Owen Sound has an attainable, sustainable housing solution within its reach.
Glassworks is designing the future of housing in Owen Sound.
Glassworks Village is at the fore-front of what the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation has called "the future of affordable housing”.
Our project is designed, not for profit, but for living within our means, and our planet's capacity.
Glassworks’ mission is to design and build a community for housing, working, and recreation.
A shared plan to meet the needs of Owen Sound and Grey County through attainable, sustainable community.
Changing the way we do things is possible.
We all need a place to call home, yet more and more of us are unable to afford one. At the same time, we need to drastically change the way we live to save our planet. These global issues are playing out right here in Owen Sound, Ontario.
Glassworks has a plan for an attainable, sustainable community.
We need your help to get from plan to action.
You can support us in taking the next step.
We have many hurdles to overcome to move us from vision to shovels in the ground. Whether you’re most comfortable contributing time to help achieve our advocacy goals, money to help us grow, or energy to engage with our local governments to support us, we need you on our team.
We are one small piece of a much Bigger movement.
Glassworks Village has been inspired by the cooperative housing movement, based on the belief that living collaboratively brings people together, increases individual social capital, while offering chances to be more intentional about our resource use.
“In order to meet the National Housing Strategy’s goal of ensuring that all Canadians have access to a home they can afford and that meets their needs, we need to revisit the current system. Accomplishing this goal will require innovative solutions, systems-level thinking, and collaboration across the governmental, nonprofit, and the private sectors.”
— Financialization & Housing: A Social Innovation Approach to a Better Housing System, December 2021
Cooperative Housing Communities Around the World
Artist rendering of a possible cooperative community plan in Washington State, US.
A seven unit, two-story building plan with green material and building components. The modernist design allows the residents to view the shared gardening area.
This project exemplifies the sustainability design features we plan to incorporate, including passive solar, minimizing hard paving, solar photovoltaic, and natural material selection.
At Petaluma Avenue Homes, cooperative principles are applied in the community garden, common house, and abundant open space, encouraging all residents to come together to build their community.
Inspiration from West Five Proposal for Energy Efficient Townhome Community, Phase One sought to minimize the environmental impact of the development by carefully considering vehicular traffic to minimize the amount of hard paving required; planning ample greenspace and resilient landscaping to naturally manage rainwater.
The experimental houses at Svartlamon are located in an urban ecological research area in Trondheim, Norway. Here five families have built their own row houses with a very low budget, relying on a lot of reuse, environmentally friendly materials, and their own manual labour and creativity.
The District of Summerland, BC is working with a team of consultants to create a concept plan for a Sustainability Eco-Village on its district-owned lands. This concept plan will be informed by engineering, environmental, archaeological and design expertise, best practices in sustainable design, as well as your community input.
Cooperative housing communities will usually have a large (3000–5000 SF) common house with a commercial kitchen, community dining room, living room, guest rooms, children’s playrooms, workshop, exercise gym, and more.