19-12-2023

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La Maison évolutive à Montréal

Programme de la maison à coût abordable.

Source:  http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/fr/prin/celoab/reou/idloab/urcodh/loev/loev_005.cfm 

La Maison Évolutive remporte le World Habitat Award en 1999 que le professeur Avi Friedman a reçu en Chine

environ 10 000 maisons évolutives ont été bâties en Amérique du Nord, offrant ainsi une maison abordable à de nombreux accédants à la propriété. Des économies appréciables sont possibles grâce à l’étroitesse de la maison et au fait que les étages sont laissés sans cloisons pour pouvoir être adaptés au fur et à mesure des besoins

Objectif

Créer une forme de logement abordable dont l’intérieur puisse être aménagé progressivement en fonction des besoins d’espace et des moyens financiers des propriétaires.

Groupe cible

Ménages dont les revenus sont de très faibles à modestes.

Résumé

La Maison évolutive est une habitation en rangée de trois étages, d’une superficie d’environ 1 000 pi² et d’une largeur d’à peu près 14 pi. Elle renferme au départ un petit salon, une cuisine/coin-repas, une salle de bains et une ou deux chambres de petites dimensions au premier étage. Lors de l’achat, les étages supérieurs ne sont pas subdivisés. Quand les propriétaires ont besoin de plus d’espace ou quand leur situation financière s’améliore, ils peuvent aménager le reste de la maison comme il leur plaît, en y installant par exemple une autre chambre, un plus grand salon ou un bureau à domicile. La Maison évolutive est très peu chère, elle ne coûte que 40 000 $ sans le terrain. À Montréal, ce type de logement se vend entre 65 000 et 95 000 $, soit 15 000 à 45 000 $ de moins qu’une maison neuve de taille comparable. Des ménages qui gagnent moins que le seuil de faible revenu fixé par Statistique Canada pour Montréal ont pu en faire l’achat, et leurs versements mensuels sont moins élevés que le loyer qu’ils payaient auparavant. Il existe plus de 10 000 habitations de ce type en Amérique du Nord, dont 6 000 dans la région de Montréal.

Description

Contexte

Avi Friedman et Witold Rybczynski du Programme de logements abordables établi par l’École d’architecture de l’Université McGill ont élaboré le concept de la Maison évolutive en 1990. Le but était de construire une habitation dont le prix de vente serait accessible aux ménages à faible revenu.

Les opinions exprimées par les visiteurs de la maison témoin ont aidé l’équipe de conception à déterminer si la Maison évolutive se vendrait bien. Trois quarts des personnes interrogées ont déclaré qu’elles pourraient vivre dans un logement de moins de 1 000 pi², 93 % ont aimé l’idée de disposer d’un étage qui pourrait être aménagé au gré de leurs besoins, plus des deux tiers ont estimé que la Maison évolutive serait un bon achat et 94 % ont apprécié son aspect extérieur classique de maison en rangée.

Mise en œuvre du projet

Une Maison évolutive est une habitation en rangée de deux étages, qui mesure 14 pi sur 36 pi (environ 1 000 pi²). Lors de l’achat, le rez-de-chaussée comporte une cuisine, une salle de bains et un salon. Le ou les étages forment une aire ouverte non aménagée. Les plans montrent le rez-de-chaussée et l’étage d’une Maison évolutive type (après aménagement de l’étage).

L’acheteur détermine l’agencement du rez-de-chaussée avant l’acquisition. Plus tard, quand il a besoin de plus d’espace ou quand ses moyens le lui permettent, il peut aménager l’étage. La plomberie et le câblage sont faciles d’accès grâce à des planches amovibles. Le propriétaire peut donc modifier l’agencement des pièces en fonction de l’évolution de son mode de vie.

Économies

La Maison évolutive permet de réaliser des économies de diverses façons :

-- Le terrain est de dimension réduite, ce qui abaisse son prix d’achat

-- La grandeur du terrain et la forte densité réduisent les coûts de l’infrastructure de 60 % par rapport aux maisons unifamiliales bâties sur des terrains ordinaires.

-- La construction d’un bâtiment de petite dimension exige moins de main-d’œuvre et moins de matériaux.

-- On propose aux acheteurs 33 options pour personnaliser leur logement, ce qui leur permet d’avoir les commodités souhaitées en respectant leur budget. On peut, par exemple, ajouter un balcon pour 350 $, un toit incliné avec lucarne pour 1 000 $, une terrasse pour 610 $ ou des moulures de style classique pour 375 $.

-- Chaque étage non aménagé abaisse les coûts de construction de 5 000 $.

-- La superficie des murs extérieurs et de la toiture de la maison évolutive correspond à une fraction de celle d’une maison individuelle classique, ce qui abaisse d’autant les coûts de chauffage et de refroidissement. En moyenne, les frais annuels de chauffage sont réduits de 60 %.

Aménagement ultérieur

Selon des recherches effectuées par l’Université McGill, deux tiers des propriétaires de Maisons évolutives ont terminé l’aménagement intérieur de leur domicile. Environ 75 % ont effectué les travaux eux-mêmes ou avec l’aide d’amis et de voisins, plutôt que de faire appel à un entrepreneur.

Concours

La Maison évolutive a gagné en 1998 le Prix mondial de l’habitat décerné par la Building and Social Housing Foundation.

Contribution à l’offre de logements abordables

Le coût de construction d’une Maison évolutive, sans le prix du terrain, s’élève à 40 000 $ environ. À Montréal, ce type de logement se vend entre 65 000 et 95 000 $, selon le quartier, soit 15 000 à 45 000 $ de moins qu’une maison comparable entièrement aménagée. On a aussi introduit avec succès ce concept dans les banlieues, où le prix de vente est nettement plus bas que celui d’une habitation classique.

Soixante-dix pour cent des Maisons évolutives ont été achetées par des jeunes couples avec ou sans enfant, le reste par des familles monoparentales ou des personnes seules. Grâce au bas prix de vente, de nombreux ménages à faible revenu ont pu accéder à la propriété. Des familles qui gagnent moins que le seuil de faible revenu fixé par Statistique Canada pour Montréal ont été en mesure d’acheter une Maison évolutive, et les versements qu’ils doivent effectuer chaque mois sont moins élevés que les loyers qu’ils payaient auparavant.

Le concept a été extrêmement bien accueilli par le marché. En 1991, un an seulement après la construction de la maison témoin sur le campus McGill, on avait déjà vendu 87 habitations de ce type. L’année suivante, on en dénombrait un millier à l’intérieur et dans les environs de Montréal. En 1999, plus de 10 000 Maisons évolutives avaient été construites en Amérique du Nord.

Récapitulation

-- Les Maisons évolutives sont accessibles aux ménages à très faible revenu. Les versements mensuels sont parfois inférieurs aux loyers payés auparavant.

-- Le prix de vente dans la région de Montréal varie de 65 000 à 95 000 $.

-- On peut construire une Maison évolutive pour 40 000 $ (sans le terrain).

-- Plus de 10 000 Maisons évolutives ont été bâties en Amérique du Nord, dont 6 000 dans la région de Montréal.

Possibilité de répéter l’expérience

La Maison évolutive a remporté un vif succès à Montréal. La construction de 4 000 habitations supplémentaires un peu partout en Amérique du Nord et en Europe de l’Est montre que le concept peut être mis en œuvre dans diverses municipalités et dans différents marchés immobiliers. Si le prix du terrain sur lequel sera bâti la maison varie, le coût des matériaux et de la main-d’œuvre reste quand même aux environs de 40 000 $. Une condition importante, toutefois, est que la municipalité soit prête à intégrer dans son règlement de zonage des terrains de tailles variables.

On a construit des Maisons évolutives en zone urbaine et en banlieue. Leur taille réduite convient bien aux terrains intercalaires ou de petites dimensions, mais on a également réalisé des versions individuelles de ce type de logement dans de nouveaux lotissements.

Stratégies connexes

Le concept Bâti-Flex

L’espace intérieur d’une maison Bâti-Flex se plie au mode de vie de ses propriétaires. On peut modifier la taille des pièces ou l’affectation de tout un étage. Ces transformations sont prévues dès le départ, grâce au précâblage et à la plomberie en place. Le logement comporte aussi des aménagements spéciaux pour favoriser l’accès aux personnes âgées, aux personnes handicapées et aux jeunes enfants. Quel que soit le type d’habitation, le concept Bâti-Flex permet de réagencer la surface habitable avec le minimum de travaux et de dépenses. Il est généralement possible de louer l’espace dont on n’a plus besoin, que ce soit à un tiers ou à un parent, ce qui réduit les coûts de possession. À mesure que les besoins de la famille évoluent, il en va de même pour le logement.

Avi Friedman, Ph.D. Co-concepteur de la Maison évolutive

Directeur, Programme de logements abordables, École d’architecture de l’Université McGill - École d’architecture McGill 815, rue Sherbrooke Ouest Montréal (Québec) H3A 2K6

Publication:

Construction industrialisée des maisons en rangée au moyen de panneaux muraux : la maison évolutive, version industrialisée.

Living Smaller

by Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania

Big houses may someday look as outdated and impractical as big cars, for many of the same reasons

IN May of 1990 my collegues and I built a demonstration house on the campus of McGill University, in downtown Montreal, to test a thesis of ours: if people thinking of changing houses could experience the advantages of high-quality, smaller, more flexible, and more adaptable houses, they might actually choose smaller rather than larger quarters. The Grow Home was small (1,000 square feet); it included unpartitioned space; it was adaptable to different households; it used good-quality finishes and materials. And it was a row house, only fourteen feet wide. The construction cost was about $35,000, which meant that the selling price in Montreal, including land and all development costs, would have been less than $60,000 -- about half the price of an average single-family house in Montreal at the time.

The house was fully furnished (by a Swedish manufacturer of do-it-yourself furniture), and it was open to the public for three weeks. Each day a stream of people made their way up the stairs to the porch and through the house. As they approached the house, their first reaction was usually "Isn't it tiny!" And the Grow Home was tiny -- fourteen feet is unusually narrow for a row house. Its smallness was exaggerated by its site: it stood alone, like a slice of bread removed from a loaf, surrounded by large university buildings. The Grow Home resembled a doll's house, albeit an elegant one, since the facade was designed in the traditional manner.

Once inside -- the first room was the kitchen -- people commonly reacted with surprise at the amount of space: "It's much bigger than I thought; it doesn't feel small at all." Fourteen feet is narrow for a house, but it is not narrow for a room, and an eat-in kitchen fourteen feet square is spacious, requiring no compromise in layout or counter space. The feeling of roominess continued in a short corridor, which was wider than usual in order to accommodate bookshelves or, in this case, shallow cupboards. Immediately behind the kitchen (and sharing its plumbing) was the bathroom, which was large enough to include a full-size washer and dryer. At the rear of the house was a small sitting room with French doors leading outside to a pergola-covered deck. Like many of the features in the house, the pergola and the deck were part of a list of options that could be added according to the owner's wishes; one might choose a deck ($610), a wood-strip floor ($545), or varnished oak stairs ($800).

The staircase led to a second floor, which was an unexpectedly large space without interior walls, extending from the front of the house to the rear. Part of this loft was furnished as a baby's room; the other end was the parents' bedroom, with large doors leading to a balcony overlooking the front garden. Movable cupboards replaced built-in closets. It would be possible in the future to create a separate children's bedroom, and there was also enough space for a second bathroom, if one was wanted.

About 10,000 people visited the Grow Home. A questionnaire was made available at the door, and although the 636 responses turned in do not represent a scientific sample, the results were nevertheless revealing.

Understandably, the Grow Home attracted people with modest incomes: half the respondents said that their household incomes were in the range of $15,000 to $34,000. Also understandably, these were relatively young households: three quarters of the respondents were under forty-five. Just over a third were single, and about a third had children; almost 40 percent indicatedthat they were looking to buy their first house. Asked if they would be ready to live in a house smaller than 1,000 square feet, three quarters answered yes. An overwhelming 93 percent approved of the idea of a second floor that could be completed according to their needs. As for the quality of the materials and the finishes, 66 percent found it to be good or excellent, 32 percent checked off "Acceptable, considering the house price," and only three percent indicated "Disappointing." Did they think that the Grow Home was a good buy at about $60,000, including land? Sixty-nine percent said yes. The traditional appearance of the Grow Home appealed to almost all (94 percent) of the respondents.

The experience with the Grow Home suggests that our thesis about small houses may well be correct. The urge to be a homeowner remains strong in Canada, as it does in the United States, and young, first-time house buyers obviously understand that they will have to be flexible and make some compromises in their dreams of a home.

Housing Shocks

IT is not really surprising that the grow home met with popular acceptance: the market and the economy have changed in ways that will make everyone compromise and be more flexible. The first of three seismic events that altered how Americans live -- and how they must think about buying houses in the future -- started as an undetected rumble in the early 1960s, just after the golden age of American housing. Almost three quarters of existing U.S. houses were built after 1940, many in the twenty years following the end of the Second World War. The overwhelming majority followed the same model: single houses for single families. The best-known example, which became a symbol of homeownership throughout the 1950s, was devised by the developer William Levitt. The house was small and uncomplicated, but it had a fully equipped kitchen, the lot was big enough for a garden, and at $7,990 -- no down payment and $65 a month -- in 1949 it was a bargain. Homecoming GIs, impatient to get on with their lives, saw this little cottage as just what they needed.

If such houses were uniform "little boxes made of "ticky-tacky," in the words of the scornful song, it was not necessarily the result of a lack of imagination but, rather, a reflection of a remarkable homogeneity in the size and composition of American households. In 1940 the typical number of occupants of a house was four: husband, wife, and two children. Their roles were predictable: Dad worked at the factory or office, and Mom stayed home, kept house, and took care of the kids, who played in the yard.

The composition of the family started to change in the early 1960s. In 1956 the median age at first marriage had been 22.5 years for men and 20.1 years for women, a historic low. Now young people started waiting longer before getting married, which, together with birth control (the pill was first marketed in 1960), affected fertility rates: people had fewer children, and had them later. The size of households shrank accordingly, and by 1989 the average number of occupants in a house had dropped to 2.6.

Households were not only smaller but different. Starting in the 1960s, for a variety of reasons, more women began to work, and by the 1970s they were entering the work force in unprecedented numbers; today in more than half of all families both parents work outside the home. At the same time, divorce rates have risen -- it is now estimated that half of all marriages will end in divorce. Hence the increased number of single-parent families, most headed by women. More people are living alone, and single-person households now account for almost a quarter of the total, up from 17 percent, twenty years ago; during the same period married-couple households went down from 71 percent to 55 percent. The typical family -- a married couple with young children -- in the Levittown cottage is not typical anymore. Indeed, it is now called the "traditional" family, and makes up less than a third of all households.

The second event that changed the American home involved ownership. Homeownership is important to Americans, about two thirds of whom own their homes -- twice the rate in France, Germany, and Great Britain. Throughout the postwar period the amount of money that the median-income family could afford to spend on buying a house exceeded the median price of a new house by several thousand dollars, a situation that persisted even though the average price of a new house increased to $16,000 in 1955 and to about $55,000 in 1978. Houses grew more expensive partly because of increased land values and inflation, but as long as family incomes also grew, the rate of homeownership continued to increase steadily. The rising numbers suggested that eventually all gainfully employed people could, if they wished, become homeowners.

During the late 1970s house prices continued to climb as before, while family incomes rose more slowly and inflation and higher interest rates reduced affordability levels. A graph of the chronological progress of the two numbers -- median house price and median affordability -- would show that until the late sixties the two lines climbed side by side, affordability above and price below. Then they began to converge, until finally, at the end of the decade, they crossed, and moved apart. The median price of a house began to exceed what a median-income family could afford.

The percentage of American households that owned their homes started to decline. The decline was small, but it was the first decline in fifty years. Throughout the 1980s the rate fluctuated, which led some observers to discount the idea that anything important had taken place. Nevertheless, after an all-time peak of 65.6 percent around 1980, ownership had fallen to 63.8 percent by 1988, and among the age group traditionally associated with buying a first home, people aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, last year it stood at 35.4 percent, a drop of eight percentage points since the previous decade. For this group the American dream of homeownership has been severely compromised.

The third and most important event was the October, 1973, energy crisis, with an aftershock during the 1980s. The streetcar, the elevated train, the commuter railroad, and the automobile had made inexpensive suburban land available to housing developers, and the rapid proliferation of single-family houses on large individual plots had been possible only because the rate of car ownership in the United States had been high ever since the 1920s. But for a short time during the winter of 1973 the world seemed to be turned upside down, and there was much talk of moving back to the city and of the benefits of energy conservation and mass transit. Eventually cars became smaller and cheaper to operate, home-insulation retrofitting suddenly became a lucrative small industry, and energy efficiency became a selling feature of new houses, though residential development continued to depend on the automobile just as much as before. Fuel prices declined, and things seemed to be back to normal.

The aftershock came in the form of a series of scientific disclosures about the deteriorating state of the physical environment, particularly global warming. Family cars, as well as power plants, were among the chief sources of carbon-dioxide emissions, so dependence on automobiles was seen as a problem once again. The more general issues of conservation of energy, physical resources, and land were also again raised, and critics were quick to point out that the suburban house lavishly consumed all three. The abundant resources that accounted for the success of the large single-family suburban house -- unlimited land, cheap transportation, and plentiful energy -- can no longer be taken for granted.

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