Federal Home Design Catalogue: Nothing But a Fun Experiment?
On December 12th, 2023 the Canadian Federal Government announced the beginning of consultations for a design catalogue to assist in the housing crisis.
MADE board member Cody Johnston, with RPK Architects and member Danielle Soneff, with ArtHouse Residential, commented on the announcement and gave some background on Friday, January 5th’s CBC Radio Active. Here are some of their additional thoughts on the issue:
The idea of a housing catalogue invokes illustrative and nostalgic ideas in the minds of many architects and urbanists. Like this Small House Designs publication from the Canadian/Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation from 1958. Yet, there are major implications to consider when discussing the revitalization of this initiative.
In their heyday, prefabricated homes helped create efficiency and expedited building during a housing crisis. You could go to the local hardware store and pick out a model, then find a local contractor to build them—easy peasy. Sometimes, you could find the same plan in places like Edmonton, Alberta and Sacramento, California. They were even sold in kits delivered and ready to assemble. This modernist assembly belt for house production benefited the homeowner’s pocketbook while removing all the essence of genius loci—aesthetically and functionally. These catalogue designs were the beginning of an era—suburbia. The strawberry box house design is an artifact that marked the beginning of our modern development patterns. They defined domestic lifestyles such as the nuclear family and single-family zoning. After the Second World War, economists worried that we would fall back into the depression, so they put people to work building infrastructure and housing. Building costs were high, and the skilled labour force was depleted.
A Complete Home or a Complete City
Affordability
We are still living with the consequences of this experiment, and it has significantly affected systemic issues such as climate change, housing affordability and social isolation. As well as an exponential growth curve for cities that has led to financial insolvency. When you talk about affordability, there are two scales to consider: The individual home buyer, owner, renter and the city; how the city can afford to provide services for those homes, roads, sewer, and power, which is achieved through property tax. Our modern development patterns have made affordability for individuals and cities unsustainable and quickly becoming unachievable.
An article from Strong Towns in 2016 from Rockford, IL, reported the exponential growth of water infrastructure compared to population. Between 1940 and 2014, the amount of water infrastructure per person more than tripled in 75 years, and within the same time frame, the population only doubled.
We know how to build fast. The challenge is to build dense, adaptive, and climate-resilient homes that support community, mental and social health. This catalogue, or any governmental messaging around housing initiatives, must consider the lifecycle analysis or a ten thousand-foot view. We need to build more productive places that are context-specific (including climate!). On a big scale, like neighbourhoods, walkable density. From an individual residential scale, fat wall systems, geothermal, and solar are achievable at a residential scale.
Adaptive use allows people to stay in their house for longer as life stages transition, especially in older age, as assisted living facilities are unable to fulfill the needs of our aging population. Door openings at 36” wide and visitability access will assist in the long-term usage and aging in place. The design catalogue could educate people about the technical specifications that can bridge upfront and long-term affordability and the costs on an individual pocketbook and on a broader societal scale.
At best, this catalogue from the federal government will present new designs that find efficiencies and scale in home designs that are missing from our current suburban sprawl communities. Realistically, the same private developers will continue developing home designs that work for their bottom line. This catalogue will prove to be nothing more than a fun little experiment that will produce a PDF, likely becoming a sort of nostalgic time capsule. Unless other, bolder initiatives emerge alongside this catalogue, such as typologies of missing middle and a specification list to meet net-zero targets. It will not be utilized by the masses the way the government is hoping or that it was in the 1950s.
One bolder initiative that would be effective at addressing the affordability crisis would be government-owned housing. Canadians forget the days when 3% of our housing stock was owned by the government, and grab hold of a meaningful portion of the market, boldly reclaiming the phrase “Housing is a human right” (not a market commodity)! If we look at our European neighbours, specifically Austria, approximately half, yes 50%, of the housing stock is owned by the government.
The federal government could allow housing forms like Point Access Blocks, known as SEBs or single exit buildings. Conrad Speckert helped change this in the national building code, but those changes will not take effect until 2030. Considerable strides could be made if municipal and provincial building code regulations were also addressed to pilot this typology much sooner.
The City of Edmonton’s Zoning Bylaw Renewal (ZBR) has opened many doors to creating residential density from a land use perspective. This is where a design catalogue could make a considerable impact. Since these new typologies of ‘Missing Middle’ are so new to Edmonton, big and small builders are scrambling to take their favourite housing project they saw on vacation and figure out if they built it in Edmonton! Edmonton also has district plans, which we are trying to sort out, but how the ZBR and the District plans will mesh is still to be determined. Now add a national housing design catalogue on top of that—it is a bit of a mess. Canada has 3,573 municipalities, all with unique zoning, contexts and stages of development. It would be very challenging for one design catalogue to rule them all.
The Canadian housing crisis will continue to cause major issues: housing affordability, housing shortage, contributions to social isolation, municipal overspending, and a climate crisis. The solution requires a radical push towards dense, sustainable housing typologies with adaptability embedded in their design. Many of these factors can be addressed with design so we would look to the catalogue to address these as a foundational aspect. Anything less communicates to Canadians that our current development and housing patterns are sustainable, which they are not. There is an opportunity to demonstrate what Canadian housing typologies can and should be: dense, energy-neutral, and built for climate and social health. To meet affordability needs at all scales, the housing design catalogue’s foundational elements must demonstrate the built forms that can achieve this. It is exciting because if they get it right, then many little plans contribute to a big win. One that we desperately need right now.