Hunted house

Frances Bula | Image: Dina Goldstein | Published: October 09, 2008

The townhouse where Paulo Horta, his wife Nadine Roth and their children, Gabriel and Rafael, live is a small piece of residential paradise. It is set amidst the forested part of Burnaby Mountain; the spires of tall evergreens soar above the roofline on one side of the 60-unit complex, called Verdant. A warm, sappy smell drifts out from the trees on hot summer days. From the upper decks of the four-storey buildings, you can look out to a skyline of blue-rinsed mountains on one side or, on the other, the ridge of central Burnaby, with Mount Baker beyond it.

The townhouses are built around a small rectangular courtyard with a sandbox in the middle that’s heavily used by the kids who live there. The concrete planters nearby bear testimony to their artistic efforts with chalk. Today, a holiday Monday, Gabriel sits solemnly studying the artificial turf near the sandbox, while his father talks with a neighbour about berry-picking expeditions (hers) and trips to Ikea (his) while older kids exit stage left with their bikes.

It’s hard to imagine that this development, with its designer palette of creams and greys accented with pumpkin-coloured doors, is related in any way to a very different looking set of buildings 20 kilometres away. The Little Mountain social housing project, a collection of dilapidated rectangular blocks scattered across a large grass field at the foot of Queen Elizabeth Park, looks like Vancouver’s best attempt at recreating an abandoned eastern European orphanage. Sheets hang over many of the windows, and the only sign of life is the woman tending a yard sale of china and knick-knacks on one patch of grass facing Main Street.

But as different as these two little quadrants of the Lower Mainland may seem, Horta’s home, which is part of SFU’s UniverCity development, does have a connection with Little Mountain. It’s not quite the grandchild, perhaps, but at least the second cousin once removed of Little Mountain, which was once seen as a model of good social engineering and modernist architecture.

Little Mountain was built in 1954, the result of 50 years of agitation for affordable homes and the more immediate crisis of returning soldiers from the war, who were occupying buildings such as the

Hotel Vancouver to protest the fact that they couldn’t find anyplace to live. The benchmark project, by the then-new Central Housing and Mortgage Corp. (now Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.), launched four decades of energetic government-supported construction in Vancouver – all of which disappeared in 1993, when the federal government decided to get out of the business of building subsidized housing. The problem of finding low-cost homes for those who can’t quite get a handhold in the strictly private market would not, however, go away.

Fifty years ago, it was veterans who every­body worried about housing, but today it’s teachers, nurses – and even, in this new century, double-income university professor households. Verdant is SFU’s solution to one of the university’s most persistent problems: finding affordable housing for its 6,000 faculty and staff. Desirable potential employees, offered jobs at the campus, would often come to take a look around, discover the price of local housing and say, “Thanks, we think we’d rather go to one of the other universities offering us work.” So SFU, which was in the process of developing an otherwise private-market housing complex on the land around its campus, worked with Vancity Enterprises Ltd. to include the Verdant project.

At Verdant, faculty and staff get to buy their townhouses or apartments for 20 per cent below the fair-market value. In exchange, the buyers have to agree to live in them, offer them to the university first when they sell and agree to get only 80 per cent of the sale price when they move. That way, the people who buy still make a little money from the rising real estate market, but the university gets to keep recycling a stock of lower-cost housing forever, managed by its community trust.

So Horta and Roth, professors in, respectively, world literature and German history, got to buy this townhouse that they moved into last May – three bedrooms, 1,200 square feet, brand new and built according to the latest environmental standards – for $290,000. Its real value was calculated at about $360,000; other places nearby were going for as much as $450,000. “We would never have been able to get into the housing market without this,” says Horta, as we walk through the fragrant woods behind his place.