Vancouver city hall is hearing "strong opinions on both sides" of the debate around allowing windowless interior bedrooms in some new apartments.

Forty years ago, when Joseph and Jeanette Jones, a now-retired librarian and teacher, bought the detached house in East Van where they raised three kids, it was difficult, Joseph says, to “catch the bottom rung” of the housing market.

Today, for most young median-income families looking to grab any rung of home ownership in Vancouver, it’s not difficult to keep up with the Joneses.

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It’s impossible.

So with home ownership now firmly out of the realm of possibility for most medium-earning Vancouverites — especially the detached house market — more young families wanting to live in or near the city will be renting, and likely living in smaller spaces.

Now, in an attempt to increase the number of family-friendly, multi-bedroom rental apartments , the City of Vancouver is experimenting with allowing bedrooms without exterior windows in some new apartment buildings.

It has locals debating whether the move is an overdue step to help young urban families, or, as the Joneses contend, a “race to the bottom” in degrading livability.

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The Joneses recently wrote to the City of Vancouver’s Children, Youth and Families advisory committee alerting them to “an issue that greatly affects the livability of housing” for families.

The city, through its new Moderate Income Rental Housing Pilot Program , or MIRHPP, has been experimenting with relaxing design guidelines to allow what they call “inboard bedrooms,” generally a third bedroom with no exterior window.

It’s an emerging issue in a growing city with a constricted land base. Vancouver saw very little rental housing built between 1980 and 2010, and there is now a shortage of family-friendly apartments.

City programs over the last decade have seen some success encouraging rental construction, but as a city-commissioned consultants’ report noted last year, “while unit composition has improved” since Vancouver’s rental incentive programs were introduced in 2009, “livability challenges remain.”

“Livability” is a subjective matter. An apartment that feels comfortable to a Tokyo resident might seem unlivable to a Vancouverite.

And city hall has been hearing “fairly strong opinions on both sides” of the debate around inboard bedrooms, said Dan Garrison, Vancouver’s assistant director of housing policy.

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“We’ve certainly heard the concern that their bedrooms wouldn’t be livable enough, and that all bedrooms should have an exterior light. We understand those concerns, and livability is really important,” he said.

“But we’ve also heard, and we know from data, that there are a lot of families with children living in apartments that are having their children sleep, for example, in places that are not proper bedrooms, that were intended to be built as, say, pantries or storage rooms.”

When a family creates an improvised bedroom out of a pantry or some other room not designed for the purpose, there can be issues with improper ventilation or safety, Garrison said.

But by allowing builders to add a third interior bedroom in a unit’s floor plan, Garrison said the city can ensure those rooms are designed with proper ventilation and what’s called a “clerestory window,” which allows “borrowed light from a neighbouring room.”

That’s why the city is considering inboard bedrooms through MIRHPP as a trial, with a plan to later evaluate how they’re working, he said.

The MIRHPP apartments in question would be secured at rents affordable for median-income households. This means a new three-bedroom unit, which might have a small, inboard third bedroom, could be affordable for a family with two income earners each making around $40,000 a year.

City hall watchers of different stripes disagree about whether that level of affordability is worth the trade-off of a smaller, interior third bedroom.

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The Joneses write a blog called Eye On Norquay , in which they’re often critical of city housing policy, and what they have described as “a developer-funded city council and compromised city planners.”

Photo by Mike Bell / PNG

Last week, Joseph Jones said he believes Garrison’s department is focused largely on hitting their targets for housing production at the expense of other considerations.

“The count is about all the city really cares about. We don’t see much concern for esthetics or landscaping or anything else. It’s just: ‘Build it to the max, and who cares what else there is,'” Jones said. “Do we want to race all the way to the bottom?”

The “extremely small” inboard third bedrooms being considered in new rental developments, Jones says, are “not livable for children or youth.”

On that point, Adrian Crook, perhaps Vancouver’s most vocal proponent of minimalist urban family living, disagrees.

Crook is a single dad who maintains his own blog called 5 Kids 1 Condo , documenting his experiences raising five kids in a rented 1,053-square-foot, two-bed-and-a-den Yaletown condo. Last year, Crook converted a windowless 32 square-foot in-suite storage room into a bedroom for his 13-year-old son Oliver.

“He loves it,” Crook said. “It’s the hardest working 32 square feet of the house, and he wouldn’t sleep anywhere else. We have ventilation accommodated for, and all sorts of other awesome modifications that basically make it his dream room.”

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Photo by Francis Georgian / PNG

Obviously, Crook said, there’s a need for building codes to ensure basic health, fire and safety standards, but there are also “all sorts of silly regulations at the city level that are really more about esthetic preferences,” whether it’s gabled roofs on laneway houses or requirements for basement suite entrances to be on the side of a building because the front is considered gauche.

Crook is frustrated to hear such criticism coming from the Joneses and other “well-housed people who don’t really have a vested interest in rental housing stock,” he said, because it only makes it harder to get badly needed rental housing built.

“This is what drives me nuts. We’re really puritanical in how we want other people to live,” Crook said.

“I don’t begrudge anybody’s desire to live in a house … But here’s somebody in a house telling others how they think they should live, when it should really be a personal choice.”

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