BCBusiness

15 B C B U S I N E S S . C A A P R I L 2 0 24 that it will be up to 18 soon. (Lang is hoping for 25 at some point, as is allowed elsewhere in the world.) "The most sophisticated carbon sequestration on the planet is trees," says Lang in one of his typical big-big- picture perspectives. "We have enough managed forest on the planet so that we can meet all the housing needs for four billion people for the next 30 years." The buildings will use only 15 percent of the energy of a normal custom house and won't have the typical service or maintenance costs, he says. "And there's no reason to ever demolish them. If you can keep the wood dry in a consistent environment, it will last forever." They can even be disas- sembled and reassembled in a different configuration on that same site—or elsewhere, if needed. Benefit Number 4: This kind of approach improves overall productivity—some- thing that Canada has been sluggish at in recent decades. It's taken a long time for Lang and Wilson to make their idea a reality. They founded Intelligent City in 2008 and had to spend a long time figur- ing out a new kind of modular housing approach, some- thing quite different from the conventional work-camp trailer style that most people think of as modular housing— a form that Lang still saw as restrictive because it results in fixed-size boxes that aren't particularly flexible. The company finally got a big injection of capital in recent years, announcing in July 2022 that it had raised $30 million through a combination of private investors and federal incentive programs. (Modu- lar housing is getting more and more interesting to all government departments that are trying to solve Canada's housing problems. And other supporters are weighing in. Canada's CSA Group, which specializes in product certifica- tion, recently issued a news release urging governments to get more on board with supporting modular housing. Vice-president Sunil Johal had a long list of reasons to back it: factory building isn't just more efficient, safer and more sustainable, it could also help solve the labour short- age by attracting people who haven't been keen on working on somewhat hazardous and rough-and-tumble construc- tion sites.) Intelligent City's staff also had to spend years figuring out how to produce designs that would be adaptable to many cities, many differ- ent kinds of sites and many configurations."We've had a lot of failure in order to not fail onsite," says Lang. The company is only now working on the components for two Vancouver projects— an apartment building on Granville Street downtown and a Vancouver Native Housing building in East Vancouver, notable for an exterior design that looks like basket weaving on a giant scale. As well, the company now has commissions in Ontario and is looking for warehouse space there. Lang's approach seems to offer a pathway out of what has become an often polar- ized debate over how to fix Canadian housing. As people across Canada try to come up with solutions to what feels like a housing mar- ket with the unaffordability gas pedal stuck at full throttle while we're barrelling toward a concrete wall, there are gener- ally two answers proposed. Those in one part of the left-progressive world will say the only way to do it is for gov- ernments to provide billions of dollars in cash or land or both to create permanent protected stocks of subsidized housing. Then everyone working in the country's many regular, non-hedge-fund jobs can rent apartments for $800 a month again, like in the '90s. Yay. Those in the "free markets solve all problems" world will say private developers can cre- ate housing for most people on the income ladder, if develop- ment can be unleashed. And then you can get the $800-a- month (or, more realistically, $2,000-a-month) places by giv- ing those builders permission to go taller and bigger than the cap that a given city has set on a given site. New, free space will pay for everything. Yay. Both of these approaches have their drawbacks, as even the most math- or logic-chal- lenged person can guess. The cost of providing subsidized housing for the approximately 4.4 million Canadians who are spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing has never been calculated by even the most dedicated proponent— a quick guess: a quintizillion. As for the free-market solu- tion, well, the 60-storey towers with some modest number of "below market" apartments in them don't seem to be making much of a dent. There's a group in between those two, though, who say that the path forward is to re- duce the dollar cost of housing altogether. That means more homes per billion dollars spent for subsidized housing. And it means making it possible for private builders to be able to limbo themselves lower down the affordability ladder. That's what Lang and Wil- son hope. It's a big dream. At the moment, modular hous- ing, which is mostly the more conventional work-camp, trailer-park kind, accounts for only 6 percent of all housing in the U.S. (Canadian stats are not available.) And that's nowhere near enough to make a dent in the problem. It has to become a movement. CITY BUILDING Renderings of an Intelligent City development in Langley, where the company hopes to prove that mass timber can acheive the same density as concrete

• Cover