The construction industry has long suffered from a shortage of skilled tradespeople. In response, Portland-metro design and construction firms, as well as nonprofits, are creating workforce development programs that reach out to populations that have largely been overlooked in the past.

Two such efforts are the EmpowHER and Your Street Your Voice programs offered by Camp ELSO, a community-based nonprofit that uses the natural world to connect children from underrepresented communities to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) concepts and disciplines.

EmpowHER and Your Street Your Voice are design studios in which students are asked: ‘If you could change one thing in your neighborhood through design, what would it be?’ Jackie Santa Lucia, a former Hacker associate, is the director of both programs. She recently engaged people from Walsh Construction Co., Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design and a host of local nonprofits (including Girls Build, The City Repair Project and Youth Power PDX) to offer a community-based design and construction workshop. Industry members helped high school students envision, design and construct planter boxes, decorations and a sizable parklet at Alberta Abbey in Northeast Portland.

“It’s just another way to get the community involved and connected to nature,” Lucia said during the workshop, which took place over two weekends in May and early June. “It is holistic workforce development, I would say. I think the biggest part is that it’s community-centered design, community-centered building and leadership.”

The workshop was designed specifically for female and femme, transgender and nonbinary BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) students and community members. They were taught basic carpentry and building skills during the recent event.

“The goal today is that we’re going to finish 18 raised juniper beds, which were all designed by this group of youth here,” said Afton Walsh, community outreach director for Walsh Construction Co. “And there’s the parklet – it’s a 40-foot-long parklet that was also designed by this youth cohort.”

The Alberta Abbey workshop resulted from collaboration with Your Street Your Voice at Walsh Construction’s Dekum Court project, Walsh said, in which 160 new affordable apartments were added to Home Forward‘s existing 40-unit building. There, LEVER Architecture partnered with Your Street Your Voice to incorporate design features like planter boxes, a community garden and more. Walsh Construction project engineer Laura Waddick liked what she saw and proceeded to create a partnership that led to the Alberta Abbey project.

“Laura did all the material procurement,” Walsh said. “She worked with the PSU students to see what was needed, and she’s coordinating with our equipment yard to get Home Depot runs for the roof panels. The logistics, rounding up the volunteers – she did it all. I just showed up.”

The high school student participants in the workshop worked with PSU School of Architecture students to design the parklet as a medicinal and mental health space, said Molly Esteve, design director for The City Repair Project and a PSU instructor.

“They really promoted those two things as a way to build community,” she said. “It’s going to be a classroom as well as an engagement space, and then a public space as well. The gardens will be out front and you’ll be able to use this space for all kinds of things.”

Another unique aspect of the workshop was a donation of juniper lumber by Sustainable Northwest Wood, a for-profit subsidiary of the Sustainable Northwest nonprofit that supports small mills in rural communities. The juniper on hand at Alberta Abbey was sourced from trees planted in eastern Oregon as part of landscape restoration efforts. It’s not normally grown for lumber because of its relatively small size and irregular shape. But juniper has superior rot resistance qualities and attractive grain.

“It’s a little squirrely and has some interesting personality to it,” said Sustainable Northwest Wood sales associate Lynn Morgan, who helped guide students as they worked with the wood. “I did a little bit of coaching, because making something out of it, it’s got a little bowing, a little twisting, lots of character, so we just push them out of the gate a little bit like making sure they pre-drill everything so the wood doesn’t split. I just enjoy the process. It’s fun to see the collaboration and cooperation and just everybody having a good time.”

Liliana Gomez, a student at David Douglas High School in Southeast Portland, took a break from building planter boxes to share how much she was enjoying the sunny afternoon learning about construction. She was encouraged to attend, she said, in part because she has family members who work in the industry.

“Yeah, I am (enjoying it),” she said. “I’m having a lot of fun. My dad, he works in construction. He’s been teaching me how to use tools and everything.”

Esteve noted that it makes sense to ask young people to design park spaces intended for their use.

“This group of youth are so good at seeing things intersectionally and describing them that way and then building off of that,” she said. “We’ve seen them really understand how you’re not talking about one piece when you’re talking about a community; you’re talking about all these different pieces and then how do they fit together into one design scheme. That’s why you’re seeing something that’s really flexible and also really accessible.”

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Construction projects can generate a lot of waste material. So why not reuse some of that material for productive or even humanitarian purposes?

That’s the rationale for a new pilot program being developed by Carleton Hart Architecture team leader Julia Mollner and Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design (CPID). Together, they’re looking to convert the interior and exterior mock-ups used for large projects into tiny homes for people without housing.

Mollner, previously a graduate fellow at PSU, was one of the students who designed sleeping quarters for a proposed “village” as part of CPID’s POD Initiative. Later, Kenton Women’s Village, a cluster of tiny houses, opened in North Portland in summer 2017. She believes more can be done.

Projects “have all this usable waste,” said Mollner, now an adjunct professor at PSU. “It’s about how can we figure out a reasonable way to siphon off reusable materials that could go to community builds. The village model works and it’s about how these mock-ups can plug into the village model.”

In the program, instead of limiting a project mock-up to a single wall or a corner with two walls, a complete structure with four walls and a roof is built using samples of the project’s interior and exterior materials. The structures are even wired, plumbed and finished on the inside.

Mock-ups normally are recycled or discarded when a project is finished. But in this scenario these complete structures will be shipped wherever they are needed following their project use.

Todd Ferry is a CPID senior research associate. He has worked on the mock-ups and related initiatives with Mollner over the past several years and said the concept is “genius” in its simplicity.

“It has the possibility of being game-changing in terms of addressing homelessness and affordable pods,” he said. “It doesn’t just have to be pods. There could be thoughtfulness on how these things can strategically be used for impact and not just go into the waste stream.”

Ferry noted that Mollner is not simply building a prototype; she’s looking to enact systemic and widespread changes in how housing is provided to Oregon’s most vulnerable citizens.

“She was part of our first class of student fellows in 2014 and one of the first graduates of our public interest design graduate certificate,” Ferry said. “She’s a natural leader, she gets stuff done, and it’s amazing to see her going from a student leader to a leader in the professional world. And we’ve been really fortunate to work with her.”

The idea may be simple, but construction of a complete sleeping pod from a mock-up requires the entire design-build team, including subcontractors. The intent is to ensure professional design and keep volunteer work to a minimum so that quality is preserved.

Mollner has been working to develop a functional model for two years now and currently has assistance from two CPID graduate students. By traveling to job sites and suppliers’ locations, they have researched what types of materials work best to create usable mock-ups and how they could best be constructed.

CPID is developing a formal guidebook that outlines design parameters, specifications, sample drawings and timelines outlining how a mock-up can be built and donated.

“Knowing that this is in the early stages makes this about building awareness right now,” Mollner said. “It’s a feel-good thing for the contractors and it will save … money. It’s shifting money from waste hauling to the local community and it’s almost a one-to-one right there.”

As the earliest and most direct connection with clients and owners, she added, architects typically are in the best position to decide whether a project will be suited to such a program.

“Most projects set sustainability goals in early design, so if one has to do with waste reduction or maybe it’s for a nonprofit and there’s a way they can loop it back to the mission of the owner, then that’s a way to do it,” she said.

Scott Mooney, a senior associate at SRG Partnership, is also a CPID professional fellow. He helped design the template used for sleeping pods at Kenton Women’s Village 2.0. Now he is working with Mollner on the first mock-up intended for reuse. First, it’s bound for PSU’s Fourth and Montgomery office building, which is being built by general contractor Andersen Construction. This first mock-up is still being assembled and tested at Andersen’s Swan Island shop. A second mock-up is being constructed on-site at the Nesika Illahee affordable housing project being built by LMC Construction in Northeast Portland.

For the Fourth and Montgomery mock-up, CPID is coordinating donations of materials and shipment of those materials. Andersen Construction has committed to shipping the mock-up when it’s no longer needed on-site.

Without a support plan and infrastructure in place, Mooney pointed out, construction of sleeping pods or tiny homes will do only a small amount to address the homelessness issue.

“Huge amounts of resources go into making these mock-ups, so being able to divert those resources in a meaningful way is a really powerful concept,” he said. “It has huge potential, but we need to create places for these mock-ups to land, and it should be a priority. That way, as other pods come online, (mock-ups) have places to go.”

Catholic Charities, the group behind Kenton Women’s Village, has already agreed to take possession of the Fourth and Montgomery mock-up when that project wraps up.

“That’s one of the hidden costs of these villages,” Mooney said. “In order to have the next village up and running, it’s not just the infrastructure but the social infrastructure that we have to support.”

Important lessons have already been learned when it comes to making the concept sustainable, Mollner said. The biggest, she noted, is being clear about the scope of work and how much is going to be absorbed into the construction budget. Then there is the matter of building the pods and finalizing a reliable method of transporting them to where they are needed most.

“Right now we’re looking for research funding for how this can be replicated more easily,” Mollner said. “We’re working with city of Portland on streamlining processes and how it can be replicated in other jurisdictions.”

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Several weeks of work culminated Friday with a series of resounding successes for the hundreds of people involved in the Pod Build Challenge for Kenton Women’s Village in North Portland.

Twenty-one teams from the metro area have spent that time building new sleeping pods for homeless women living at the transitional housing complex. After countless hours of work to craft and install at least 14 of the new pods at a new location at North Columbia Boulevard and Argyle Way, teams engaged in a celebration.

“Today when I came here and I saw all these people showing up it just blew my mind,” said Maddy Stolowitz, director of corporate philanthropy for Andersen Construction. “All the builders have put so much thought and care into it, and you can just tell they were really thinking about these women. I feel like I’m hopeful that these women feel loved and cared for while transitioning out of homelessness.”

Each team built its pod using one of three designs provided by SRG Partnership, Scott | Edwards Architecture and Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design. Teams were given freedom to express their creativity within the bounds of the floor plans.

“The guys love doing stuff like this, and for us it’s a change of pace because we’re concrete workers,” said Russ LaVaque, Andersen Construction’s general superintendent. “So, we all got to work with wood and that was great. It’s all recycled wood that came off of jobs, glu-lams that are 80 years old. The 4-by-4s underneath are all re-shores that are 40 years old. So it’s pretty nice.”

Future residents of Kenton Women’s Village participated in the judging portion of the Pod Build Challenge. Andersen Construction’s pod, made largely from reclaimed timber from past projects, received the “Best in Show” award.

“There are so many wonderful things that have been done,” said head judge Deborah Kamprath, a project manager with Catholic Charities. “There was a lot of love going into decorating and extra pieces and cool water saving things like the one with the gutter going into the water reclamation.”

Kenton Women’s Village originally was located on a different property nearby. However, it was always intended to be temporary; that property now is being developed by nonprofit REACH Community Development Corporation. Ground was broken there in January on a three-building, 189-unit affordable housing project designed by MWA Architects and scheduled for completion in spring 2020.

“We came together as a community to play one small piece in helping (the women) transition into, hopefully, affordable housing and a better situation,” Stolowitz said. “And (for) our team, it’s just been the most fun. We’ve had our superintendents and carpenters come together with our project engineers and our leadership team, and everyone played a role. And it wasn’t always people who have gotten to work together before, so it’s just been really a labor of love.”

Pod Build Challenge awards

Best in Show: Andersen Construction

Most Creative Interior Customization: Elite Development

Most Creative Exterior Customization: D.R. Horton

Best Interior Craftsmanship: LMC Construction

Best Exterior Craftsmanship: D.R. Horton

Most Creative Material Use/Reuse – Interior: ReBuilding Center

Most Creative Material Use/Reuse – Exterior: Professional Women in Building

The post Sleeping pod construction efforts celebrated appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

A cluster of tiny homes in North Portland that serves as a shelter for homeless women has been moved to a new location thanks to the efforts of a small army of volunteers and the support of the local building industry.

Kenton Women’s Village opened in summer 2017 as a one-year pilot project on a city-owned lot in the Kenton neighborhood. The idea was to create a transitional housing community for women experiencing homelessness without the constraints of a traditional overnight shelter environment, where women’s safety can be at risk and a sense of permanence is lacking.

“This is more individual; it’s their home,” said Deborah Kamprath, development project manager with Catholic Charities, which operates the shelter. “They have privacy and a place to put their stuff, where with shelters you don’t have that. You’re just going in for the night and leaving in the morning.”

The original village had capacity for 14 residents, all whom were housed in small sleeping “pods” designed and built by the Partners On Dwelling Initiative, which included Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design and several local architecture firms. The goal was to create a replicable model for tackling the homelessness issue by building small, inexpensive housing units that would be easy to mass-produce and transport.

The village proved to be a success, and when the yearlong trial period expired the Kenton Neighborhood Association voted overwhelmingly to allow it to stay in operation. Imminent construction of a low-income housing development on the village site meant a new location had to be found, and a suitable one on another city-owned parcel just a few hundred feet away was chosen.

LMC Construction has spearheaded the effort to prepare the new site, an approximately three-quarters-acre parcel at 2420 N. Columbia Blvd., for the move. The firm has been working pro bono since this past fall to build concrete pads for the housing pods, grade and landscape the site, and install electrical, plumbing and sanitary service.

The project has come to fruition thanks to the help of multiple contractors, suppliers, design and engineering firms who have donated labor and materials to make the move happen. Scott Kotlarz, a superintendent with LMC Construction, said he has received overwhelming support from firms that are eager to support the effort.

“I don’t have submittals (and) I don’t have contracts with anybody, but everybody has stepped up,” he said. “They’re here no matter when I call. It’s been great.”

The Northwest College of Construction (NWCOC) has been instrumental in supplying labor, Kotlarz said. Students have helped with multiple scopes of work, including concrete, framing, site work and landscaping. Late last month, students in a Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center pre-apprenticeship program, led by a NWCOC instructor, helped put the finishing touches on the new site by framing a trash enclosure, laying hog’s fuel paths and building decks.

Residents are expected to return this week to the village, which will reopen with six of the original pods, one donated tiny house and two donated temporary tiny homes on wheels. A second phase of work will bring the site up to its capacity of 20 pods; volunteers last week kicked off an effort to build additional units.

A total of 21 commercial and residential builders have committed to participation in the Pod Build Challenge, during which they will each construct a unit over the course of the next couple of months before installation on site in April. The units will be installed with the help of Andersen Construction. The remaining eight units will be installed at a second village location later this year.

For Kotlarz, whose work on the project will be wrapping up with the completion of this phase, it has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of his nearly 40-year career.

“It’s been neat to see this process develop as it goes,” he said. “It’s not so much a job; it’s more an honor to be present and be a part of this.”

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When it comes to local efforts to create the next generation of housing for the homeless, computer-aided saws and plywood will be as instrumental as hammers and nails.

“We thought there was some technology that could lead to some really interesting options,” said Todd Ferry, Portland State University research associate for the Center for Public Interest Design.

The results of the computer-aided process of building, part of the next stage of the center’s POD Initiative to create housing for the homeless, will be presented Sunday at the Portland Art Museum as part of an exhibit of pod design that will run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Members of SERA Architecture and PSU students will build a plywood pod home in front of the museum from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The larger exhibit will feature 15 other pod designs created by Portland-area architects

“We did something called the plywood pod initiative,” Ferry said. “The museum wanted to partner with us.”

The plywood pod effort is an extension of an earlier project that used traditional wood-frame construction to build pods that now make up Kenton Women’s Village in north Portland.

The plywood pod, which measures 8 feet by 16 feet, is built using a Maslow Computer Numerical Control (CNC) cutting machine. Sheets of plywood are hung vertically by chains, and perfectly measured individual pieces are cut by a computer-controlled saw. The pieces then fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

“It’s a way to quickly and perfectly create something,” Ferry said.

The new approach also allows for easier assembly. The pods that were built for the Kenton Women’s Village required heavy machinery to move them from the where they were built to the final site. The new pods can be disassembled and moved easily, and then reassembled quickly.

“These are built in four sections that can be put up separately,” Ferry said. “This could completely change how big they could be. That is an exciting development in this whole process.”

“It was a little more of challenge,” said Tim Bestor, SERA’s senior job captain, designer and product manager. “The only downside is the innovation process. Conventional wood construction has been done for so long, it’s down pretty well.”

The learning curve aside, the technology has the potential to open up new horizons in the world of pod design and construction, Bestor said. He can imagine using the process to make warehouses full of pieces for pods. Those pieces could be shipped and put together in a fraction of the three to four weeks it took to make the first pods.

“It’s a great system,” Bestor said. “With further refinements, the possibilities are endless.”

Once the exhibit ends, the plywood pod that SERA and the PSU students build, with assistance from employees with Maslow, will be added to those already in place at Kenton Women’s Village.

Eventually other plywood pod homes will be built that will become part of a pod village planned for an industrial site in Clackamas County. Some of the pods in that village also will be built using trusses that PSU students built for the stage they designed for the annual Pickathon music festival last month.

Ferry said the exhibition will offer a chance to see some ways the issue of homelessness is being dealt with in the Portland-metro area. Attendees will be able to get information on how they can help solve the problem in their own communities.

“The exhibits will be about pods and houselessness,” Ferry said. “It’s this rich architectural problem of creating a dignified structure for the issue.”

The exhibition is part of the larger exhibit, Quest for Beauty: The Architecture, Landscapes, and Collections of John Yeon. Stephanie Parrish, the art museum’s associate director of education and public programs, said the pod presentation was a natural extension the larger exhibit.

“When we worked on the Yeon exhibition, we were thinking how to contextualize Yeon and how to contextualize it in Portland,” Parrish said. “He used plywood and we thought this would be a good exhibition showing how architects are solving problems today.”

If you go:

What: Miller Family Free Day — Exploring Architecture, Building Community

When: Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Where: Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., Portland

Cost: Free

The post Next generation of pod home design arrives in Portland appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Portland State University architecture student William Chandler has won the 2017 Hatfield Architectural Award. Chandler, now in his third year pursuing a master’s degree, was honored at a luncheon last week.

“He demonstrated a deep understanding of community service through design,” said Jane Jarrett, executive director of the Architecture Foundation of Oregon, which sponsors the scholarship. “The committee found Willy’s portfolio to show a higher level of design than other applicants’.”

The award came with a $2,000 scholarship. Chandler will be able to use the money to cover education-related expenses such as tuition or loan repayment – even travel to supplement studio learning, Jarrett said.

Chandler, a Vermont native, has already been involved in projects as far away as Haiti. But he was drawn west “by a desire to ski,” he said. After receiving a degree in horticulture, with an emphasis on landscape design, from Montana State University, Chandler took a year off. Then he chose to continue his education at PSU.

“During my year off after my undergrad studies, I didn’t find the intellectual challenge I wanted,” he said. “Coming to PSU, I was given that intellectual challenge.”

The projects being tackled by the Center for Public Interest Design helped convince Chandler to enroll in PSU’s School of Architecture, he said.

“The center has worked with the Rosewood Initiative,” he said. “They do a lot of work with children and underserved populations.”

The Rosewood Initiative, a nonprofit, works to improve the lives of residents in the Rosewood area around Southeast 162nd and Burnside streets.

“I have also been able to work with the Right 2 Root program,” Chandler said. “That looked at helping the African-American population in the Albina neighborhood that have been displaced by gentrification.”

Chandler was a member of a team that entered the Portland sleeping pod design contest; it sought designs for dwellings able to serve homeless individuals. He also worked on a project to help the Northern Cheyenne Tribe reduce wildfire risk at its reservation in Montana, and traveled to Haiti to design steel play structures for children.

Of all of Chandler’s efforts, the most memorable one for him was the Opera a la Cart project. The idea was to build a traveling stage that would operate like a food cart but provide opera instead of food.

“It is like opera du jour,” he said. “In terms of my responsibility, the Opera a la Cart project was the biggest.”

The Hatfield Architectural Award honors the late Mark O. Hatfield, a longtime Oregon politician who died in 2011. He received the AFO‘s Honored Citizen Award in 1998.

AFO’s goal is to honor Oregon architecture students who combine design promise with community service. While the scholarship was given annually, the luncheon was suspended when Hatfield became ill in 2005 … until this year.

“When (Hatfield) became ill, and later passed away, we did not feel we had a (sufficiently attractive) program to continue the luncheon,” Jarrett said. “Now, with so many of our past scholars doing such great work in the Northwest and around the world, we felt it was time to bring the luncheon back.”

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Sacramento, California, in many ways, is similar to Portland. California’s capital has seen a recent growth spurt and now is facing economic issues and infrastructure needs comparable to those here. But in other ways the two cities are very different. Sacramento has fewer people with fewer avenues of public transportation, but in a larger geographic area and with limited safe walking and biking options for residents.

Portland State University students are hoping to help a south section of Sacramento address some of those issues via a design studio called “A home for La Familia.” The group La Familia works with the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) to advocate for improvements in the community near its headquarters.

“Our studio looked at the urban forms and urban patterns of south Sacramento,” said Mark Raggett, a senior planner at the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability and studio co-leader with James McGrath, an adjunct assistant architecture professor at PSU. “We were looking at existing conditions and then thinking of some big improvements.”

The students’ work was part of a three-year contract between Sacramento and PSU’s Center for Public Interest Design through its Urban Sustainability Accelerator program. The students looked at some of the challenges facing the area.

“We were doing an analysis of the community at the district scale and then proposing what might be some improvements based on a larger system look,” Raggett said.

The students focused on improving an area of Franklin Boulevard, which serves as a gateway to the area. They found that Franklin’s character is similar to that of Portland’s Southeast Division Street east of Interstate 205. Transportation became a focal point for the students.

“There was a lot of interest in finding out (whether) we get a (bus) stop in front of La Familia,” Raggett said. “Extending the service south would better serve the community and increase the opportunities for non-driving trips.”

Another transportation issue is the fact that the area is cut in half with a light-rail line with only one stop at the far northern end. Accessing that station is difficult for many area residents.

“They have well-intended light rail,” said Sergio Palleroni, a PSU architecture professor and director of the Center for Public Interest Design. “They were designed for wealthier people to come into downtown. They end up bisecting poor communities, and the mayors don’t want to see that.”

The students studied the possibility of adding a light-rail station more centrally located to potentially increase ridership among area residents. The students traveled to Sacramento and met with residents in a half-day design charette to identify issues facing residents in the community.

“We wanted to get ideas, issues and challenges that could help direct the students’ work,” Raggett said.

They weighed possibilities such as adding on-street parking or new facilities such as a cultural center or auditorium. They also considered greenways and east-west connectors between major north-south thoroughfares.

One key reason that residents did not walk more, they said, was concerns about safety and conditions of the sidewalks. Then there is Californians’ love affair with cars.

“I think that it is so car-focused there that there are some things they haven’t really addressed yet,” said Amy Peterson, a third-year graduate student attending PSU’s architecture school. “They have a little more walkability downtown and they are trying to integrate that into south Sacramento. Because everyone is so car-focused in sort of a California way … (other modes of transportation) aren’t so front and center.”

How much of the students’ ideas and concepts become reality is largely up to SACOG and La Familia. California recently passed a carbon tax that is now yielding revenues that could be used to implement many of the students’ concepts.

“They are student ideas that can help La Familia and SACOG shape proposals to actually be implemented,” Raggett said.

Regardless of what eventually becomes reality in the area, there is a chance it will have a Portland flavor.

“It will probably lead to RFP for the design,” Palleroni said. “It will create the call for projects that will hopefully be built.”

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As Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design (CPID) seeks to help alleviate the city’s housing crisis, it has garnered contributions from professional architects.

“Architecture and design usually only serve the wealthy,” said Todd Ferry, a research associate for the CPID. “We wanted to figure out how we can take our ideas to benefit underserved communities.”

A coalition including the CPID started the Partners On Dwelling (POD) Initiative. Fourteen teams signed on to create prototype housing pods that could help alleviate homelessness in Portland. The goal was for the pods to be able to be mass-produced easily and occupy a relatively small space.

“The idea behind them is that these would be longer-term transitional housing,” Ferry said. “So these would be somebody’s home for an extended amount of time.”

The pods are very small. The largest of the designs is just 8 feet by 12 feet while the tiniest is 6 feet by 8 feet. The tallest stands just 10 feet, 8 inches.

They lack almost all amenities. There is no electricity, heat or running water.

What the pods lack in creature comforts, they make up for in functionality. The houses are heavily insulated, and their small sizes help trap body heat. The tiny homes also have bedding and a variety of design features that help address challenges faced by the homeless. One pod includes a dry sink. Another structure features bunk beds and a second entry to allow multiple people to sleep. The pods also are designed to allow for storage and to be locked for security.

In addition, the pods’ sizes allow significant flexibility for location.

“Faith organizations were interested, and 6-by-8 (units) could fit on a parking spot and use the organizations’ infrastructure,” Ferry said.

The hope is that these structures could be used in a village setting, similar to other encampments like Right 2 Dream Too or Hazelnut Grove. One such “transitional village” for up to 14 women is already in the works at 2221 N. Argyle St. The project is currently receiving public input.

The pods were built in a fashion to require minimal, simple maintenance. Pod residents would be responsible for cleaning and maintaining the structures. In a village setting, a communal infrastructure of bathrooms, showers and sinks can be used.

A large effort was invested in making the structures aesthetically pleasing.

“Part of this is about changing perceptions,” Ferry said. “We are hoping that people would be willing to have these near where they live.”

Another big issue was keeping construction costs to a minimum. Each design team was given $2,000 through the mayor’s office to produce a prototype. Some teams invested their own money or raised additional money through GoFundMe websites to push the average amount spent to $3,000.

They were built fast. The project began with a design charette attended by nearly 100 designers, social workers, activists and houseless individuals on Oct. 1. The prototypes were on display by Dec. 5 on a parking

lot at Northwest Glisan Street and Park Avenue.

The time and design parameters posed a variety of challenges for project teams.

“We usually do these enormous projects with unlimited budgets (in class),” fourth-year architecture student Heather Peterson said. “This was the first time we have been pulled down to earth. It was a great dose of reality.”

One of the biggest challenges Peterson’s team faced was bringing light into the structure and giving the occupant a sense of separate living and sleeping spaces.

“We used a strip of polycarbonate to allow in filtered light,” she said. “We wanted to make something that had elements of luxury that you wouldn’t normally see in a structure like this.”

Each team used different features like small porches to maximize the space they had to work with and make the structure more than just a place to stay for the night.

“For our team, we thought it was important to give the people enough space that they could make it their own,” said Reid Weber, a project assistant on SERA Architects‘ team.

The teams also spoke to homeless individuals to see what elements they wanted in the structure.

“They said they tend to have a huge rat problem,” Weber said. “We made the floor as durable as possible. We used a wire mesh to stop rats from getting in.”

Even items such as insulation had to considered carefully with potential residents in mind.

“They said that staying dry was a big concern,” Weber said. “We used a rigid insulation to (keep the unit) drier.”

Heat was a big focus of LRS Architects‘ pod. Team members focused on the idea that it would be maintained with almost no resources from the person living in it.

“We wanted to make it as close to a passive house as possible,” said Kelsy Colvin, a project manager for LRS Architects’ team. “We designed it so it could be heated off of body heat.”

The architects found that many of the techniques used for their pod projects can be used elsewhere.

“I think one of the unique constraints was looking at how you move these,” said Scott Mooney, an architect with SRG Partnership. “How wide it can be and how tall can it be before you can’t get it on flat bed on a freeway. Those ideas are useful in context of prefab houses. How those elements get from A to B and how those elements are transported to another site.”

The pods nevertheless have significant drawbacks, according to Stuart Emmons, vice president of strategic development at Blokable, a company focused on modular stackable housing.

“These pods are what they are,” he said. “It’s better than staying outside. That’s fair enough; I get that. It’s dry.”

Emmons has focused on housing solutions for the homeless for much of his career. He said that the space needed for a pod could be a significant hurdle for use in Portland’s core, where property is so valuable. However, he acknowledged that the pods can be a part of the overall solution.

“These aren’t the only solution, but it is one solution,” Ferry said. “There are going to be many solutions to solve this problem.”

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In architect Pedro Pacheco’s perfect world, everyone would have a home and every building resource would be sustainable.

Such dreams come from Pacheco’s childhood in a low-income family in Oaxaca, Mexico. As the son of an artisan in the pre-Columbian tradition, he can empathize with the plight of people in poverty.

“I had to live through all these things I’m now studying,” he said.

Pacheco has a background in teaching university architecture students to design homes made of recycled materials for low-income families in Monterrey, Mexico. He has relocated with his family to Portland to perform similar work here while on sabbatical from professorship at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education.

New lessons in recycling

Pacheco will be here through next June, working with people at – at the invitation of CPID Director Sergio Palleroni. Pacheco will run design studios for architecture students to use recycled materials to create housing for homeless individuals. As co-founder of Urban Impulse, an educational and research program to help low-income families build housing and community, he has 15 years of experience with such work.

Using recycled materials for construction isn’t a new idea in Portland, Palleroni said, but Pacheco has taken it to a level not seen here by applying it to low-income housing.

“He’s doing what we’re doing but doing it better,” Palleroni said.

Metro officials and others are already devising ways to reuse more building materials in Portland, so Pacheco has arrived at the right time, Palleroni said.

“This is a very important moment in political will,” he said. “We need housing and we’ll make good on our promise to recycle goods.”

Pacheco will also work with PSU graduate students to research reusable building materials. And by the end of the year they plan to build – for public display – a couple of sleeping pods or “micro-houses” for people without homes. Later they plan to design and build accessory housing units using recycled materials to add to the low-income housing stock.

That ties in with Palleroni’s overall goal for the CPID: re-engage people in architecture and engineering with social problems. Students want to help solve problems they read about in newspapers, he said, but they need to first hone skills tied to not only design but also social engagement and interaction with vulnerable groups.

“Pedro and I are on a mission to give young graduates those skills,” Palleroni said.

Making personal connections

Although Monterrey is more than twice the size of Portland, the former has a much larger gap between rich and poor, Pacheco said. One-third of the population is “living under precarious conditions,” he said.

Although Pacheco grew up with modest means, he didn’t see abject poverty until he went to work in mountain towns of Oaxaca as part of his community service requirement in college. There he saw unemployed, starving people living in terrible conditions.

The towns were a 1½-day trek up the mountain on foot, with no other transportation available. Local residents accepted the situation because they had no help from the government or anyone else.

“It was very dramatic, a big turning point for me,” he said. “And so that’s why the civic engagement theme in my education is very important.”

That quest for civic engagement carries over to his students, Pacheco said, as he encourages them to consider the common good and not just people who can afford to pay.

“How do you go about designing processes so that the concentration is on not only designing pretty things but making them accessible to people?” he said.

That notion can stretch the definition of design so that it accounts for collaboration, funding and distribution of products to the community, he said.

“It is more than design; it is trying to bring as many issues as possible to the (forefront) so that the student has this broad understanding of the problem,” he said. “It’s not just a material, or a family or a site. It’s understanding the problem from a very integrated way.”

Learning in Portland and beyond

A lot of Monterrey’s recyclable building materials wind up in the landfill, Pacheco said. However, wood pallets in particular have become an important component in low-income housing. Fabric and paper are also abundant.

“I don’t have the numbers in Portland yet, but I would like to make a comparison to see how much of those materials are being reused,” he said.

What he’ll learn, according to Palleroni, is that much of Portland’s recycling – particularly glass, metal and paper – are sent to China or India for recycling. Palleroni said he plans to try to convince local leaders to consider recycling more here.

“It’s an opportunity for creating jobs in our city from our waste,” he said.

Portland is just a starting point, Pacheco noted, in an effort to expand his knowledge of civic engagement and shares what he’s learned about sustainable building. He hopes to study and visit other cities around the world.

“What somebody’s doing in the same bioregion will be helpful to all of us,” he said.

Pacheco also plans to share his knowledge and his experiences in Portland through blogs and articles, and eventually write a book about his experiences.

When Pacheco returns to Monterrey, he plans to expand the Urban Impulse program to involve more groups in “a very integrated way.” Chemistry students, for example, could study water quality in poor areas and medical students could look at family health, he said.

“We will go into low-income communities to try and understand their problems from the bottom up,” he said. “And based on that diagnosis we will start making different types of proposals.”

The post Affordable housing, with a twist appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

After a nonprofit coalition bought the former Sugar Shack strip club in the Cully neighborhood last year, more than 1,000 residents showed up at a community meeting to discuss future plans for the property, which totals approximately two acres.

Anna Gordon, outreach coordinator for the Living Cully group, knew then that plans should be up to the residents, so she gathered neighborhood kids to participate in the design process.

Living Cully was formed in 2010 as a collaboration of four nonprofits: Habitat for Humanity Portland/Metro East, Hacienda Community Development Corp., Native American Youth and Family Center and Verde. Living Cully, according to its website, “reinterprets sustainability as an anti-poverty strategy by concentrating environmental investments at the neighborhood scale and braiding those investments with traditional community development resources.”

Gordon said no decision has been made about the existing building on the property, but plans were sought for 20,000 square feet of the site. She engaged Alex Salazar of Salazar Architects Studio to oversee the design – but with input from around 40 kids.

To begin the process, Gordon said, Living Cully held four planning workshops with students in neighborhood after-school programs.

“They had kind of a brainstorm and voted on top ideas and then came back and did design charettes,” she said. “We placed different elements on the site and then came back and modeled what the final design would look like.”

Portland Parks & Recreation also helped, Gordon said, by arranging a field trip for the students to five area parks.

“The director of parks (Mike Abbate) came with us and interacted with the kids,” she said. “It was a great opportunity to learn about landscape architecture, and Alex talked about being an architect, giving them exposure to career opportunities.”

Salazar, who has been in practice in Portland for about a year and a half, was point person working with the students, he said. He has taught architecture at schools including Portland State University and the University of California, Berkeley.

“My task was to determine what we could do with the site and involve the kids in the process,” he said.

Salazar also involved the Center for Public Interest Design at PSU. Its staff helped run the design charettes.

All students, including a group of skateboarders in the parking lot, were invited to participate. The students, mostly from middle schools and high schools, didn’t agree on everything at first, Gordon said, but they learned to compromise.

“A big group wanted a skate area and another group had wanted a basketball court for a long time, so there was a little bit of tension,” she said. “But we incorporated them in the design and they collaborated.”

Some of the girls in the design charette also wanted a garden area, and that was incorporated as well, Gordon said.

“I think it was a great community-building exercise for them, and they learned to respect each other,” she said.

Living Cully bought the Sugar Shack property at 6739 N.E. Killingsworth St. after a successful crowdfunding campaign last year that raised $54,000 and helped secure financing for the $2.75 million purchase.

No money is available for construction yet, Gordon said, but eventually plans will be finalized and work will take place in phases.

“We don’t have money to build this, and it will be baby steps at the beginning,” she said. “It’s not a done deal, but this has been a great project, a need in the community and it’s been great to have an opportunity to (involve youths in the) design.”

To help publicize the effort to design the small park, Gordon said the entire process involving Salazar and the students – including their tour of city parks – was recorded. The video will be shown to community groups and others who want to help the redevelopment project.

“It’s still tentative, what came out of the youth workshops, and (the final design) might not include all those things, but it’s been a great design process and we’ll be showing it to people who might be able to partner with us,” Gordon said.

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