Canada needs more homes. Prefabricated houses could fill the void
CBC
Terra Page's new house was the talk of her Toronto neighbourhood. That makes sense, since it was delivered on a truck.
"It was like watching a really cool giant Lego box being assembled," Page told Cost of Living.
When Page found tree roots growing in the pipes of their 100-year-old house, Page and her family decided their best move would be to demolish the house and build anew. That's when their contractor suggested a "prefab" house — one that would be built off-site, then shipped to the lot.
She was sold on the fact that it would be less of a nuisance for her neighbours, and it could be done much faster.
"It's generating a lot of buzz locally. And I think a lot of people like us had never even heard of this before or never really thought of it as an option," said Page.
And the federal government is thinking along similar lines.
Prefabricated homes are one of the options experts say could help improve the housing inventory in Canada. During the election campaign, Mark Carney and the now-elected Liberal Party promised about $25 billion in loans to the prefabricated homes industry.
And Canada needs a lot of new homes. According to a 2022 report by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the country needs an additional 3.5 million homes built by 2030 to keep up with housing demand.
Toronto architect Paul Dowsett, who suggested Page start from scratch and worked with them on the prefab house suggested by the contractor, says that even though ready-made homes aren't a new concept, they could be the answer now.
"We need to be building more housing faster and we need to build it better," he said. "Just building more crap houses is not an answer."
A prefab home is a house or pieces of a house that are made in a factory, then put on a large truck and shipped to their desired destination.
Some are built from top to bottom, while others are built into separate pieces, which are then shipped to the location where they can be put together.
At Rick Weste's company, Triple H Housing in Lethbridge, Alta., they can work on 30 to 40 different houses at a time in their factory. Weste says they finish three or four houses a day.
Excluding planning time, he says they can build a house in about eight days.
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