Jack Lipson's Contact Details

Jack Lipson's Company Details

Proof Housing

Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 3 Employees
Real Estate

PROOF is a development practice on a mission to make better housing. For most of us struggling to enter the housing market the feelings are similar: disconnected, hopeless and frustrated. While the housing industry strives to respond to increasing demand, new homes struggle to meet our desire. Condo living is generic and limiting, while buying a house is unattainable for most. More housing is being built than ever before, which demands the question: "Why doesn't new housing reflect what we actually want or how we use our homes?" Building new housing requires an incredible amount of time, money, labour and material resources, which makes the process both complicated and risky. This produces a housing landscape trapped in a highly conservative cycle of short-term thinking which prioritizes immediate returns over long-term value, and favours rigid developments that lose utility as times change. This is wasteful, expensive and ultimately unsustainable. Housing is far too important to be built this way.So how can we fix this?In order to make better housing, we must rethink how it is built, used and owned. PROOF uses research-led design to challenge the variety of accepted conventions that have created the housing crisis we find ourselves in, including how projects are financed, designed and eventually occupied.But it's not enough to simply challenge: each of our projects is a proof of concept, aiming to facilitate housing that is more adaptable to our changing needs, built sustainably and conscious of its larger impact, and ultimately accessible to us all.