Architecture: $2,000 for a House
Originally published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here.
Earlier this year, Rae Lemke Sprung and her husband, Craig, got a surprise $2,000 tax rebate and used it to buy a house. You read that right: $2,000 for a house. The Sprungs, both in their late 20s, previously thought about home ownership the way most young urbanites do: as a vague, distant prospect.
"We thought, maybe we'll do that someday, when we grow up," Ms. Lemke Sprung says. At the time, they lived in Calgary's Parkdale neighbourhood, where they rented a basement apartment she describes as "better than what a lot of people get."
Here's what "better" means in a Canadian urban centre: missing doors, windows painted shut, ancient appliances and a master bedroom overlooking an enclosed stairwell. It was hardly an ideal family home and, shortly after filing their tax return, the Sprungs learned they were expecting.
That July, they moved into their own three-storey townhouse in Bowness, a once-independent municipality that has since been swallowed by the ever-growing city. Many of their neighbours also got their houses with $2,000 down payments—a stunning achievement in Calgary, where the average home costs nearly $500,000. Their community, called Arrive at Bowness, is a kind of living laboratory where smart architecture and a clever loan program are brought to bear on the affordability crisis. The initiative merits a closer look: perhaps Canada's urban-housing problem seems more intractable than it really is.
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