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Haeccity partners Travis Hanks and Shirely Shen drew up sketches, but they say their “micro-ops” could easily take on a totally different exterior look.

“It could be anything. A character home or super modern,” says Shen. “Our graphics are purposefully sketchy and not a rendering with everything figured out.”

Rather, the focus in the exercise was to come up with a model that chips away at issues of zoning, land costs and ownership that are killing housing access and affordability.

“One of the things we came to, and other winners did as well, was trying to question the developer model that is the standard way of creating new housing” in Metro Vancouver, says Shen.

“When you look at, for example, the Cambie corridor, you see the land assembly, and then, there’s stratas and big buildings with lots of units packed into them,” says Hanks. “We wanted to think of a way to use single lots and create incremental infill to add density without destroying neighbourhoods.”

By fitting six or seven units on a single lot and cutting out the need for land assembly, there wouldn’t be as much speculation in land costs and the “boarding up of houses for years and years while you’re waiting for approvals and not making all the people on the block move out. It’s allowing people to age in place and stay in neighbourhoods they like,” says Hanks.

“In our proposal, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, either stratified or outright owning,” says Shen. “A group of six households come together, develop one lot together and together own a rental property that they then lease back to themselves.”