Homeless in Vancouver: Home sweet little home

There’s this house I see whenever my binning takes me up toward Cambie Street.

It’s like a miniature dream home: peaked roof, two storeys, modest front and back yard, and a veranda to boot.

I like it a lot. At any moment I feel the roof might open to reveal a ballerina turning in time to a tinkly music box tune.

It reminds me a lot of what I used to hear described as “wartime homes” when I was growing up in Saskatoon, but it might possibly be even smaller than those.

It even seems a bit smaller than most of Vancouver’s new detached rental units called “lane homes”.

The City of Vancouver’s VanMap—a graphical portal to all sorts of city data—only shows an age for the block this house is on but I don’t believe the house is as old as 1908. (I love VanMap but the more I use it the more omissions and errors I find.)

I realize that two-storey walk-up condo units jammed together side-by-each pretty much duplicate the living space of a little house like this and they do it more efficiently, but I’d rather live in this house. It would feel like real home ownership and besides that, it has windows on all four sides.