The rise of windowless bedrooms
The rise of windowless bedrooms
Marginalized Calgarians deserve more than sub-par homes
A bedroom is more than just a space to sleep in.
For young children, bedrooms are a space to engage in unsupervised play; to build forts and have impromptu dance parties, to experiment without an adult’s presence. As they grow older, the need of spending time away from the parental gaze also increases. The bedroom is a teenager’s sanctuary; one of the few spaces where they can enjoy privacy and safe self-expression.
As young adults become independent, living with roommates is a rite of passage. Whether these roommates are friends or strangers, the bedroom remains a solace.
It’s not until we become fully independent adults — if we ever do — that an entire dwelling can become truly ours; that different rooms can start serving singular, specific purposes, and that the bedroom’s functions narrow down to sleeping and other after-dark activities, which I would prefer not to mention because I’m a prude.
Considering the range of uses a bedroom supports throughout our life span, it seems worth asking if forgoing access to natural light and ventilation as a minimum standard of livability is a sacrifice we should make in the name of affordability.
Driven by the belief that building sub-par housing is better than not building any housing at all, the uptake of windowless, inboard bedrooms is rising, despite the benefits of daylight for our physical and mental health, or the issues caused by the lack thereof.
While in cities like Vancouver, Austin and New York this issue has made the headlines, in Calgary it’s remained under the radar.
Killing two birds with one stone
As two crises converged in Calgary: a shortage of affordable housing, and sky-high vacancy rates in our city’s downtown core, office-to-residential conversions have been adopted as a win-win solution.
While Calgary’s strategy has garnered international attention, the structural nature of office buildings presents important challenges to livability that shouldn’t be disregarded.
The deep floor plates office buildings require to support a large workforce — with enough space for multiple elevators, mechanical rooms, and washrooms — also make access to natural light a challenging feat.
Unbeknownst to many, egress windows in bedrooms are a requirement only in buildings without fire sprinklers. Because large multi-family buildings must have a fire suppression system in place, bedroom windows are optional.
The homes produced so far by the City of Calgary’s office-to-residential conversion program, boast below-market rates, family-sized units, and bedrooms without windows.
In September last year, HomeSpace Society announced the grand opening of Neoma, the first office to residential conversion to be completed. Designed with a trauma-informed approach, Neoma has become the poster child of the potential vacant office buildings have to offer — yet the fact that many of Neoma’s units feature windowless bedrooms has rarely been mentioned.
This building is not an outlier.
The next office-to-residential conversion expected to reach completion early next year is PeopleFirst’s The Cornerstone, a state-of-the-art building whose family-sized units are a welcome addition to the limited housing stock in our city’s core.
Although bedrooms in two of the five apartment layouts lack windows, it is The Cornerstone’s balconies that have madethe headlines. Though nice to have, balconies don’t make up for the lack of windows in 10 bedrooms per floor.
With 17 office-to-residential conversions in the pipeline, chances are that windowless bedrooms will continue to proliferate in our city, as the structural adjustments required to ensure widespread access to daylight are too costly to produce apartments at a reasonable price point.
The impact of this trend on livability not only affects Calgarians today, but also generations to come.
Because Calgary relies on filtering to provide low-cost housing, it seems worth considering the impact apartments with windowless bedrooms will have in the future. Currently, the most affordable rentals in Calgary are those built before 1980 — what kind of homes are we building for the lower income Calgarians in decades to come?
The perfect is the enemy of the good
Increasingly, conversations about housing affordability are becoming polarized, and criticism towards the homes that do get built is often perceived as a bad-faith argument. As a result, many progressives turn a blind eye to important deficiencies, like windowless bedrooms, and hide behind platitudes such as “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”
But building housing that supports our biological needs is not the perfect — it’s barely the good.
Although the city paused applications to the office-to-residential incentive in October, citing insufficient funding, the fact that the program’s terms of reference are being updated to better align with Calgary’s housing strategy is a concern.
As the feds have earmarked $228 million to fund the construction of 6,825 affordable housing units in Calgary, holding our city’s decision-makers accountable for the expenditure of this funding is key. Boosting the value of vacant office buildings should not come at the expense of housing standards, as some pundits have suggested.
If our city’s leadership truly aims to deliver the equity marginalized populations deserve, they should sure ensure homes aren’t only plentiful and affordable, but also livable. Increasing the number of sub-par options for those with already limited alternatives is an inequitable approach to housing supply.
Long marginalized, lower income Calgarians deserve better.
Reluctantly yours,
Ximena.
p.s. i finally got around setting up payments. Many thanks to the two lovely folks who’ve pledged their support. Now i have to keep this thing going, don’t i?
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