Housing conference to highlight changing definitions of home

The single-family home in Vancouver is becoming a thing of the past, according to a local housing expert.

Nathanael Lauster, a sociology professor at the University of B.C. who specializes in housing, is among the guest speakers at next week’s Re:Address Summit. The Oct. 26-27 gathering is part of a longer conference dealing with housing affordability in Vancouver.

Lauster will give a closing presentation on concepts outlined in his book, The Death and Life of the Single-Family House, and how Vancouver compares to other North American cities in moving away from traditional housing setups.

Zoning codes were introduced as a response to industrializing cities in the late 19th century, says Lauster, allowing for an explosion of single-family housing development outside inner cities.

“Pretty much all across North America, you had these single-family homes pop up and what I like to think of as ‘the Great House Reserve,’ ” he said. “That’s been in place since the early 20th century and it’s really affected a lot of how people understand what they should be striving towards.”

Lauster acknowledges that for many, a traditional marker of success is the ability to raise a family in a single-family home, and when that’s not as easily achievable — as is commonplace in Vancouver’s current market — perhaps the definitions of success and housing need to be re-examined.

“I’d like to see us try to diversify away from that (the single-family house) and I think Vancouver in many respects is leading the way in that kind of diversification,” said Lauster, citing the city’s push for transit-oriented neighbourhood planning and multi-family dwellings.

Lauster also notes it’s important to examine our understandings of housing and how a house does not always equal a home. The idea is outlined in At Home Looks Like, a 2015 project in which Lauster asked youth in Arviat, Nunavat and Vancouver, both of which deal with housing challenges, to photograph their homes and explain what that means to them.

“I think a lot of the times the voices, especially of more marginalized youth, are missing when it comes to housing conversations and when it comes to trying to come up with definitions and understandings of what home means,” he said. “So we really wanted to bring those voices to the fore.”

The photographs show people, places and things but very few are straightforward depictions of a house or dwelling. Instead, the photographs all follow a common theme in documenting the things that take place inside the homes and what it represents.

“We should celebrate that kind of diversity in terms of what people’s ideas of what the good life might entail,” said Lauster.

sip@postmedia.com

twitter.com/stephanie_ip