Victoria’s Missing Middle Housing (feat. Strong Towns Nanaimo)
I have been a fan of Strong Towns as a movement and organisation for a long time. I am sure many of you have noticed me quote their articles on Sidewalking Victoria frequently. That is why I am so excited to let you know about today’s article which is being done in collaboration with Strong Towns Nanaimo. A few weeks ago, before my trip to Newfoundland, Michael Bassili from Strong Towns Nanaimo and I had a call to talk about our two sites and Michael suggested a collaboration that could showcase both of our cities. In particular, the suggestion was to show off some examples of missing middle housing. Often the focus is put on the ‘missing’ aspect, and it can ignore the fact that we may have great examples to use as blueprints already in our cities. That is definitely the case for Victoria.
What is Missing Middle?
Just as a refresher on what missing middle is I thought I would talk about the working definition we used for these articles, but it also works more generally what type of housing I think fits. Missing middle housing usually refers to housing that is more intensive than a single family house on a lot, but is usually at a smaller scale so that even the largest buildings in the definition would not likely have an elevator. The usual list of building types includes: duplexes, tri-plexes- six-plexes, townhouses, dingbats, bungalow courts, co-ops and walk-up apartment buildings. Usually the buildings will be focused on family housing rather than bachelors though that isn’t a hard and fast rule.
Missing Middle in Victoria
While in some cities you see a real dichotomy between the single-family house and the intensive high-density living of the city centre, Victoria already does have some great examples of missing-middle housing, just unfortunately not at the scale we need it to be at. In my neighbourhood, many of the streets were changed from single family zoning to allow for duplexes many decades ago (I live in one). There are also lots of other examples around the city as you will see. More recently we have seen the City of Victoria move to allow even more density of single family lots, though I would say that due to the very onerous hurdles that the city put into the bylaw, there has not been much uptake on it. For more on that, have a read of my article from earlier this year here.
As you will see in both articles we have a series of 30 photos of local examples of missing middle housing. It will be really interesting to look back and forth between Victoria and Nanaimo and see what the similarities and differences are.
Victoria’s Missing Middle
The selection above is just a sample. There are of course, hundreds more in the City of Victoria and in Greater Victoria. I am really curious to see what Strong Towns Nanaimo have pulled together in their article. Make sure to check it out here. As always, please leave a comment with your thoughts on Missing Middle in Victoria below.