Canada needs more homes. Prefabricated houses could fill the void

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.”

What are prefabricated homes?

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.

“So as the groundwork is being done, the basement is being done, we’re building the house in Lethbridge,” said Weste. “Then the house ships over [and] goes right onto the foundation.”

And these aren’t just single-level, mobile homes. Weste works on houses that are up to and over 3,000 square feet. And they aren’t all the same house. Customers can work with the company and chose between design options that fit their needs. 

While most of Weste’s customers live in rural Canada, where it’s more difficult and expensive to bring in traditional construction crews, he’s also placed more than 300 homes in cities like Saskatoon. He says the entire process takes half the time of a conventional “stick-built” house, which is what they call onsite building. 

And while he says he can mass-produce these homes, it is slightly more expensive. They save some on bulk purchasing materials, but there are other costs. 

“We also got to ship a house and make sure it doesn’t break or fall apart. So we actually structurally engineer them to be able to travel,” said Weste, noting some can be moved up to 1,000 kilometres. “And then there’s the actual cost of shipping.”

Dowsett, the Toronto architect, designs both prefabricated and traditionally constructed homes, but there’s no question as to which one he prefers: He’s a prefab fan. 

“It’s just an intelligent way to build,” he said, adding that prefab homes can be much better quality because construction crews working in a factory don’t have to deal with the elements.

“You can imagine the quality in a climate-controlled factory versus the quality you’re going to get late on a Friday afternoon on a cold, rainy day in March on a ladder three stories up off the ground,” said Dowsett. 

Roadblocks to change

Dowsett says there’s some pushback from within the construction industry. 

“The stereotypical image of the construction industry is Mike Holmes standing there with his arms crossed, being stern about something and not really open to change,” he said, noting that’s partly because the status quo is proven to work.

Innovation means there’s a risk it could go wrong, and since there’s already so much liability in construction, he says many people are hesitant to change. 

“I’m not suggesting that we be ridiculously reckless and … innovate for the sake of innovation,” Dowsett said. “But I think we need to look critically, as I have done at prefab, and say, ‘Yeah, that does all the things that we traditionally do through stick-built framing, it just does it better.’ “

Then there’s support from the federal government. While Carney did make campaign promises, the industry is still waiting to see what the follow-through looks like. 

Mike Moffatt, an economist and housing expert at Western University, says that money could help businesses invest in the infrastructure needed to build these factories, and get them through any downtimes in the market. 

“So if we’re able to scale up this industry, we’re able to get those costs down, but we’re also able to produce faster,” he said. 

Creating ‘an ecosystem’ of builders 

Steven Beites, architecture professor at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., hopes it’s not just big businesses like Triple M Housing that see the allure of prefab houses. 

Solving the housing crisis, he says, will also mean empowering local builders to get into prefab construction. 

He says smaller crews could assemble some parts of a house off site, then do the rest of the work on the lot. While the production might not happen as fast as it would at a larger company, he says it could still make a difference.

“It’s really having an ecosystem of local builders that are starting to embrace prefab and seeing the benefits.”