Articles

When thinking about intensification in older neighbourhoods, a question that might come to mind is: “What about infrastructure capacity? Can the pipes, stormwater, and water supply systems support it?” It’s true. Most older neighbourhoods weren’t built with today’s housing needs in mind. Add a few more homes, and suddenly the pipes work harder, the showers run longer, and the stormwater has fewer places to soak in. But that’s no reason to treat infill like a threat. With the

For over a century, catalogues like Aladdin's mail-order kits and the postwar Victory Homes delivered fast, affordable and replicable homes that built entire neighbourhoods. Today's Federal Housing Catalogue revives this dream with no-cost “pre-approved” or “near permit-ready” designs to spur low-rise infill redevelopment. The appeal of catalogue housing lies in repetition. Once a design is approved, it can be built again and again, reducing costs, shortening timelines, and m

Canada’s housing crisis isn’t from a lack of ideas: It’s from a system too fragmented to make them work together. Build Canada Homes (BCH) offers strategies to address Canada’s housing crisis, with early moves in financing, modular tech, and public land use representing an important step toward real progress. But siloed solutions won’t fix this system-wide problem unless they are in lockstep with zoning and approvals. Without coordinated regulatory reform, the initiative risk