ABOVE: The brightly coloured $1500 64-square-feet home prototypes displayed at Granville Island fulfill some basic human needs.
A close family member has been basically couch-surfing for seven months since she sold her large condo and bought and renovated a smaller townhouse.
It was a wise move that wiped out her mortgage, but this transient period has shown her — and the rest of the family — that when you don’t have a stable home, you don’t function well. You become detached from your routines, your social network, your productivity, your self-determination.
Imagine what it’s like to be one of the 2660 truly homeless people in Metro Vancouver, counted this spring by Greater Vancouver Regional Steering Committee in March — 450 more than three years ago. Even if you’re an otherwise healthy, clean and sober employable individual, you don’t have the personal resources to fully participate in society when you don’t have your own, stable space you can go to retreat, sleep, eat, heal, think, groom, create, nest, or connect.
I don’t understand why the Canadian government is not required to provide a minimum level of housing access to all its people, in the same way that it must provide medical access. I’m talking something beyond barracks or the mattress-on-the-shelter-floor setup: small self-contained, fully insulated structures that could be easily moved to occupy under-used lands wherever they’re most needed.
A third-year class of Emily Carr University design students has been displaying just that home at Granville Island for the past month. Each of the four prototypes take on the challenge of constructing a maximum-use space in 64 square feet, on a budget of no more than $1500, and using pine beetle wood and 30 per cent recycled materials.
I spent some time inside each one of those prototypes, absorbing some of the cost-savers, like re-used windows and single-pitch roofs. The interior designs include some clever features like stepped shelving that leads up to a bed, taking advantage of the rising heat from below while providing an alcove below to break up the boxy dimensions.
The little houses could be set up as a community, maybe grouped around a resource centre to tackle all the other issues of poverty like work options, clothing bank, library/computer access, health clinic and daycare.
Both Vancouver mayoral candidates know this election’s all about reducing homelessness. I’d like to hear what they think of adding little houses for some of the more than 1500 people in their own city who can’t find a place to call home.
