This episode touches on two topics that have been of particular interest to me in recent times: modular housing and accelerated construction schedules.
Daniel Ling of Montgomery Sisam is my guest this week and we talked about his involvement in a supportive modular housing project that was designed and built in about 6 months and what lessons can be learned from this, and applied to the world of architecture more broadly speaking.
About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.
Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd
Transcript below edited for clarity and brevity.
RVLTR:
Daniel Ling is an architect, director, and principal at Montgomery Sisam in Toronto. While involved in a wide range of work from education, to healthcare, to various forms of housing, he more recently designed housing for the homeless through the use of modular construction. This is what we're going to talk about today. So Daniel, thank you very much for being on the show. It's a real pleasure to have you.
Daniel Ling:
Thanks for having me. It's exciting.
RVLTR:
Can you start by telling us who you are and what you do in your own words in three sentences or less?
Daniel Ling:
Sure, absolutely. So to say, I'm an architect and together for my partners, we are really interesting working to build a practice that has a strong culture, and they really do work that combines design quality with strong social value. So in other words, design building that addresses social issues.
RVLTR:
That sounds great. So as I mentioned earlier, you're here to talk about supportive housing projects. Can you tell us what they are more specific in more detail?
Daniel Ling:
Yeah, absolutely. And there's a series of them. In essence, they are permanent housing for those that are experiencing homelessness. This project for us really started in early 2020 with the beginning of the pandemic. The first series of projects are for the city of Toronto. In what we call phase one, there were two projects and the initiative was to provide a hundred homes over two sites. So these two are constructed already, one at 11 Macy Avenue and one at Dovercourt. So these are delivered through modular construction because of the speed of it, because there's a need to provide them through rapid delivery.
Really at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a overcapacity with the shelter system. There's a need to find homes for these individuals very quickly, so the city of Toronto employed this method to deliver these two. So they are a self-sufficient, small compact studio units, about 300 square feet. It has a kitchen, washroom, shower, everything that is in a home, but in a very compact efficient fashion. And so the reason for modular is, as I mentioned, because of the speed of it. So from the beginning when we were hired in May 2020 to when the first unit was moved in, it was eight months. So the first occupants moved in before Christmas.
RVLTR:
That's rather impressive. So is that a new thing that the city is doing, or they have been building housing for the homeless before but the newness of it was building modular?
Daniel Ling:
There has been housing for the homeless. There's also been various shelter facilities, but the modular construction component is relatively new. It was initially used in VC a few years ago and then more recently here in Ontario.
RVLTR:
And so are you able to tell us a little more about where this type of housing fits in? Because I'm assuming the city has many solutions to deal with homelessness and things like that. Can you give us an overview of what the ecosystem is like as far as the city is concerned?
Daniel Ling:
Yeah, I can give a bit of an overview. There's obviously the shelter system, which is temporary. There is something that's more transitional, where it's really a temporary housing. Well, it's permanent housing, but it's intended to transition them out of the system. And then there's these housing, which is permanent housing where they're intended to stay there for as long as they need.
RVLTR:
So in the case of these, do they become basically tenants of the city and they just stay as long as they need and then move on to other things later on?
Daniel Ling:
Yeah. The way these works is that the city would collaborate with a nonprofit. So the nonprofit organization would actually operate and run the facility, and depending on the particular organization, they might have offered different services or they might have different policies.
RVLTR:
Gotcha. So why did you get involved with housing for the homeless?
Daniel Ling:
Well, I guess there's two main reasons I could say. One I touched on earlier is that we are a practice that are interested in design work that has meaning, that has offered social value. And I think the people that tend to work here with us are interested in doing design, but design that can make a difference. And what we realize that as a practice, even though that's the culture and the interest, it also makes sense as a business model when you focus on work that have relevant issues that the community of society is facing at the moment. The government tends to be in the same place, funding tends to be coming at the same time, so we tend to stay nimble to the issues that are at play.
So that's one reason. The second reason is as a design challenge, it's interesting for us. How do you work with projects that has certain constraints and how do you find opportunities out of that? How do we use modular construction that has a certain perception of being perhaps institutional and turn it into something that fits into various contexts, into various neighborhood? How do we do housing in a economic way? Is it the idea of doing more of less? How do we work with such tight schedules? What does that mean from a design perspective? Yeah, so for us, it's interesting to create architecture within such constraints.
RVLTR:
What would be some of the lessons you learned from that? You've talked about some of the challenges you were facing and constraints. What would be the most important lessons you've drawn from it that you might be able to apply to future work?
Daniel Ling:
Yeah, there's a lot of lessons. Modular construction and prefabrication is pretty interesting. There's the whole pros and cons of quality control. What can be done in the shop could be extremely high quality because you're doing it in a controlled environment versus what happens on a site. So we take a lot of time thinking about how to design these. How do we maximize the of type of work that could be done in a shop and minimize the type of work that's done on-site?
There is other technical challenges. We'll get into the details how these things come completely finished and it gets clean into place, so there's the idea of tolerance and how do they actually join together is interesting from a technical perspective. I guess the other aspect is because these are wood modular system, there's a certain limitation. They tend to be three to five-story, so it generates relatively compact buildings. So from a density and built form perspective, it's also interesting for us. The sites are relatively compact, 100 by 200 feet, so that what would fit five to six single family houses, we would fit 50 units.
In terms of how it applies to other projects, I think that the speed of these are good lessons learned. We're involved in other affordable housing projects such as the Housing Now Initiative you might have heard of, where the city wants to deliver over 5,000 affordable units over the next few years, and these tend to be much larger mixed use developments. And as quickly as the city is intending to do them, it still takes a few years. So to be able to deliver is something that could be within 12 months. I think it's something that is relevant to other housing projects and just the speed of providing housing.
RVLTR:
I have a twofold question for you. Maybe you can break it down into separate answers if you want, but the first part of the question is modular construction has been very much liked by architects by and large for the last few decades, maybe the last 60 or 70 years, but it's never really taken hold as a very common way of building. It happens and people build in modular construction, but by and large most construction is still based on the on-site construction model. Why is that not more common, given the fact that it's faster, more precise, better finished?
There's plenty of advantages to modular construction and few constraints. You have size constraints maybe, but architects are also really good at working with constraints. So why isn't that more prevalent as a technique or method of construction? And does the advantages or the lessons you've learned from modular housing for the homeless possibly apply to the broader housing challenges? Because as we both know, currently housing affordability is an issue for everyone, not just for low income people. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Daniel Ling:
Sure. I think to answer the first part of the question, why is it not used more frequently, why hasn't it taken hold as much as one could imagine, there is a cost premium to modular construction, so I think it really comes down to is there a business case for it? So let's say you're applying to market housing, for example, and there is maybe $50 or $75 of square-foot premium on the modular versus conventional. Does the speed of accelerating the construction, the benefit of that is that greater than the cost premium, so it really comes down to the business model.
So that's one. I think the other is that modular construction makes sense when you have a lot of repetition. So does the program benefit from this construction? The projects that I'm talking about, the first one was a hundred homes over two sites. The second phase of the Toronto project is 300 home over five sites. These are all identical units, all 300 square-feet of the same thing, so it makes a lot of practical sense. When you get into other building types, even regular market housing, there's a lot more variety, so at some point you lose the economy of that repetition.
In terms of lessons applied to other housing project, I think that's your second part of your question?
RVLTR:
Yep.
Daniel Ling:
I could see highly sustainable perhaps micro homes that provide compact living. That may work for other housing, like market housing. What's interesting about these, these are wood frame construction, so not using steel or concrete other than a bit of foundation, so they're fairly sustainable projects. And because of the constraint of the module, which has to be about 12 to 14 feet wide by 65 feet long so it fits in a truck, they tend to work for the smaller units. So that's one application that I could see, and because of the size of it, it might pay for the premium. By building less per unit, it might start to make financial sense for the premium of modular.
RVLTR:
Yeah, those are very interesting points. And this is a bit of my personal opinion, but you'd think that now that we've seen how bad the housing affordability has become of an issue, you'd think that all the traditional solutions that we've traditionally relied on should be not discarded, because they probably have some value, but should be considered somewhat obsolete in looking at maybe faster and easier ways to build. So you'd think people would be trying a bunch of new things such as modular housing, and I'm sure there's other technologies out there that could help with the problem. So it's an interesting answer that you've given me.
Would you see, for example, rental housing be reasonably based on the same model or is that just so completely different that it wouldn't work for that?
Daniel Ling:
Yeah, I think it's possible. Again, and I think it comes down to the business case. How much are you able to charge for it relative to the premium? So that's why I think the idea, I think as the trend goes towards most sustainable living with a smaller footprint maybe a day-to-day willingness to live in less space, it might start to swing it so that it makes sense from a business perspective to use this.
The other thing that's interesting is unlike when developer build out of concrete, for example, which is the majority of the housing development, there's a certain economy they're going high with the tower footprint.
RVLTR:
Well, they have to to make their proforma work, right?
Daniel Ling:
Right, exactly.
RVLTR:
Because the zoning and the development charges are so restrictive that they have to go as high as they can to maximize their revenue or profit.
Daniel Ling:
Exactly. So you don't see a lot of three, four, five-story concrete condos around. For this particular type of construction, it's very modular and the limitation is really around five-story. You can maybe stretch it to six at the most. So a lot of the buildings we're doing are the type of infill urban project that is the density that we're missing a lot in Canadian cities. The one that we're doing now for Housing City Hamilton is 24 units on a lot that's only 100 foot wide, three-story, and it would normally fit two or three houses at the most and we are fitting 24 homes in three stories. And so they actually fit well into the residential neighborhood while adding the type of density that we need.
RVLTR:
Yeah. There's a lot of precedent even in Toronto that the units are bigger obviously, but you have a lot of those three, four-story apartment buildings that are not much taller if at all than the surrounding houses but have a slightly bigger footprint and they usually have a flat roof so you can have large units on two or three floors and have six homes on what would be one large home on the same lot, so that makes a lot of sense.
Daniel Ling:
Yeah. These particular models that we're looking at for affordable housing, they don't have parking. So there's no underground parking, there's no basement. Because of the number of units, there isn't a large garbage loading requirement, so it's actually a relatively light footprint on these tight urban lots. That's, I think, something we can learn from [inaudible 00:16:38].
RVLTR:
And could you realistically in modular build larger units, maybe combining several modules together? Could you have a 800 to 1,000-square-foot apartments?
Daniel Ling:
Yep. Sure, you certainly can. You could put two modules side by side and that would create a one or two bedroom units that is probably in the range of 750 to 800 square-foot. Yeah, absolutely.
RVLTR:
So I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit, but I'd love to hear your opinion on that. Just out of curiosity, what do you think are the biggest roadblocks to the current housing affordability issues that we have? And if you had a magic wand, what would be your solution or solutions to that?
Daniel Ling:
Well, I think part of the roadblock is the city of Toronto is very unique where we still have a lot of single family housing in the downtown core and there is quite a bit of resistance in certain areas to densify those areas. You tend to have this all-or-nothing approach where the developer goes in, goes to the OMB, and goes for the full-blown podium for the story tower solution. So if we have the magic wand, it would be to look at innovative way to introduce the smaller scale housing unit into the residential neighborhood and create a wider variety of housing and maybe offer these smaller unit options that are quite sustainable where you don't have to... Let's not build more than we have to, but fit it into the residential neighborhood.
And I think what we've learned also through this process, because some of the municipality we've been working have been quite pushing the sustainability agenda quite a bit, is that these type of buildings can be done with a very low carbon footprint. These are not glass housing, glass condos, glass housing buildings, they're highly insulated envelope. You have triple-glazed window in them. Because they're shop-fabricated, you can take advantage of that quality and have really tight inflow but very low air infiltration. So one of them we're doing is going to be Passive House certified. We are looking at a net zero prototype for this building type now next. This is something that's on the drawing board. So I think we can easily do zero admission buildings housing in an affordable way out of this type of construction.
RVLTR:
Yeah, let's hope the regulatory environment becomes more favorable to that because I personally think the large part of the blame, not all the blame, is on politicians' lack of balls, for lack of a better term, to change the zoning and allow not crazy dense but denser typologies as of right instead of having, what is it, 60% to 70% of the city that's entirely zoned for a single family, which is insane.
I moved to Toronto 17 years ago, and even then we didn't have those problems, but it was insane to me that a city the size of Toronto, as you mentioned earlier, would have entire neighborhoods of single family homes in the downtown core. That just never made sense to me because I grew up in cities where the downtown core was a much denser area. You'd have six to 10-story buildings everywhere and walkable neighborhoods and all the amenities within 15 minutes, which is pretty much the case in most of downtown-ish Toronto neighborhoods, but as soon as you get a little further out, it's a lot less livable if you don't have a car. So those are very interesting legacies we're left to deal with from a much different era.
I think those were all the questions I had for you because this is the only other question I didn't ask you pretty much answered in an indirect way. Are there any last words you want to share with the podcast audience or any ideas you want to put out there?
Daniel Ling:
Yeah, sure, and I've been thinking a lot about this because these rapid delivery housing projects is something that we've only been exposed to in the last 24 months and we've gone through nine. We're on the ninth project now, so it's been very exciting. So thinking about all that, one thing that... I came across a quote recently, I don't know if you heard it by Ray and Charles Eames, and they wanted to do, "The best for the most for the least." So the best design for the most people for the least cost, and I think that's quite inspiring when we are thinking about the housing crisis and affordable housing. How can we apply this set of vision to creating highly sustainable, compact, affordable living?
RVLTR:
Yeah. Well, hopefully your work paves the way for other people to follow suit and maybe use modular housing and prefabricated in a factory and to solve some of those challenges. But regarding that quote from the Eames, I didn't know that quote, but I'm not surprised knowing their work. It's very much in keeping with their lifelong work ethic, so I'm glad you shared that.
I want to thank you very much for your time. I think it was a very interesting conversation and hopefully the first of many.
Daniel Ling:
Thanks, Arnaud.