The federal government intends to resurrect a post-war effort to ramp up housing construction across Canada — but with a 21st-century twist.
A consultation process will begin next month on developing a catalogue of pre-approved home designs to accelerate the home-building process for developers, Housing Minister Sean Fraser said Tuesday.
It’s a reboot of a federal policy from the post-Second World War era, when the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. developed straightforward blueprints to help speed up the construction of badly needed homes, Fraser said.
“When many thousands of soldiers were returning home to be reunited with their families at once, Canada faced enormous housing crunches,” he said.
“We intend to take these lessons from our history books and bring them into the 21st century.” … [More in the article]
When they had a “housing crisis”, the USSR built a shitload of prefab concrete housing, the famous “commieblock” buildings. They were imposing, ugly, and made out of load bearing asbestos, but they succeeded in their goal of transforming an impoverished rural serf society into an urbanized industrial powerhouse. While you can and should criticize the Soviet Union, their housing project of the early/mid 20th century was the singular most successful social project in history.
I’m not saying we need “commieblocks”, but we definitely need high quality mass produced social housing in this country. We will simply never be able to solve the problem by building endless suburbs of timber and rockwoll shacks. It won’t “destroy the real estate market” because loads of people will still want their own homes eventually, but for everybody else it will be a great improvement over what we have now.
Should be achievable with this project, so long as multi-family and mixed use buildings are included in the catalog.
My understanding is the whole point of the catalog is that you can build any of the designs anywhere in Canada. This fights the “well my municipality/HOA/neighborhood appeal” roadblocks.
If it’s in the catalog, it can go up. Period.