FAIRMONT — Through a partnership of multiple organizations, Fairmont is looking at a unique affordable housing project.

A $3,000 grant from the Southwest Regional Sustainable Development Partnership at the University of Minnesota was recently given to be used over the next year.

“It’s a year for us to set the groundwork for this to work,” said Alex Young-Williams, community activator through Lead for Minnesota and a point person for the project.

Young-Williams said that when he came to Fairmont, conversations had already been taking place between Project 1590 and Jacob Mans, an associate professor for the college of design at the University of Minnesota.

Young-Williams said they looked at the Fairmont housing study that was done last year which recommended more affordable housing options and more senior housing.

“That’s the initial direction we want to go with this knowing that women over 75 are the demographic of the largest percentage of people in poverty,” Young-Williams said.

Since then more organizations have gotten involved in the conversation, including the Fairmont Area School District, City of Fairmont, HRA and Habitat for Humanity.

Mans said, “The technology we’re working with between the city of Fairmont, Habitat and the school is something that we’re calling a utility core.”

Mans explained that it’s a modular piece of building that contains all of the systems and appliances needed to make a house function, all consolidated into a modular component that can be manufactured off site and brought to the house location and the house would be built around it.

In addition to working for the University of Minnesota, Mans runs a practice called the Decentralized Design Lab. They’ve been working on the utility core concept for the past few years. Mans said they’ve done some remote projects in Canada and they’re also trying to do it across greater Minnesota.

The three communities they’re focused on partnering with are Fairmont, Hackensack and White Earth Nation.

“We’re trying to connect the high school, the HRA, the local habitat chapter, the city of Fairmont and the state department of labor and industry together into a project so that we can work with students to build these utility cores that will be inspected through the state to ensure that building code officials locally recognize that the work the students are doing is to a level that is satisfactory, which will allow the HRA and Habitat to build more affordably,” Mans said.

Fairmont Area Schools Superintendent Joe Brown said that Mans was looking for schools to pilot the project and thought the Fairmont construction trades class could start on it and with the new vocational center, the students would have the ability to build multiple cores.

“It ties right in with the goal of our new vocational center. Students would get electrical, plumbing and HVAC experience as well as construction. It would provide a less expensive design for a house and it would be the perfect project for the city to repopulate some of these smaller, vacant lots and more importantly provide affordable and accessible housing for people,” Brown said.

Young-Williams said by the end of the year they hope to have a Memorandum of Understanding between the city on the project in order to remove road blocks when it comes to actually building the houses.

“This is a great opportunity for Fairmont to be on the forefront of this kind of technology and lead the way for other communities to follow,” Young-Williams said.