2023-12-12 20:55:00
To tackle the housing crisis, Ottawa will launch by next fall a catalog of pre-approved housing like at the time of the Second World War.
• Read also – Housing crisis: Ottawa will relaunch “house catalogs”
Housing Minister Sean Fraser sees it as “a concrete way to help build more housing faster” by cutting approval and construction times of all kinds.
According to Minister Fraser, who cites “expert estimates”, the house catalog concept has the potential to “reduce the construction time of a project by up to a year”.
By next fall, Ottawa will launch a catalog of pre-approved housing similar to the era of the Second World War, as announced yesterday by the Minister of Housing, Sean Fraser. Web screenshot
Lessons from the past
Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1970s, pre-approved design catalogs helped speed the construction of residences for war factory workers and veterans returning from combat.
To house these workers, the federal government created a state corporation, the Wartime Housing Corporation, which built 46,000 units in eight years.
After the war, the forerunner of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) was created to take over, to help house hundreds of thousands of returning veterans.
At the time, some of these small houses of around 1,000 square feet were mass-built in just a few days, said Minister Fraser, who had in hand a 1954 catalog containing detailed plans.
Even today, these post-war constructions dot many Canadian cities.
An example of veterans’ homes in the Émard and Côte-Saint-Paul neighborhoods in Montreal built according to the uniform construction plan model Montreal History Center
Ottawa will launch consultations with developers, provinces and cities in January, in order to put together its catalog which should be available a few months later.
For this new war effort, the federal government will mainly focus on the development of plans for multiplexes, small apartment buildings and housing for students and the elderly.
Minister Fraser does not yet know how many housing units this new initiative will build.
Canada is facing an intense housing crisis with no end in sight.
The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates the shortfall in housing to be built by 2030 at 3.5 million in the country, including 620,000 in Quebec.
Without this additional contribution, it will be impossible to restore costs deemed affordable by CMHC, like those we experienced in the early 2000s.
Good idea
One of the authors of a recent study on the housing crisis, Mike Moffat, believes that mass manufacturing of pre-approved housing has “the potential to be extremely beneficial.”
“Imagine what the auto industry would look like if every car was built the way before Henry Ford,” he commented on the social network X. “If every vehicle produced had to undergo air quality testing, etc. We would have very few cars and a huge labor shortage in the sector.”
According to Mr. Moffat, a catalog might reduce approval and permit times, as well as construction times, while requiring less labor.
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