A Designer and Housing Consultant will get the conversation started about creative solutions to the housing crisis during a talk in Owen Sound.
Christy Hempel will be at the Owen Sound North Grey Union Public Library Wednesday, July 24 starting at 6:30 p.m.
She will bring her experience from living in Denmark, where she studied 20 different Co-housing communities from cluster housing, to co-living, to cooperatives.
"Underlining my theme is that we need to recognize, as a community, that there is a housing crisis," she revealed. "And there's probably ways that we could move our edge a little bit in terms of sharing more, whether that's having little clustered housing that has smaller lot sizes, whether it's having maybe a person renting a room from us, or whether it's having a backyard suite, or whether it's thinking about a life lease model."
Hempel pointed out options could be as simple as co-living.
"Maybe just advertise for a nice, you know, student to come with them for for the summer. Or maybe they could have a tenant who's a similar age. Or there's a lot of people living alone in houses that hard for them to manage, both financially, but also just in terms of being able to deal with a larger house," she said.
She will introduce other ways of living that differ from single family housing, including co-operatives, life lease communities, clustered housing, backyard dwellings, multi-unit rentals, and multi-unit condos.
She added that other co-housing options could see perhaps 30 homes built on a large property like a condo development, but also common space where people might come together for meals, or gardening.
She will describe the history and design of several projects including a home for millennial renters in Stockholm, rental co-housing for those 55-years-old and older in rural Denmark, and one of the oldest and most successful multi-generational co-housing projects in a small town not far from Copenhagen. She'll describe the differences between Danish and North American projects – and despite high demand, why this way of living has taken so long to take off here in Canada.
The talk will be followed by an open discussion about what might work well in local urban and rural areas, and what steps our communities can take to support the construction of creative housing types
"There's probably room for some innovation," she added. "And then people who do try to develop some of these communities will tell you that they have run into obstacles with building departments and planning departments and just the community in general trying to figure out, you know, if they can get zoning for something like that. And so I just want to make sure that the conversation is out there."
Hempel has designed several affordable housing projects in the Owen Sound area and was a founding member of the Grey Bruce Affordable Housing Coalition.
