Designer Bryn Davidson Makes Tiny Homes and Big Waves at City Hall

Bryn Davidson doesn’t fit the image of a persistent thorn in the side of the City of Vancouver. He doesn’t organize demonstrations or wave placards or deliver thundering speeches in council chambers. In fact, as he speaks about his projects in various forums—always in his thoughtful, even-toned way—he looks and sounds like he should be farming corn somewhere or maybe overseeing some bridge construction in a remote rural area.

But, when we reached out to see if he’d be willing to be interviewed as a “Disruptor” for this magazine, he cheerily responded: “Sure. Sounds nicer than ‘shit disturber.’”

What 48-year-old Davidson has done, in the years since he started his green-home-building business, Lanefab Design/Build, shortly after he graduated from architecture school in 2005, is quietly and persistently convince the city to change important housing policies. When he tackled his first house, city bureaucrats were going to levy a penalty on his company for the thicker walls needed for  passive-house construction— a type of construction that produces homes that are so well insulated and ventilated that they don’t need heating or cooling systems. Eventually, he got them to provide a density bonus (more total buildable space  allowed) for any builder doing the same, making passive houses more financially feasible.

As Vancouver has gone through rolling transformations of its housing policies—laneway homes first allowed in 2009, various efforts to encourage new types of multi-family housing, cautious moves into allowing duplexes in 2018, a full embrace of multiplexes (four to six homes on a single lot) two years ago—Davidson has been talking to others in the industry, attending city meetings and speaking out on social media constantly, giving his very experience-based opinions on which changes will work, and which ones won’t. He has also been a consistent voice calling for the province to intervene in some housing issues, because cities are just not going to make enough bold changes on their own. “I feel like what I’m arguing about is five to eight years ahead of where governments are,” says Davidson.

Along with that, he spent years advocating for the creation of the St. George Rainway in Mount Pleasant—a project that is now under construction to re-create a stream along St. George Street that replicates the course of one that used to run in the same area before it was covered over. (Davidson works and lives in Mount Pleasant.) And all the while, he was growing his company, focused on working with clients who had the same environmental goals as he did. Lanefab now has about 20 people in it, designing and building about 10 homes a year.

In 2020, he ventured into a new kind of housing mission when he built a tiny house and then found a temporary site for it in the Downtown Eastside as a way to push the city into accepting them as an option. City staff had always pooh-poohed the idea, which has been used in other cities, like Portland and Prince George. But in February 2022, they finally approved a pilot project—one that now consists of 10 tiny homes near Main and Terminal.

Davidson’s willingness to speak out has earned him praise from advocates on various points of the housing spectrum, particularly because he’s not an academic or a housing enthusiast with a background only in computer programming or video-game development—the resumé of more than one person involved in Vancouver’s (and North America’s) rapidly expanding Yes in My Backyard pro-housing movement.

“It is always helpful when you’re talking to somebody who is actually building stuff,” says Russil Wvong, a volunteer with Abundant Housing Vancouver and a council candidate in 2022 with Kennedy Stewart’s Forward Together party. “They’ve got more on the line. These are people who have to make the numbers work.”

Wvong says the illustrations that Davidson puts out on X/Twitter do a wonderful job of helping the public see what the possibilities are for denser housing that fits well into existing neighbourhoods.

Sarah Blyth-Gerszak, the Downtown Eastside activist who has been a major force in creating Vancouver’s overdose-prevention sites, was impressed with Davidson’s willingness to go far out on a limb to build and find a site for a tiny house.

“He’s obviously one of those people who is willing to try a crazy thing,” says Blyth-Gerszak, who has a track record of her own in that area. (Another sign of his willingness to step off the well-trodden path: he’s just finished up living for a year in Bali with his partner and young son.)

Davidson’s background doesn’t have any flashing red arrows that would indicate the role he’d eventually be playing. He’s the son of two public school teachers from a small town in California near Sacramento. “It was a great place to grow up as a little white boy,” he says. He got a mechanical engineering degree at the University of California, Berkeley, then went to work in Alaska for three years—only to find the work wasn’t as creative (or green) as he’d hoped. So, he went back to school and got a master’s degree in architecture from UBC in 2005.

If Davidson is ever to express any noticeable annoyance, it’s when he looks at how silent too many people in his industry are about reforms that need to be made for climate change and accessible housing. “I’m frustrated at times by the lack of willingness to be a shit disturber,” he says. Still, he’s adamant that advocating for change doesn’t have to mean being a jerk. “I try to be lovingly critical,” he says. “I understand how hard it is to make change within a bureaucracy.”