Valley college students rewarded for sustainable solutions to water, affordable housing scarcity

PHOENIX – Six students at a Valley community college were rewarded for their entrepreneurial solutions to affordable housing and water scarcity in Arizona.

Prizes totaling $6,500 were awarded to the competitors in Glendale Community College’s GCC Unlimited Challenge earlier this month.

The contest theme was Desert Roots: Housing for Every Arizonan. Entrants were asked to find ways to increase affordable housing in Arizona without having a large impact on the state’s water supply.

“How do you use and recycle water within a community?” was the question students were trying to answer, GCC business professor Brent Kleinman told KTAR News 92.3 FM.

Third place: Small-scale water recycling plants

Farah Manasir’s project, NanoLoop — Affordable Water Recycling for Arizona Homes and Communities, placed third, earning a $1,000 prize.

Her idea was to take recycling plants like what Scottsdale and Phoenix are doing on the city level and recreate them on a smaller scale within individual neighborhoods.

“That allows that community to use half the amount of water, 30% of the water, because not only are they using it once, they’re reusing it two or three times,” Kleinman explained.

Cites and developers would have to work together to build these neighborhoods with their self-contained recycling plants. Water that goes down the drain would go into a tank and be treated for reuse as greywater in toilets or for lawns and gardens, but not for drinking.

While this solution is the most elaborate configuration of the projects, it would conserve the most water.

Second place: Building on vacant city lots

Aidan Benjamin won $1,500 for his second-place project, which he called Blooms: Modular Eco Homes with Community Land Trusts.

It involves building microhomes using recycled materials on vacant lots.

“Ideally, looking at plots of land in south Phoenix, West Valley, East Valley that no one has built on for years or decades,” Kleinman said.

Vacant lots within the city limits are already configured for plumbing, so water could easily be connected without a new source.

First place: Repurposing vacant big-box retail buildings

Jasmina Ejup took home the top prize of $2,500 for her project: Habitat — Solving Arizona’s Housing Crisis.

The plan is to convert abandoned big-box retail buildings into apartments with a shared living space. Renters would pay a $600 monthly subscription to live in units that include a shared kitchen, living room and bathrooms to help cut down on water use. In theory, the building would not need to be rezoned as residential with a subscription-based payment model.

“If you took an old empty Target, Kmart, Walmart and actually just put up walls in there and redefined some of the plumbing and electricity, you could really create something quickly and inexpensively,” Kleinman said.

Ejup will present her project to the Phoenix Housing Conference in the spring and is working with a developer to price out the idea.

Honorable mention

After watching all six presentations via stream, an anonymous business offered to kick in $500 honorable mention awards for each of the other three entrants: Sol Acosta, Evan Peraza and Winona Christensen.

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