Federal housing catalogue will have little effect on home-building
Liberals look to emulate WWII-era housing program. But this is not the 1940s and it is not going to work
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The federal government recently announced that it will accelerate housing construction by launching a “wartime” catalogue of pre-approved architectural designs for residential builders. However, industry experts have criticized the plan and argued that its impact will be negligible.
Canada first used architectural catalogues to help build homes for veterans returning from the Second World War. The designs at that time primarily focused on detached single family homes in suburban settings, which were dubbed “victory” or “strawberry box” houses. Numerous pre-approved blueprints emerged over time and were used by the federal government to build around a million homes from the 1940s through the 1960s.
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However, the Trudeau government’s new catalogue will focus on urban infill development and gentle density (i.e., multiplexes and garden suites). This makes sense, given that there is a growing consensus that Canadian cities need to add more homes to low-density neighbourhoods where multi-unit housing has largely been banned by restrictive zoning laws.
But there’s a problem: experts say that design catalogues don’t actually work in this context.
According to Chris Spoke, a housing activist with extensive experience in the development industry, design catalogues are useful for suburban projects where large parcels of land can be acquired and subdivided into standardized lots. Under these conditions, it is possible to repeatedly reuse the same designs, lowering costs through greater efficiency and economies of scale.
This is why many suburban developers already maintain their own design catalogues without any government support.
But with urban infill development, every lot is complex and unique. Not only do sites often differ in size, they have countless other variations (soil conditions, presence or absence of a neighbouring wall, etc.) that necessitate customized drawings. Even if the federal government were to fill its catalogue with a large number of pre-approved designs, Spoke believes that customization would still be inevitable.
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Spoke is also skeptical about whether a federal catalogue would even be feasible these days, given that every pre-approved design would have to conform to the regulations of hundreds of municipalities.
“Are they going to submit this catalogue to every municipality and have every municipality review and approve every drawing? I don’t know how practically you can do that,” he said, noting that the problem would be exacerbated by the fact that municipal regulations are always changing.
Alternatively, the federal government could unilaterally impose its pre-approved designs onto municipalities, regardless of whether they conform to local building or land use regulations, but this would lead to messy debates about the boundaries of federal power. Housing falls under provincial jurisdiction, so only provincial governments should have the authority to dictate or override their municipalities in this area.
Yet all of this is somewhat a moot point, because policy wonks are apparently overestimating how much time and money goes into producing and approving architectural drawings, which Spoke said is actually a “relatively cheap and quick process.”
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For one of his current projects, which has a budget of $3.8 million and is expected to take three years to complete, the custom architectural drawings cost only $20,000 and were approved within six weeks. Even in the best-case scenario, with no customization, he said the upcoming federal design catalogue would only have reduced his costs by 0.5 per cent and expedited his timelines by 3.8 per cent.
While certainly helpful, these kinds of savings do not adequately address the housing crisis — you cannot bail out a sinking boat with a teaspoon.
This point was also made by Allan Teramura, a past president of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, who recently wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail, which largely echoed Spoke’s points and called the Trudeau government’s catalogue solution “naive.”
“Canadian building codes and planning regulations do not require houses and small multiple-family dwellings to be designed by architects, and therefore, almost none of them are. The housing industry is already based on a model of the absolute minimum of time spent on design,” wrote Teramura, who said that it would be a “fallacy” to think that design work substantially inflates overall costs.
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Both Teramura and Spoke argued that it doesn’t make sense for policymakers to focus on architectural drawings, given that there are much more important impediments to housing construction. Municipal approval processes are dysfunctional and easily derailed. Regressive zoning laws prevent densification in large swathes of urban Canada. Building codes can, at times, nonsensically penalize gentle density.
Any housing announcements that fail to address these core problems are “a bit of a distraction,” said Spoke. The design catalogue, he continued, “is a popular policy among policy wonks but I don’t know of any urban infill builders who think that this is a serious solution. Suburban subdivisions love this stuff, but they’ve been doing it for many years and the feds aren’t introducing anything new — but I don’t know any urban infill builders who would take this seriously.”
We need substantial regulatory reforms to boost residential construction and fix our housing crisis. While implementing a “wartime” strategy is excellent political branding, it is ultimately just another example of the federal government pantomiming seriousness on this issue while offering only trivial solutions.
National Post
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