Professor Jeff Wilson wants to create the “iPhone for housing”. He thinks we need to shed our preconceptions of housing as dependent on land and instead consider his plug-and-play shelter.His Kasita units are not just tiny homes- the prototype is 208 square feet-, but they fit onto a “rack” to become part of “a vertical, high-end, design-yet-affordable, urban trailer park”.
source/image(PrtSc): Kirsten Dirksen
“Think about an RV park”, explains Wilson, “it’s a vertical way to do that: so you own your RV and you park it in a slot, this is a structure that these can go vertically.”Born into the zeitgeist of the Tiny House Movement, Kasita goes far beyond size with its housing-as-a-service. “The problem with tiny houses is the coding, permitting, and the land. And the land’s the most difficult issue to solve because the folks who usually have the land are not the folks that need affordable housing.
So our model allows the folks that have the land to highly monetize that land while providing homeownership to someone.”The Kasita is built according to international building code and the unit and rack structure is zoned as multi-unit housing. Kasita, according to Wilson, isn’t a real estate firm, but a product company.
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They’re not just selling their “iPhones for housing”, but they’re selling the racks so anyone with a bit of land can create their own “vertical, high-end, urban trailer park”.If Wilson and his team can sell enough racks around the country, these modular units could become truly mobile: the idea is, in the future, owners could request a move via an app on their phone./Kirsten Dirksen
