The Vancouver Special—Blight or Brilliant?

In the early 1960s, an affordable single-family dwelling emerged in Vancouver, and within two decades, over 10,000 were constructed, predominantly on the east side of the city. The plan-based design was tailored to the city’s lot sizes, floor square ratios, and climatic conditions, with its low slope roof and shallow foundation and, as a result, could be approved and constructed quickly. The flexible use of interior space allowed owners to put in a legal rental suite on the bottom floor as a mortgage helper, which made ownership more accessible to working-class families. Despite its popularity among homeowners, the Vancouver Special, as it was pejoratively called, was no longer approved for construction by 1984 because of fears that the residential landscape was becoming too homogenized. The fears of homogenization, the author argues, are based on the ways the Vancouver Special disrupted the embedded cultural and colonial domestic architectural norms, which reflected primarily British racial and class ideals of homeownership. By declaring the design a blight on the landscape, it overshadowed the ways in which the Vancouver Special helped solve housing issues in the city during the 1960s–1970s by increasing affordable housing stock, expanding the available rental market, particularly for families, and gently densifying urban neighbourhoods to help stem the exodus to the suburbs to find affordable housing. Recently, the maligned Vancouver Special has been claimed by local heritage lovers as part of the city’s unique architectural history, and there have been calls for a “new Vancouver Special” to solve the current housing unaffordability and rental crisis in the city, but the fears of homogenization of the residential landscape remain pointing to the unaddressed cultural and colonial norms attached to housing.