Canada's Next Mega Project: Repeatable Housing

Across the country, governments are discussing high-speed rail, energy corridors, AI infrastructure, industrial strategy, defence production, and housing. Canada is once again entering an era of nation-scale ambition, comparable to the railway, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the national highway system, hydroelectric expansion, and post-war suburban growth. Yet while housing is often discussed alongside these mega projects, it is rarely treated with the same level of coordination, urgency, or technical rigour.

In reality, housing meets every definition of a mega project: national in scale, highly complex, financially risky, and deeply interconnected with infrastructure, labour, energy, transportation, municipal finance, and economic competitiveness. The issue is not that housing is smaller or simpler, but that it continues to be treated as a series of disconnected local decisions rather than a unified national challenge.

The risks of continuing this approach are significant: worsening affordability, slower economic growth, infrastructure strain, labour shortages, and increasing difficulty retaining younger generations in Canadian communities.

The Peril of the Mega Project

Canada’s housing challenge is often framed as a question of federal policy or construction capacity, and solutions focus on single-project success stories. But a housing solution that matches the scale of the challenge will need to catalyze a momentous industry response, delivering millions of homes across hundreds of communities, using thousands of different sets of regional regulations. This will require coordination, forecasting, financing, infrastructure planning, and decision-making under pressure.

In their book How Big Things Get Done, authors Ben Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner examine some of the world’s largest and most ambitious projects, including airports, subways, dams, Olympic Games, and industrial megaprojects. Their goal is to understand why some projects succeed while others become defined by delays, cost overruns, and disorganization.

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Source: Canva AI

A major theme throughout the book is that mega projects are not only technical challenges, they're human ones. Large projects are shaped by people making decisions under pressure, often while competing for funding, political approval, influence, and public support. Once urgency takes over, leaders often respond by accelerating timelines, mobilizing immediately, demanding that everyone work at maximum intensity, and pushing ahead before alternatives have been fully explored or systems properly coordinated. While this creates the appearance of momentum, it often produces the opposite result: confusion, rework, bottlenecks, delays, and escalating costs.

Cost overrun data for megaprojects shows that modular, repeatable developments consistently experience significantly lower cost overruns. Source: Image created by BuildingIN based on Flyvbjerg database and “How Big Things Get Done,” Appendix A (p. 191).

Flyvbjerg and Gardner chronicle a wide variety of projects and identify that successful mega projects are not custom designs—they are projects like wind and solar farms, roads, fossil thermal power plants and electricity transmission—all examples of repeating modularity. Successful large-scale outcomes are usually built through iteration, standardization, and repetition. The projects most likely to succeed are rarely the most bespoke. Instead, it’s the projects that are refined and repeated that succeed.

In other words, the best way to build something big is often to build smaller things repeatedly.

Many housing projects are unique: apartment blocks and towers designed to fit unique sites and subject to individual approval processes. But big housing outcomes made up of many small repeating projects could be approached systematically, with realistic forecasting, thoughtful planning, and the advantage of refining design solutions while scaling up. 

This way of thinking—leveraging repetition instead of constant reinvention—has major implications for housing in Canada.

The “Start Fast, Fix Later” Trap

Implementing repeatable housing designs and establishing a unified housing market in Canada is challenging. Municipal zoning rules differ widely, sometimes from block to block. Approval processes vary from one municipality to another. So, most projects begin from scratch, with planners, architects, engineers, builders, and municipalities investing time and energy in custom solutions rather than repeatable ones.

In many ways, this reflects the exact pitfall identified in How Big Things Get Done: thinking fast and acting slow. Municipalities often move quickly to announce targets, growth strategies, or ambitious housing commitments, but the underlying delivery systems remain fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. The result is that enormous effort is spent navigating the process, resolving avoidable uncertainty, and reinventing approaches rather than accelerating housing delivery itself.

Housing delivery has become slower, riskier, and more expensive than necessary because the systems behind it are fragmented and necessitate custom solutions.

The Power of Small, Repeatable Projects

Canada’s greatest scalable housing opportunity isn’t in big projects like new neighbourhoods or apartment buildings.  Repeatable low-rise multi-unit infill housing with 6-12 units per building has the potential to scale and fits in growing municipalities across the country.

Low-rise, multi-unit homes that are two to three-storeys in height and include 6-12 units. Due to their compact nature, they're the most affordable to build, heat, cool and maintain, and are well-suited to modular methods of construction. Source: BuildingIN Housing Catalogue.

This is an often-overlooked housing option, and one with a public image problem. But mid-density infill housing, like the examples shown here, is a great fit in neighbourhoods when they’re shaped by rules that protect valued streetscape characteristics -- rules that require façade features that enhance the community.

These housing forms are not experimental. Most Canadian municipalities already contain examples from earlier eras of development. And although these buildings are small, they offer the opportunity to gradually double density in areas where they are a good fit. These forms are also well-suited to modular construction, compatible with existing neighbourhood patterns, and capable of being deployed incrementally across many municipalities. They are among the most affordable forms of housing to construct, heat, cool, and maintain.

Most importantly, they are repeatable. Canadian neighbourhoods are already structured around repetition. In older neighbourhoods, lots are generally rectangular with similar frontages and depths inherited from original subdivision patterns and plans, making them ideal candidates for standardized low-rise infill building. The modular factory industry is also ready to scale. Builders are looking for more predictable pathways to delivery.

What’s needed is a coordinated regulatory framework that sets the stage for these pieces to come together into a repeatable national housing supply system.

Time for Action

Municipalities increasingly need implementation-ready tools: zoning approaches, form-based standards, servicing guidance, permitting pathways, and forecasting models that translate policy intent into measurable housing outcomes. They also need practical ways to identify where mid-density, low-rise infill housing is viable, where infrastructure investments will have the greatest impact, and how neighbourhood change can occur incrementally over time.

Canada’s next great nation-building effort should be the delivery of thousands of well-designed low-rise infill homes that fit within existing neighbourhoods — repeatable low-rise multi-unit buildings delivered consistently across hundreds of communities. Across the country, developers and modular manufacturers could refine proven building types, improve delivery systems, and replicate successful projects at scale.

If Canada is serious about addressing the housing crisis, federal and provincial governments must lend unprecedented support to municipalities as they build a repeatable and unified regulatory and delivery system capable of catalyzing a sustained infill housing boom.

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Rosaline Hill is a principal architect, planner, and development consultant with over 25 years dedicated to designing homes and communities that work. She founded RJH Architecture + Planning, Walkable Ottawa, Ottawa Cohousing, and BuildingIN, each building on her passion for smarter, more sustainable housing solutions.

With support from her CMHC Housing Supply Challenge winnings, Rosaline launched BuildingIN, an infill consulting practice advancing a data-driven approach that unifies Canada’s fragmented housing market for low-rise, multi-unit infill. Her proven methodology has guided municipalities, large and small, through transformative change. Today, she partners with governments across the country, empowering changemakers to unlock scalable, affordable housing solutions where they are needed most.

Sources:

Flyvbjerg, B., & Gardner, D. (2022). How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project. Penguin Random House.