Hello, British Columbia! Welcome, Please Take a Look Around!

Welcome to the Vienna House website! Though this proposed project has been percolating for some time now, today we officially launch with a news release from the British Columbia Attorney General and Ministry responsible for Housing.

BC Housing and our partners are giving this planned community a bit of extra outreach love via this site, because we anticipate it will offer so many lessons on how new technologies and processes can advance innovative solutions to affordability, climate change, and social equity.

We’ll have lots to learn and share here. For example:

The University of British Columbia’s Sustainability Initiative will be studying Vienna House from multiple angles. Researchers at the university will capture and document the knowledge that will emerge from this project, and help disseminate observations and findings to industry, governments and other stakeholders.
Vienna House is part of a collaboration between the City of Vancouver and the City of Vienna, in Austria. Our European friends will be building their own similar project starting in 2022, and our two teams will be swapping info and findings along the way.
In April 2021, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) awarded the Vienna House project funding from its National Housing Strategy Demonstrations Initiative. The federal crown corporation did so because the project seeks to “demonstrate technologies, processes and practices to deliver sustainable wood housing projects affordably, safely and reliably.“

Think of this site as a central location for sharing research findings as the project progresses from rezoning application—coming in about July 2021—to occupancy sometime in late 2023. Expect renderings, interviews, drone job-site videos, research summaries, and much more! (Pssst…. Have you seen our launch video?)

The Vienna House launch video!

We hope Vienna House will prove an important chapter in BC Housing’s proud history of delivering affordable housing for British Columbians. Sign up below and we’ll let you know what we learn, as we learn it—and what comes next!