Road blocks for house movers and heritage advocates

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Most people accept recycling as a necessary part of their routine. And yet instead of recycling perfectly livable houses, we freely demolish thousands each year. That’s hardly sustainable.

Last year alone, about 4,000 houses were demolished in the Vancouver region, and an estimated 80 per cent of them had at least 50 years of life left in them, according to Jeremy Nickel, president of the structural moving company based in Port Coquitlam. Heritage advocates note that about one-quarter of that number are houses from Vancouver.

“In the Vancouver area, it’s where the greatest amount of demolitions are occurring, and the least amount of moving,” said Mr. Nickel, who runs the company with his brother Allan. Their father founded the company in 1956.

Mr. Nickel has lobbied governments to divert significant construction waste from the landfill by saving houses and relocating them to other areas. But his efforts have been stymied in recent years. As policies push for increased density, he says the problem has exacerbated.

Mr. Nickel is speaking out because in his 40 years of doing business as a major recycler, he’s never had so much difficulty doing his job. It’s not for lack of demand—there is a market for the houses. He’s seeing a greater number of bureaucratic obstacles. As a consequence, he says he is relocating fewer houses in the Vancouver region than he was a decade ago.

He estimates that hundreds of houses between Granville and Cambie streets, from Southwest Marine Drive to West 16th Avenue, are fenced off and boarded up, awaiting demolition. He is seeing developers purchase large groupings of houses to rezone to a higher density.

But part of the discussion should be a plan to recycle houses, to make it easier to do so.

“I have to tell you, that all the politicians, and many people I’ve dealt with for years, lobbying them and working with every level of government, they all say same thing—that we have to divert solid waste from landfills. And currently, the demolition debris from houses being demolished is over 40 per cent of all landfill waste. That’s the highest it’s ever been.

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“And then you take price of wood and how precious our trees are. Say, a 40-ton building that’s demolished, which is on the lighter side, that’s 60 to 80 trees to replace that wood that ends up being mulched up and then thrown into the garbage dump.”

One major obstacle is the delay in obtaining a demolition permit needed to move a house.

And the Vancouver Park Board has made it more difficult to move a house through waterfront parks. Mr. Nickel has long depended on access to the parks to move the houses onto barges. One park in particular that he used was Fraser River Park, in South Vancouver.

The Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation Manager of Park Development, Ian Stewart, said that Fraser River Park and “most shoreline parks in Vancouver are not appropriate locations to facilitate this process.”

Reasons given include cultural and archaeological concerns, stability issues, protection of walkways and boardwalks and an aging underground infrastructure. The Park Board has suggested Nickel Bros. finds another means to access the waterfront.

“We are no longer in a position to accept the associated risks with such commercial operations,” Mr. Stewart said.

Nickel Bros. is also a big presence in Washington State, where he said it’s easier for them to carry out their recycling. The Americans have been the beneficiaries of many of our unwanted character homes. He’s moved about a dozen arts and crafts homes from Oak Bay municipality on Vancouver Island to Friday Harbor, on the San Juan Islands, where a subdivision of recycled character houses has been growing for the last several years. This past week he surveyed routes to move 11 houses and cabins from B.C. to Point Roberts, Washington.

Despite Seattle’s difficult topography, he’s moving more houses there than Vancouver, because the system has more of a preservation mindset, and what he calls a more proactive approach to recycling. He got a call from the City of Portland because they too want to recycle and resell displaced buildings.

“You think of all the challenges we are faced with in terms of homelessness, and affordable housing, the environment, the lack of wood products—all of these things point to the solution being we need to preserve the current inventory of houses,” says Mr. Nickel. “If [local governments] are going to a higher density, then let’s talk about a plan.”

In North America, moving and recycling houses and also selling them is a unique business model. Mr. Nickel can’t think of another house moving company that sells houses, which they list on their website. The website lists several homes for sale, all structurally sound, he says. There’s a classic 1928 craftsman bungalow in North Vancouver with stained fir floors, ceiling beams and trims and stained glass windows. The lovely four-bedroom character home is listed for $119,500, and that includes the cost of moving it within five kilometres. That doesn’t include any barging cost.

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The house is labelled: “time running out.” Other houses on the site are labelled “price reduced,” “sold,” and “demolished.” They are just a handful of houses that Mr. Nickel is attempting to save.

He figures the houses typically sell for within 5 per cent of the listed price. One house in the U.S. they sold, a 6,000-square-foot mansion, was assessed at $3.2 million and will be brought to Canada. It had been listed on their website for $800,000.

Vancouver has a green demolition bylaw for houses built before 1950. Otherwise, there is no minimum requirement to reuse and recycle demolition materials.

There are things that municipalities could do, such as offer developers a couple of units of more density if they save the original houses, he says. Another challenge he faces is moving the houses before they become neglected and vandalized, which is what happens when they sit empty while the developer awaits permits. In Vancouver, a developer must obtain a development permit before beginning demolition work. In order to move a house, Nickel Bros. needs a demolition permit to prepare and deconstruct the basement and place steel beams under the house. But because it can take eight to 24 months to obtain the permits, the house falls apart by the time they are obtained, making the houses unsalvageable. By then, everybody in the neighbourhood is happy to see the house torn down. Mr. Nickel says that wouldn’t happen if the City made an exception for houses to be moved and saved, and issued a demo permit early on, separate from the building permit.

Long-time heritage consultant Don Luxton said relocation isn’t their first choice, but it is often necessary to conserve them.

“Any obstacles to relocation imposed by bureaucratic rules means that more heritage buildings will be demolished,” he said. “Even harder on historic buildings are the many building code requirements that require us to strip them to the studs to meet envelope and energy performance standards.

“We often have no choice, despite the incredible waste of perfectly good materials.”

And with so many requirements to update the house, all that’s left is the structural frame. All the old growth fir and oak used for the siding, the floors and the trim gets mulched. Original windows are tossed. What’s left is a mere replica of the original house that lacks the original features. Heritage houses are so stripped of original details that heritage advocates now have a name for it: volumetric preservation.

The wastefulness is also happening in Langley and Surrey, where he’s seeing houses that are only 15 to 20 years old coming down at a “staggering” pace.

“What is strange is that we have more political support than ever before, and we have more public support than ever before,” he says. “It’s time word gets out. I’m trying to emphasize that everybody sees it’s the right thing to do, but we have more obstacles than ever before.”

Mr. Nickel says he’s spending a lot more money on legal fees and his own time because of all the bureaucratic barriers.

“Most of these houses in Vancouver will get demolished as a result.”

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