Living With Kids in the City: Meet Adrian With 5 Kids In A Tiny Condo
I am pleased to launch the first instalment of Kids in the City, a new series that will showcase families who embrace compact urban living.
As a new mother, I am humbled and exhausted at the thought of expanding my family (even though I plan to…because kids are awesome). One of my readers, an IT entrepreneur named Adrian Crook, is not only a father to five small children, he manages to house his entire family in a 1000 square foot condo in downtown Vancouver (yes, you did read that correctly).
Adrian recently started to document his experience on the blog, 5 Kids 1 Condo, which has been getting a lot of media attention. Before you dismiss this lifestyle as impossibly challenging, read his thoughts on the actual simplicity of compact urban living. It just might convince you to downsize your own life and move to a walkable city.
What are the benefits of compact urban living to you and your family?
There are really two parts to that question.
Compact living has huge advantages over living large (i.e. in a house on property). Not only does it take less of our time and money to maintain our 1000sqft condo (freeing us up to travel, go out, enjoy family time, etc), but living small uses fewer resources than running a house does. My energy bill when I lived in a big house was 5-10 times more than it is now.
Urban living ties into compact living so well because when we live small, we invert our life. Instead of bringing everything inside our four walls, owning our own version of everything we need, we rely on the world outside our walls.
Our yard is the local park. Our "man cave" is the movie theatre. Museums, food trucks, art galleries, music festivals, kids fairs, and much more are all within easy walking distance. In a city setting, what you can walk or bike to is nearly unlimited. The best that Vancouver has to offer culturally is nearly always centered around downtown, so by living small we can afford to live right in the centre of everything fun, for kids and adults alike.
Beyond fun, I also think it's instructive for kids to see a more well-rounded view of life than they'd get in the suburbs. The suburbs are a monoculture, with everyone on the same socio-economic plane, for the most part. Living downtown, we frequent neighborhoods such as the Downtown Eastside, whose residents afford the kids a fuller perspective on life.
What are the challenges of compact urban living?
We're very fortunate as both my partner and I are self-employed, meaning we can be involved with our kids whenever they get off school or throughout the day. If we weren't, it might be tougher to get them outside as often as we do without a back yard. At the age they're at now they still need us to go to parks with them, although that will soon not be the case.
A question I often get has to do with how we fit all our stuff into such a small space, but we're minimalists so this isn't much of an issue. We love living compactly because it forces us to make strict decisions about what we buy. We are focused on preserving our floor space for more important things, like allowing kids to sprawl out, build Keva towers, or do cartwheels.
We're also very cognizant of the toll owning too many things takes on your psyche. As I mentioned before, this is a big reason we don't have a house to maintain.
We'd rather spend our life enjoying living than worrying about maintaining huge amounts of "stuff." So for that reason, we don't acquire many things to begin with and the things we do acquire are chosen to minimize maintenance and occupy as little space as possible.
What could be done to make your neighbourhood more family friendly?
Living in downtown Vancouver means we're incredibly blessed with family friendly city design to begin with. Protected bike lanes allow us to go on 20 kilometer rides around the city with the kids without ever having to confront cars, for instance.
However, the two most major items that could be addressed to increase Vancouver's family friendly factor are schools and housing. Just 0.5% of Vancouver's rental housing stock are three bedroom units. The city is obviously aiming to increase this, but it won't happen overnight. So families like ours rely on finding two bedroom apartments with big dens that can be used as a third bedroom.
From a school perspective, there's a big waiting list and an ever-shrinking catchment area for the one Yaletown elementary school. A new 500-student elementary school is being built for early 2017 near us, but even that required the Vancouver School Board to take out a $1.6M loan f to complete, due to the Provincial Government's refusal to fully fund it.
How do you maximize space in your home for your family?
We use a lot of vertical storage and keep what we own to a minimum. Bunk beds, such as the triple bunk in the boys room, are imperative. Mounting the TV on the wall instead of atop a big entertainment unit is another must do.
We also converted our in-suite storage room to a kids art room, giving them a room they can make a mess in. And we make sure the bedrooms are able to be used during the day for playing games in, reading books, watching TV, etc. Doing this ensures we can all get some space when we need it, rather than always competing for the same room.
There's a kid-sized table and bench, wall-mounted paper racks and containers that contain paint brushes, pens, markers and crayons, as well as a wall-mounted easel with paper roll across from the table. The kids art hangs on all the walls of the art room. It's a pretty great space for them to decamp to whenever a creative urge strikes.
Do you think your lifestyle has a smaller ecological footprint? How so?
So often I get people chalking up our lifestyle to mere preference. "Well some people like downtown, some people like suburbs" - like it's a potato/potatoe level of trivial choice.
These are the same people who live in a 3000sqft house in the suburbs with two or three vehicles out front that they drive everywhere in.
Our hydro bill over the winter clocked in at about $30/month. When I lived in North Van in a 2500sqft house years ago, it wasn't uncommon for my hydro/gas bills to be hundreds of dollars. I also drove everywhere without thinking, renovated perfectly good rooms (creating needless waste), and purchased far more consumer goods (than I do now) because I had the space to fill.
Never mind the fact that suburban sprawl costs much more for municipalities to service with fire, police, sewer, water, bylaw enforcement, and so on. Picture a 160-unit tower like the one we live in now versus 160 single family homes sprawled out in the suburbs and tell me how the latter is not many times more expensive than the former. It's illogical to think it isn't.
So yes, living small - and in dense communities - is the way of the future, especially in regions like Greater Vancouver where population growth forecasts are especially high (1M additional residents over the next ten years). For the most part, our city planners understand that.
Unfortunately, residents of predominantly single family home neighborhoods consistently battle density, as if neighborhoods can be frozen in time and the status quo can be maintained forever.
What do your kids think about compact urban living vs single family home living?
Kids are great because they're infinitely adaptable. They've lived in the suburbs before and the city now. They enjoy it all, I believe. My job as a dad is only to show them options, not to convince them of anything in particular.
For decades we've been told that the gold standard for family life is a house in the suburbs. It's imperative we move away from this arbitrary measure, as most Vanouverites #donthave1million.
What our family loves about living in close quarters is how close it brings us together. I feel much more connected to my kids than I did when we lived in a big house. It also teaches all of us to respect each other and our needs more than if we were each able to squirrel away somewhere.
One thing that has been interesting to the kids lately is how connected everything is downtown. We recently began biking as a family and one of our first rides was around the seawall.
It was fascinating to hear the kids calling out all the places we'd been before and figuring out just how close together each of those places were. It really dawned on them even more how accessible downtown is, especially via bike.
What types of policies and projects would you like to see to encourage families to move to cities and smaller homes?
Programs to increase rental housing stock for families are crucial. Affordable two- and three-bedroom rental units are in short supply, and the ones that do exist are priced high as they weren't built to be rental, but instead are condos being rented out by owners. The City of Vancouver recently made some steps to change this, by waiving development cost levies for developers who build three bedroom rental units.
We also need to rezone much of Vancouver to gently densify single family home neighborhoods into townhome or multi-dwelling lots. Permitting separately titled small homes on the same lot would be hugely beneficial, allowing families to purchase property below the million dollar threshold that is the current benchmark price for single family homes in Vancouver.
More schools downtown, as I mentioned, are vital. But until then, for those of us that still maintain a vehicle solely for the purpose of driving the kids to school in another city, I'd love to see some of our car share companies (Zipcar, Modo or Evo, specifically) provide an easy way to take kids in their vehicles.
Some type of booster or car seat solution would be great, because right now that Modo minivan parked two blocks away is much less likely to be used by me if I have to schlep a couple car seats to it each time.
Top photo: Globe and Mail. All others c/o by Adrian Crook.
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