Why Canada’s houses are getting smaller

Tristin Hopper – National Post

From post-war bungalows to 1990s McMansions, the Canadian house has spent the last 60 years progressively ballooning into one of the largest domiciles in history. But amid shrinking lot sizes, skyrocketing land prices and a new generation of homeowners uninterested in the lures of suburban life, the ever-expanding Canadian house has finally reached its apex. After decades of pushing the limits of human dwellings, Canada’s unbridled passion for square footage is coming to an end.

In 1947, to accommodate a wave of post-war home construction, the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation began publishing catalogues of housing plans drawn up by prominent Canadian architects. They were cheap and well-planned, but shockingly to modern eyes, they were often no bigger than 1,000 square feet. The typical Canadian of the Louis St. Laurent era, it seems, was raising pre-birth control-sized families in homes half the size of a volleyball court.

“Canadians were pretty down-to-earth people in those days. They bought as much as they could afford and expanded later if they could afford it,” Canadian architectural historian Ioana Teodorescu told Postmedia in 2009.

And expand they did. Powder rooms, family rooms, enclosed garages; by 1975 home sizes had jumped to 1,075 square feet. But still, their children, the Baby Boomers, shared bedrooms and coped with the weekday morning ritual of waiting for a spot in the home’s only bathroom.

Crazed for elbow room, when the Boomers finally seized the reins of home ownership in the 1980s, all hell broke loose: Wide hallways, gargantuan entrance halls, mud rooms. By the turn of the millennium, Canadians lived in some of the world’s largest houses – and were filling them with some of the world’s smallest families. In 2002, a U.K. market analyst lined up developed countries according to how many of its citizens owned homes with more than five rooms. Canada easily bested Australia, the U.S. and New Zealand for the top spot.

But then, by 2007, the meteoric growth of Canadian houses began to slow to a trickle, according to floor size data compiled by Natural Resources Canada. In its latest industry survey, the Canadian Home Builders Association reported that the average new home size had dropped to 1,900 square feet – well down from a mid-2000s peak of 2,300 square feet. According to internal forecasts, they are only going to get smaller, reported the association.

Craig Alexander, chief economist of TD Bank Financial Group, says that Canadian cities simply ran out of space. In the 1950s, the CMHC’s “catalogue homes” were often plunked down in a sea of grass. Over the years, lot sizes stayed pretty much the same, but builders added storeys, dug out basements and pushed the front steps to the sidewalk. “We’ve gone from land rich and house poor to land poor and house rich,” said Mr. Alexander. “If the square footage has levelled off, it’s probably because we’re building the biggest homes we possibly can on the existing lots,” he said.

Following the 2008 U.S. housing market collapse, new U.S. homes immediately sloughed off the equivalent of a large bedroom and by 2011, the American Institute of Architects reported that cash-conscious homeowners were increasingly shrugging off the “special” features of decades past: Mud rooms, home theatres and outdoor living rooms. Canada, too, is witnessing the slow death of walk-in closets, hobby rooms and even the once-ubiquitous living room. “We haven’t built a living room in the past two years,” Greg Graham with Ottawa’s Cardel Homes, told Postmedia in April.

Canada’s housing stock is drifting toward the “European model,” said McGill architecture professor Avi Friedman. Never ones for picket fences and outdoor barbeques, most Germans, French, Italians and Spaniards raise their families in flats, maisonettes and terraced houses.

The British, inventors of the lawn, can now claim the smallest homes of all, with the average new home clocking in at just over 800 square feet. “Room to swing a cat? Hardly,” commented the BBC. Tellingly, while Prime Minister Stephen Harper occupies a mansion in Ottawa, his U.K. counterpart occupies a non-descript townhouse jammed into downtown London.

“If you take the typical Canadian home and take out all the wasted space, you have a European home,” said Mr. Friedman, speaking by Skype from Northern France, where he is midway through a tour of European housing projects. “They’ll have the same number of rooms, the same uses, but they will all be smaller.”

House builders are taking the hint. “People are doing with less space, but they want it to be a richer experience,” said Ben Taddei, COO of ParkLane Homes, a house builder. “Large landings, sweeping staircases, those have all gone the way of the dodo bird.” Where past homes counted separate dining rooms, living rooms and kitchens, Mr. Taddei’s designers simply combine them all into a single “great room.”

The Milllennials, the generation born from 1983 onwards, enjoyed a childhood free of bunkbeds or even shared bathrooms. Growing up in plush megahomes undoubtedly helped them become, in the words of one author, “self-centred, needy, and entitled with unrealistic work expectations.” Oddly, it also spawned a group of people patently unimpressed with backyards and breakfast nooks.

Under current economic forecasts, Millennials are poised to spend their early adulthood decidedly less affluent than their parents. They are also facing a housing market that has outpaced income growth for well over a decade. Mr. Friedman calls it a “perfect storm of phenomena” that is making homebuyers “physically and psychologically comfortable” in small spaces, said Mr. Friedman. Condo towers and row-houses will continue to sprout, he predicts, and as boomers vacate their large suburban houses for retirement, developers and municipalities will carve them up into apartments, duplexes and laneway houses.

“In 2006, the market peaked and everybody got back to the idea of ‘We’ve got to make houses smaller and we’ve got to make them more affordable,” said Brian Johnston, COO of Mattamy Corp., Canada’s largest builder of new homes. “I don’t think it’s a matter of personal preference, people just can’t afford to live in those big houses anymore.”

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Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information – 416-388-1960

Laurin & Natalie Jeffrey are Toronto Realtors with Century 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these articles, they just reproduce them here for people
who are interested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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homes with mud rooms toronto

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