Virginia Tech students help turn school into affordable housing

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impact 1:15 Virginia Tech students help turn school into affordable housing

By:

Jasmine Rorrer

7 Mar 2024 215

Students from Virginia Tech's Apparel, Housing, and Resource Management are gaining real world experience through a collaboration between Virginia Tech and Pulaski County. The project is in its beginning phase and will ultimately result in new affordable housing for the community.

Video by Jasmine Rorrer.

It's an adaptive reuse of the Dublin Middle School to make it into affordable housing for residents of Dublin and Pulaski County. After the pandemic, we built a new middle school. The schools were combined. That left two empty middle schools in the county, and almost more attractive to preserve and keep these amenities than it is to just erase them from the history of the community. Right. It's a huge project. The more heads we can get on this project, the better. I think the most challenging part is going to be keeping in mind the historical aspect and working around the space to design a living environment. It's super cool that we're able to go out in the community and meet people from the county and developers and get to work with real life projects that are actually going on. I think the fact that it's a real collaborative project between actual like architects, developers, the county, but also other people of our major, the property management and real estate students. And having to work as a team in something real, that's the first time I've ever done anything like this.