Civil engineering student wins CaGBC award for housing crisis project

Photo courtesy CaGBC.

The Canadian Green Building Council (CaGBC) has presented this year’s Andy Kesteloo Memorial Project Award, which recognizes up-and-coming talent, to recent University of Victoria civil engineering graduate Jonah Wright for his response to British Columbia’s housing crisis.

Named in memory of sustainability advocate Andy Kesteloo, the award is open to students whose projects demonstrate “leadership, innovation and a creative vision for the future of sustainable design in the field of green building and communities,” according to CaGBC.

Wright worked on his project, titled ‘Revising Building Practices via Research, Mapping and Site-Specific Design: A Response to the BC Housing Crisis,’ for more than two years before incorporating it into his senior-year research course. He found one of the leading contributors to the failure of affordable housing projects was miscommunication among stakeholders, but the ability to bring about significant change is almost fully the responsibility of policymakers.

“I’ve always been interested in green building design, so when I started looking through student work placements or co-ops during my degree, I was curious about how high-performance design and the housing crisis interact,” Wright explains. “What would it take to reliably mandate, design and deliver a home that is affordable, risk-averse and sustainable that can be adopted now?”

So, his project attempted to propose an alternative building design methodology for engineers, including such components as direct-to-issue design, integrated regional mapping and beyond-code-level site-specific design. Based on existing data and research for a Vancouver redevelopment site, Wright emphasized the need to implement direct responses to the housing crisis through smart, efficient and pre-emptive residential design.

In addition to economic considerations, the project focused on energy performance, structural resilience and carbon reduction. A cost analysis examined material depreciation, utility rates, inflation and the number of income earners per unit, so as to ensure affordability and sustainability beyond the research project’s time of completion.

Having graduated, Wright is pursuing a career in housing design, management or a related field.