Federal government reboots Canada's housing policy from WWII

Federal government reboots Canada's housing policy from Second World War

BC government's example of multiple small homes on a single-family lot (Government of BC) | Vancouver Special homes (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

What is old is new again when it comes to Canada’s national housing policy.

The federal government announced today it is reviving a previous housing policy now about 80 years old, which was created in response to the immense demand for housing after the Second World War.

Federal Minister of Housing Sean Fraser says the federal government will begin the process of creating a new housing design catalogue, which will help speed up the design and construction of homes by standardizing designs.

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This effort to create a catalogue of templates will begin with low-rise construction, including modular and prefabricated structures, with the consideration of higher-density forms later on, such as mid-rise buildings. The consultation process with relevant stakeholders and partners in the housing sector will begin in January 2024.

“In order to build more homes faster, we need to change how we build homes in Canada. We are going to take the idea of a housing catalogue which we used the last time Canada faced a housing crisis, and bring it into the 21st century,” said Fraser in a statement.

“This is going to help accelerate future developments, and tap into new and innovative construction methods that will make a real difference in building communities across Canada.”

Additionally, the federal government will also work with other levels of government that are looking to implement their own housing design catalogues. This is already being carried out by BC’s provincial government, which announced last month it will create up to 10 design templates of multi-family structures on single-family lots for municipal governments to then use and adopt as their individual policies.

“In order to address our housing crisis, we must use innovative solutions to enable housing to be built faster. Having standardized building designs available can help streamline the permitting process,” said Ravi Kahlon, BC’s minister of housing, in a previous statement.

The predecessor to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the existing federal crown corporation that carries out the nation’s affordable housing initiatives, was the Wartime Housing Corporation. CMHC created a series of housing design catalogues that helped spur the rapid construction of many new homes between the 1950s and 1970s.

One of the most common templates was called the “Strawberry Box” single-family house, which gets its name from the similar shape of the containers used to hold the berries. Over one million of these small bungalows were constructed in the post-war period to urgently meet the housing demand from returning soldiers and pent-up economic activity.

These homes were initially offered as rentals at deeply affordable rates of between $22 and $30 per month — equivalent to $376 to $513 monthly in 2023. Later on, the tenants were offered the option to purchase the homes from CMHC for as low as $6,000.

This reboot of the design catalogue strategy comes amidst growing criticism of the federal government’s measures to tame the escalating housing affordability and supply crisis, which is due in part to the elevated federal immigration targets and the changes in living preferences since the pandemic.

strawberry box house canada second world war f

Example of a “Strawberry Box” house built in the 1960s. (City of Toronto Archives)

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