Atira Women’s Resource Society’s mission is clear: to provide resources to self-identifying women who have been affected by violence. One of these resources is, of course, housing, and Vancouver’s skyrocketing real estate market provides an extra hurdle to its already-challenging endeavor. The Society has been inventive in its proposals, however, and has become an important part of Vancouver’s larger conversation about affordable housing. A case in point: Atira’s first housing scheme in Metro Vancouver, which was Canada’s first complex made from recycled shipping containers.
In 2013, Atira’s Oneesanhousing opened. Built using shipping containers for structure, the project brings to mind other recent projects’ uses of this method — Poteet Architects’ Container Guest House in San Antonio, Reactor Films by Brooks + Scarpa in Santa Monica or the Concierge Hotel & Freedom Café by Don Albert & Partners in Durban, South Africa — but the Atira project brings an important social dimension to this typically environmentally oriented typology.
Skeptics of the shipping crate as a recycled building material tend to point to the added cost needed to make the vessels livable, but in this case the Society has said that each home cost less than $80,000 to build.
The complex itself is strikingly suited to its “Railtown” neighborhood, adjacent to Vancouver’s active railway tracks where train cars mirror the building’s materials. The shipping containers stack to make up 12 open-plan units, ranging from 280 to 290 square feet. An outdoor staircase connects the colorful crates and also allows for some outdoor space for residents within the complex.
In the spring of 2015, Atira proposed another, larger complex in the nearby Strathcona neighborhood, which has been met with some resistance from the Strathcona Residents Association. The new project would be more than double the size of the first development, incorporating 26 units over seven stories.
The building’s design would be in contrast with the neighborhood’s cottage-like housing typology, but its mix of studio apartments and family housing would be at home in the largely residential neighborhood. That being said, its homogeneity has actually been one of residents’ main concerns, and the addition of commercial space is something that may be integrated before the project is approved.
As part of a wider discussion of affordable housing in Vancouver, Atira’s proposals certainly have their work cut out for them. The idea of a social nonprofit as real estate developer is less common than it should and could be. But its use of recycled materials, mix of social housing and limited rental rate units and thoughtful locations bring a realistic approach to the table.
CEO Janice Abbott has been quoted as saying that Atira was founded in order to provide women with real resources, not just to raise awareness or provoke discussion, and it seems her pragmatic approach could do well to be applied to the broader question of housing in Vancouver today.
Article images via Jaime Kowal; Hero image via Damilee
