Settlement near Vancouver
The detached single-family home in a suburban area is still considered the ideal residence for the average North American resident. Nearly all major American and Canadian cities are surrounded by sprawling suburban developments with straight streets lined with uniformly sized, mostly single-storey houses. The previously almost exclusively monotonous sprawl of the suburbs has become a particular problem for Vancouver, Canada's third-largest city. Space for extensive suburban developments with traditional single-family homes is becoming scarce; it is shifting further and further away from the city centre (the city proper has approximately 430,000 inhabitants, while Greater Vancouver, including all its suburbs, is now a metropolis of over a million). Furthermore, Vancouver's expansion is naturally limited by the ocean on one side and the coastal mountains on the other. Therefore, the city is increasingly turning to more compact forms of development that save building space while still offering the advantages of the single-family home.
