Teardown. It's a dismaying word for many residents of Vancouver, where sustained high real-estate prices have sacrificed a lot of older homes to the wrecker.

Teardowns used to refer to mouldy old shacks but in Vancouver, hundreds of solid, even fully updated homes are being bulldozed.

Statistics from the Canadian Real Estate Association show the average sale price of a Vancouver single-family home in June was $796,714, compared with a national average of $413,215. Most of the value is in the land which is so high that owners feel compelled to replace smaller homes with ones that max out the square footage.

The problem is affecting other active property markets like Calgary (average price $466,994) and Toronto ($568,374), but Vancouver's white hot market has altered the character of many neighbourhoods at a startling pace.

Novelist Caroline Adderson's family has lived in the upscale westside neighbourhood of Kerrisdale for 15 years. She became alarmed at what she saw as she took her dog for its daily walk.

Houses with "sold" signs, instead of welcoming new residents, were fenced off and demolished regardless of condition.

“As a writer, I see these old houses as repositories of narrative," Addison told Yahoo Canada News. "When you look at an old house you see all the lives that were lived there, the stories of all the people who lived there.

"The people who built our city, contributed to it and made it what it is lived in these homes and they’re being demolished one after another and with them go all these stories.”

[ Related: Demolition ban could require recycling of older Vancouver homes ]

Adderson started taking photos and sending them to city councillors but said she was largely brushed off. She said the role of the governing Vision Vancouver civic party is ironic. It wants the city to be the greenest in the world by 2020 but is allowing demolitions that each add about 50 tonnes of waste to the landfill, not including concrete foundations.

Frustrated, she had a friend help her set up a Facebook page, Vancouver Vanishes, which has been documenting the phenomenon for the last 18 months. It features photos of the condemned homes, some of them looking move-in ready, with a notation that they've been demolished. The page has almost 4,800 likes.

Adderson also launched a petition on change.org, Save Vancouver's Character Houses, which has garnered more than 4,000 signatures. It calls for the city to revise bylaws and zoning that make it easier to demolish homes instead of updating them and taking a closer look at development projects that tear down pre-1940s homes while prioritizing those that retain them.

The effort seems to be paying off with higher visibility. Some demolitions have even attracted protesters, which may have helped save two faux Tudor homes known as The Dorothies, from the wrecker. They were purchased intact and trucked off to new locations.

The issue is now on the radar of Heritage Canada The National Trust, a preservationist group that has put West Side Vancouver's character homes and gardens on its Top 10 Endangered Places List. Adderson notes it's not just the high-end west side; the blue-collar east side may have been hit even harder.

The municipal government has responded, announcing a Heritage Action Plan last December. It calls for a review, streamlining of zoning and permitting rules to make heritage retention applications easier. This will increase demolition fees for pre-1940s houses and update the city's heritage registry.

But Adderson said the process will take up to three years. Demolition will continue, with 866 houses destroyed last year and some 2,400 in the last three years.

Heritage designation may flag some houses but Kathryn Morrow, communications manager for the Vancouver Heritage Foundation said so-called character homes fall into a kind of grey zone that makes protecting them hard.

"Just because it hasn’t been designated or isn’t on the registry or there may not have been somebody famous that lived there doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in that home," Morrow said.

With west side lots worth upwards of a million dollars just in land value, and taxed that way, buyers and developers feel pressure to build big, destroying gardens and cutting down trees in the process.

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