Townhomes continue to undergo mid-development stages in Oshawa, Ont., on July 10.Shay Conroy/The Globe and Mail
From a bird’s-eye view, the homes in Victoria’s Mayfair neighbourhood are boring boxes, built from a single design cranked out in great numbers to meet a surge in housing demand across Canada following the Second World War. At street level, however, these small, sturdy bungalows offer a pleasing variation, through the simple trick of customized entrances. Almost eight decades later, the community remains an enclave of tidy family homes.
Those bungalows are undeniably cozy by today’s standards. The blueprints were taken from the government-sponsored Homes for Canadians catalogues, featuring award-winning designs for small houses, typically with under 1,000 square feet of living space. They were built to provide affordable housing; even in today’s overheated real estate market, they remain a rare entry point for home buyers.
The legacy of cookie-cutter homes can be found in other neighbourhoods, too. Victoria’s first housing boom in 1912 fuelled demand for off-the-shelf designs, including the California bungalow with its spacious verandahs and Craftsman details. During that real estate frenzy, the plans were typically purchased from a catalogue, a necessary shortcut in a fast-growing town. Many of those homes remain standing today, listed on the city’s heritage buildings registry.
Catalogue homes can also be found across the country in communities large and small. In Western Canada in the early 1900s, Eaton’s sold mail-order home kits, which included the plans and all the building materials.
Now they are about to make a comeback.
The British Columbia government announced in November its intent to develop standardized designs for small-scale, multiunit homes that will fit on lots currently zoned for single-family dwellings. On Tuesday, federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser followed suit, promising a national housing design catalogue will come in 2024.
It’s not a new idea, but it is a proven solution. Let us praise, in these times of urgent housing need, cookie-cutter design.
Some architects fret about the potential for monotonous and ill-fitting designs, but the alternative is gridlock at City Hall, where planners need to treat each proposed home plan like a unicorn – a creature without precedent.
The catalogue home was last in vogue during an earlier Canadian housing crisis. In 1944, service personnel and others engaged in war work flocked to cities from Halifax to Vancouver. Postwar Canada faced a desperate housing shortage and set about to build 730,000 homes in the span of 10 years. That ambitious plan created construction jobs and addressed the housing shortages.
The postwar bungalows that can still be found across the country came from a catalogue of designs offered at low cost by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and its predecessor. Subsidized loans were part of the package. The homes were not architectural wonders – some are referred to as “strawberry boxes,” and they often come with the descriptor “humble.” But also, importantly as Canada deals with a new housing crisis, “affordable.”
The CMHC catalogues were phased out in the 1970s. The agency now estimates that Canada needs to build 3.5 million more housing units by 2030 to restore affordability. The Federal Housing Advocate argues the needs are greater still.
The solutions will come from both the private and public sector, and will require land, cash and large measures of ingenuity.
British Columbia has led the country with housing reform this year, and its standardized housing-design project is just one small part of the effort. The blueprints will serve as a companion policy to legislation that requires local governments to update zoning bylaws to permit multiunit buildings on lots typically used for single-family detached homes.
What happens next will help determine the success of that province’s legislation: B.C. is currently looking to experts to help draft housing blueprints in the coming months to ensure that the increased density is thoughtful enough to serve generations. (Those designs should not just be energy-efficient, but also resilient to climate change.)
Ottawa’s ambitions may rise even higher. The next federal housing-design catalogue will start with standardized low-rise construction, but the federal government will also explore a potential catalogue to support higher-density construction, such as midrise buildings.
It’s an idea whose time has come, again.