Demolishing Vancouver
 
The high pace of house razing has led to a peculiar event known as the demo sale, in which all the fittings of a vacant home - pipes, oak floors, window frames - are up for grabs to citizens willing to rip them out Published: The Globe and Mail, March 30, 1996, FOCUS By Deborah Jones, Vancouver AS the season of yard sales approaches throughout the land, Vancouver is gearing up for something different - demolition sales, unholy free-for- alls peculiar to the city in which entire houses and their yards are up for grabs. Every year more than 1,000 "Demo Sale" signs appear on street corners to announce the location of homes about to be pulled down. The notices attract a stream of cottage owners, home renovators, gardeners and bargain hunters who appear at a site wielding crowbars, shovels, buckets and screwdrivers. They commence to dicker over the house parts they want, then spend hours, even days, ripping out the prizes they've purchased: once- elegant oak floors, entire walls of windows, doors, wooden mouldings, complete fireplaces, kitchen cabinets. Less ambitious customers poke around in basement closets seeking picture frames, old tables and light fixtures. In the yard, gardeners strip away the greenery - whether seven-metre magnolias or patches of day lilies and sod. By the time a sale is over, a perfectly solid family home, sometimes only a few decades old, will be stripped down to its studs, sub-floor and exterior cladding, ready to submit pliantly to a bulldozer. Of course, recycling of household stuff through second-hand shops and yard sales occurs most everywhere. But in this booming city, the size of the demolition business is extraordinary. Last year, 1,040 new single- family homes were built, and for virtually every one an old one was demolished. Demo sales are such a phenomenon peculiar to Vancouver that newcomers sometimes mistake the signs for ads for car lots selling off demonstration models, rather than invitations to scavenge the leftovers of houses. Not all razed houses are worth keeping, but there are enough grand homes full of brass hardware and fine finishings to attract the interest of interior decorators, antique collectors and home renovators. The reason for such intense bulldozing and rebuilding - a rare phenomenon even in nearby cities like Surrey, Burnaby and North Vancouver - is the layout of Vancouver. It's crowded on all sides by other municipalities and waterways. So demand for its land is so high among Canadians, immigrants and offshore investors that nondescript residential lots with "dozer-bait" buildings sell for up to $1.5-million. "The city has small boundaries and few vacant lots," says Vancouver permits supervisor Sandy Esworthy, "so people are building over and over on the land." The demolition derbies allow house owners, builders and professional demo-sale operators to make a few extra bucks, offer neat junk to customers and recycle materials that would otherwise end up in a landfill. However, there's a nasty side to the demo-sale, empty-house syndrome. Open season has been declared by the city's bottom feeders on virtually every vacated home. Like the thieves of old tales who crept through battlefields prying gold teeth from fallen soldiers, burglars prowl city lanes at night seeking empty houses to strip of their valuables, which they fence through second-hand or junk shops, antique stores, metal recyclers and pawn shops. As a result of the demo craze, renovators who leave a site unguarded overnight risk losing appliances, doors, windows, even structural items such as banisters and stairs. "You hear horror stories," says Ms. Esworthy at city hall. "If you're not guarding a house night and day people steal copper pipes, mantelpieces, the hot-water tank and the furnace. If it's a nice house the whole staircase can be gone. One lady who came in for permits was trying to renovate her building. Someone stole all the copper piping and the furnace and made a fire right in the middle of the livingroom floor. She had to demolish the building." Warns Ms. Esworthy, "I wouldn't leave a building vacant in Vancouver unless it has lights on and curtains on the windows." Thefts from empty houses count as break-and-enters, says Sergeant Valerie Harrison, the officer in charge of the Vancouver Police burglary squad, adding that police do not consider the number of complaints related to vacant houses particularly high. Mind you, that may be partly because such crimes are lost in the sheer volume of city burglary - there were 19,000 reported break-and-enters in Vancouver last year, up from 14,000 five years before. "We feel like we're sinking under the deluge," says Sgt. Harrison, who is "optimistic" in estimating that police solved 200 of last year's B&Es. Moreover, people selling demolition goods - even homeowners and contractors, who have legitimate title to them - are unlikely to report thefts, because most sales are conducted under the table to avoid taxes. In the past when Vancouver houses were demolished, most of their fixed contents were bulldozed. As antiques became more popular and recycling became trendy, business increased for professional salvage companies, who bought a household as a package and resold the goods for a profit. Now homeowners have caught on to the fact that money can be made, and small- time entrepreneurs, who will operate demo sales for owners and building contractors, have created a new service industry. And thieves want part of this action. Fly-by-night crews find empty houses, says one homeowner who demolished a house recently, by spotting the typically orange nets erected around trees to protect them from bulldozers. Burglars also spot a notice put up by a local hydro company when the power is disconnected, and scan the demolition permits on file at city hall. "Pretty well every house that we do a demolition on has been broken into and robbed," says a woman called Susan, who runs a demo-sale sideline to her husband's contracting business on properties he is hired to knock down and rebuild. (Her trade is all under-the-table: She pays and charges no taxes, does not take out city business permits or pay for liability insurance. She prefers not to use her last name.) "There seems to be a whole ring of thieves who know when someone goes to city hall and applies for a demolition permit," says Susan. "As soon as people move out, the house is broken into. The most popular things they take are stoves and fridges, French doors and light fixtures." The gossip among the demo crowd, she says, is that the thieves are "from back East, and are out here working in a group. The latest rumour has one fellow (cycling) around the city looking for houses. He'll walk into the yard nonchalantly, go to the back door, give it a good kick and if it opens and no alarm goes off he notifies his friends. When it's dark, the group comes with a truck and, boom, sometimes within five minutes, they have loaded up and are gone." To add insult to injury, vacated houses have also become dumping grounds for garbage. At one demolition site in the city's West Side last week, a truckful of dirt mixed with tin and plastic debris was dumped in a driveway overnight, likely because the driver didn't care to haul the junk to a landfill. Police and city hall mostly turn a blind eye to demo sales, although workers' compensation officials recently closed down a large one - while customers were busily removing flooring and other items - as an unsafe workplace. "They're supposed to have a permit but we treat them like yard sales, because they're almost impossible to enforce," says a city official. A tinge of sadness surrounds almost all sales in Vancouver's lost houses. At a recent one in the upscale Kerrisdale district, customers were snooping for bargains when a former owner of the house arrived to reminisce. "Property is too expensive for a house like this because it's not fancy enough," said Graham Cumpston, of the house he bought in 1966 for $18,000, and which sits in a neighbourhood where land alone is worth up to $800,000 per lot. "I spent $15,000 renovating there," he said, pointing to the stripped-down bedrooms where people were chipping away at the windows. Throughout the house, the walls were defiled with graffiti by the home's last tenants, who held a demo party before the demo sale. Still, there are terrific bargains to be had at the sales: an old oak table disguised by paint went recently for $15, hardwood flooring for 25 cents a square foot, all manner of free plants and trees. Sometimes robbers and bargain hunters meet amid the wreckage. At a sale Susan held on a rainy weekend, thieves stole two buckets of tulips a woman had paid for and dug up herself from the garden. She put them in her unlocked car to dash back to the house to buy a curtain, and the tulips were gone when she returned. At the same sale a man dismantled a 1920s' wrought-iron gate from the back-yard fence and put his hammer down while he carried the gate to his car. When he got back to pay Susan, the hammer had been filched. In Vancouver, a city of rich and not-rich, the scavengers scavenge the scavengers. Deborah Jones is a contributing editor with The Globe's Report on Business Magazine and Chatelaine. Copyright Deborah Jones 1996 About this website: Text and photos by Deborah Jones except where otherwise noted. Please contact me for reprint rights. All material copyrighted ../About.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
Nail down the floor: the demo gang is here
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