too late to enter the housing market, are willing to rent them, because other, more functional family-type housing, like quadplexes, duplexes, or apartments with more than two bedrooms, are extremely hard to come by. Townhouses are available, but with Vancouver’s penchant for luxury, they are usually marketed toward high-income downsizers who can pay $3,500+ in rent. Suffice to say, basement suites for many middle- and low-income people are one of few good options.
But, from my observations at least, homeowners who rent out their basement suites view them as income generators, not as homes.
We’ve felt this in a variety of ways where we live. Many suites (ours notably excepted) aren’t well-maintained, or have depressing 1 foot tall windows that let in almost no light. They have odd layouts that aren’t conducive to the ways Canadian families typically operate: kitchens lining one wall of the living room, weird hallways that add square footage but no functional space, no storage for common things like kids’ bikes or camping gear. In our case, we’ve found our childless landlord doesn’t have a lot of empathy for life with kids, considering them liabilities that add more wear and tear; we live in terror of one of our preschoolers ruining the pristine landscaping.
I don’t begrudge people for having income suites. Many people living “upstairs” in this city are house rich but cash poor, tied down to mortgages they can never pay off, having to choose between a house and literally buying anything else of significance for most of their adult life. But that doesn’t make being the ones underground any rosier.
In 2021, Vancouver was listed as the least affordable housing market in North America — and second worst in the world, after Hong Kong. At the same time, Better Dwelling reported that the Canadian economy is now 30% more dependent on real estate than the US was in 2006 — at the height of the housing bubble. This is because in Canada, housing (also known as the places where people live most of their non-working lives or, in pandemics, all of their lives), is seen solely as a commodity for wealth generation. Those of us unable to enter the market are just there to add more dollars to the pile.
But we still need somewhere to raise our kids.
Until basement suites and other “owned” rental spaces are viewed first and foremost as functional spaces for families to grow, thrive, and contribute to our communities, as opposed to a commodity, they will continue to fall short of people’s soul-felt needs for shelter, autonomy, and community.
This is part three 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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