By Amy Juschka
Photo by Ahmad Kavousian
After months of uncertainty, Vancouver’s smallest housing development has finally found a home. A series of 64 square-foot homes built last year by Emily Carr students have been adopted by the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Society and will now provide shelter for a few of Vancouver’s growing homeless population.
Despite the city’s pressing need for more short- and long-term housing developments, no Lower Mainland municipality would take them. It was almost too ironic: a housing project for the homeless that was homeless itself. Happily though, the project is going to be put to good use.
“I'm excited that our project won’t just be something we can include in our portfolio,” says David Cha, 22, a third-year industrial design student at Emily Carr who, along with four of his classmates, helped to design and build one of the homes. “Seeing it actually being used and being part of making a change in our community means so much to me as an individual and as a student.”
Painted a vibrant orange, Cha’s design is a staggered structure featuring multifunctional furniture, two small patios and is meant to be equipped with a green wall, which would provide added insulation and could be used to grow fruits and vegetables by its occupant
It’s one of four brightly painted mini-homes currently being displayed on Granville Island. Built by third-year Emily Carr students working alongside wood-manufacturing students from UBC’s Centre for Advanced Wood Processing, these 64 square-foot structures cost just $1,500 a piece and are meant to address the continuing crisis of homelessness in Vancouver.
“I wanted to come up with a project that was relevant to our city,” says Christian Blyt, an associate professor at Emily Carr who proposed the homegrown project to his industrial design class last spring. “We wanted to tackle a local problem using design, so I created a project with a concept that we could implement to a full-scale.”
With just 15 weeks, the goal of the Homes for Less project was to design affordable, short-term housing using pine-beetle wood and 30 per cent recycled building materials. According to Cha, the real challenge of the project was building on a one-to-one scale, something uncommon in design classes, which usually only require students to build a scaled model.
“It was tough and there were a lot of challenges,” says Cha. “I have a design background, not a construction background, so parts of it were definitely difficult… I had to ask a lot of questions.”
Blyt says his students were hesitant of the project at first, but after convincing them of its importance they took it on passionately—consulting people living in shelters, on the streets and abandoned buildings. This, says Blyt, allowed his students to get a first-hand perspective from their clientele and adapt the homes to their unique needs.
For Cha, the chance to speak directly with homeless people was the most rewarding part of the project. “The research that went into this project was pretty serious and speaking with homeless citizens was really a precious moment for us,” he explains. “They told us how hard it is to do anything without an address… most of them told us they needed a place to rest, a place to sleep and an address so they could apply for a job and keep their things safe.”
The homes are a direct reflection of these needs, offering multifunctional shelving and storage space that doubles as furniture. “To be able to use our strength in design to help in some way, to be part of something bigger, was really great,” says Cha.
But Blyt wasn’t only hoping to inspire his students. More than just a community housing development, the Homes for Less project is also meant to promote a wider dialogue among the public regarding housing rights and homelessness.
“The main objective of the project was a form of three-dimensional communication,” says Blyt. “We wanted to show that with very limited resources, you can create homes for these citizens, and I keep stressing citizens because they are citizens with rights just like the rest of us.”
Although the public’s reaction to the project has been overwhelmingly positive, until recently, it looked like they may have ended up as garden sheds or children’s playhouses, something that Cha says would have been a total waste.
After initial talks with Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster, it seemed that no municipality was seriously considering using the shelters, making the housing development essentially homeless itself. “We worked extremely hard and talked to a lot of people, but we were hitting walls all over the place,” says Blyt.
That was until recently, when the Vancouver Aboriginal Transformative Justice Society showed interest in the units and plans to implement them behind one of their existing housing facilities so that occupants of the mini homes will have access to amenities.
“We’re in the negotiating stages,” says Blyt, “and soon we’ll be taking the units to a holding facility where we’ll upgrade them with lighting and base board heaters… I’m excited, and see this as the next chapter to our story.”
