Vancouver, worried that its early history of single-family wood housing is disappearing under wreckers’ balls at an increasing pace, plans measures not only to slow that frequency but also require most materials to be kept out of the landfill.

Two related reports going to city council next week indicate plans for a temporary moratorium on the demolition of “character homes” in the heritage-rich First Shaughnessy district, and to require recycling of up to 90 per cent of any pre-1940s houses in the city approved for demolition.

City staff are reacting to what they say has become an alarming pace of destruction of usable pre-Second-World-War housing. They also want to tackle a major source of the materials that end up in the dump yet could be recycled.

If approved, the proposals would make mandatory a construction and demolition waste recovery program that had been voluntary, until now, and mostly unsuccessful.

Two years ago, Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson endorsed a pilot program that encouraged the systematic and labour-intensive “deconstruction” of houses that otherwise would have been crushed by machinery and hauled to the dump. While the rate of recovery was high — as much as 93 per cent of buildings, including doors, timbers, glass, wire, concrete and other materials, were recycled — the market for such items has not fully developed.

“The pilot project didn’t get the uptick that we hoped,” Coun. Heather Deal, council’s liaison on the city’s Heritage Advisory Commission, acknowledged Wednesday.

However, by requiring a high level of recycling from predominantly wooden pre-1940s housing, markets will likely develop, she said, noting they exist in other cities with similar salvage rules. City staff say as much as 40 tonnes of material could be diverted from landfills for each house and would go a long ways towards meeting Vancouver’s zero-waste policies under the 2011 Greenest City plan. It notes that a high level of recycling already takes place in more modern construction because there are developed markets for concrete and metal.

The proposals come as the city experience — particularly in the First Shaughnessy District — a renewed interest among small developers to bulldoze old housing on expensive land and replace them with the equivalent of small mansions.

First Shaughnessy, with its larger lot sizes and old housing, is particularly affected. City staff say of the 595 properties in the neighbourhood, 329 were built before 1940 and 80 are listed on the Vancouver Heritage Register. But only 11 are protected from demolition through heritage designation or heritage revitalization agreements.

Under the first proposal, the city would not grant any demolitions or significant alterations of prewar housing in First Shaugnessy for at least a year, until a staff review of the area’s development plan is completed. The city also expects to complete a citywide heritage plan within 18 months.

Deal said that of about 1,000 house demolitions approved last year, nearly a third involved “character homes”, and neighbourhoods have started to protest such destruction.

“We’re really hope this turns the dial down on the number of people choosing to demolish houses. We know that people don’t want to see the city changing this way,” she said. “We have had a lot feedback and attention on this issue and we agree that it is better to retain those older character homes when it makes sense to do so.”

The city reports say that if successful, the program could lead to the phasing in of stringent waste recycling requirements for all one- and two-family housing, regardless of age.