Front Burner - The time Canada built a million cheap homes

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

Housing Minister Sean Fraser says he’s bringing back a housing idea from the Second World War that helped build over a million homes. Could catalogues of pre-approved blueprints create more homes, faster? What other lessons should we be taking from Canada’s post-war housing effort? How has mass construction of ready-made designs impacted housing in other countries? Carolyn Whitzman is a housing policy consultant and expert advisor to the Housing Assessment Resource Tools project For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. We are living in a housing crisis, but it's not the first time Canada's been here. At a press conference last week, Housing Minister Sean Fraser pulled out a catalogue of blueprints dating back to 1954. On the pages were tight floor plans and renderings of idyllic mid-century box homes. This particular issue was on bungalows and split-level houses,

and for a fee of $10, you could actually have access to designs that could be built quickly. These were pre-approved housing plans, developed starting at the end of the Second World War by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which was then called Wartime Housing Limited. Just like today, Canada was in need of more homes. A lot more homes. And after these catalogs came out, those homes sprung up by the hundreds of thousands. That's why last week, Fraser announced plans for a new catalog of pre-approved homes, with some tweaks for the 21st century.

I will be looking for pre-approved designs for multiplexes, for mid-rise buildings, for student housing, for seniors' residences, and other small... The CMHC says we need to build 3.5 million units by 2030 to make housing affordable. So, can a wartime housing catalog really help ease this current crisis? Carolyn Weitzman is a housing policy consultant and expert advisor to the Can a wartime housing catalog really help ease this current crisis? Carolyn Weitzman is a housing policy consultant and expert advisor to the Housing Assessment Resource Tools Project that's based out of UBC, and she's going to talk about Canada's post-war housing effort and what we might learn from it. Hey, Carolyn, thanks for coming on FrontBurner.

It's a pleasure, Damon. Okay, so during the announcement last week, Sean Frazier acknowledged that he was pulling this catalog idea from another major housing crisis from our past, and that's the one that was near the end of the Second World War. And back then, like now, Canada suddenly needed a whole bunch of new homes. So maybe you can start by telling me what drove that housing crisis. Sure. In the early 20th century, Canada wasn't yet urbanized. The majority of people were still living outside of towns and cities.

But during World War II, there was a tremendous need for industrial workers. Households flowed to cities. And as the plants and factories grow, so the cities of industrial Canada swell with the influx of skilled workers. Wherever industry centers, but especially in the St. Lawrence Great Lakes Basin, the cities feel the flood tide of a new migration

from western farm and eastern village as fresh workers throng to wartime factories. And in many cases, working age men were off to war. And so there were a lot of women in industries. And the federal government at the time had a commission about post-war reconstruction. And it came up with about 600,000 homes that would need to be built in the next decade. And it recommended a third be public housing, a third be rental. But at that point, the federal government had rent control. So it was like regulated rental increases and inexpensively after the war.

Architects and draftsmen went ahead with the job of a broader kind of hermimentarian of policies, right? Absolutely. So there was already rent control, as I mentioned, throughout the 1940s. There was government acquisition of land because land's one of the biggest costs behind housing. There was a whole training up of a new generation of planners and housing experts. In fact, Canada's first housing schools were established after the Second World War. And the aim was to create housing that was not going to be too expensive for first-time homebuyers, because the idea was that one of the terms

was homes for heroes, that there'd be returning servicemen, they'd be marrying, they'd be having children, and they would need small, affordable homes. Typical of those who have found new homes here is machine shop inspector Robert Ballantyne. For his growing family, a congested two-room downtown apartment meant lack of air, sleep, and exercise. One of 1,100 applicants for the first 300 houses, he now has an attractive wartime home close to where he works.

Okay, so tell me about these small affordable homes, like the designs of these pre-approved homes specifically, what do they look like? Yeah, I mean, Canada's had a little bit of a housing growth spurt in terms of the size of homes, not necessarily the number of homes. So these were modest bungalows, one story, one and a half stories that had two, three bedrooms, usually a finished basement. My husband grew up in one of them. They had four kids and two kids shared a bedroom. One had a bedroom in the basement, which was later finished. So you could easily accommodate a household of six, as long as a couple of them were sharing bedrooms. And these were the houses they

refer to as strawberry box houses, right? Strawberry box houses, because the design was said to resemble the boxes that strawberries were sold in. There were about 30,000 homes that were built for rent. But then towards the end of the 1940s, the federal government decided that it wanted to shift into private provision of the same kinds of homes that kept those designs in the 1950s. So, you know, houses in the 40s and 1950s, and there were almost one and a half million homes built along this scheme from the CMHC. And so mortgages were guaranteed, land was acquired, the municipal governments were expected to approve these subdivisions. I mean, in many ways, it worked very efficiently. I suppose one of the issues was that it was reliant on everyone having a car and not needing two cars because there was assumed to be a male head of household and the woman and the children could manage without a car. So can you help me understand, if I were looking for one of these houses back then, when they're kind of rolling out, so to speak, how affordable would they have been? What would they cost? Yeah, in those days, affordable was considered about 20% of a household's income. And that was generally one person working full time. So yeah, the notion was one day's work for a week's accommodation.

So, when I talk about homes being 5,000, 6,000, that would have been not that much more than two, two and a half times the annual income of a person in not even middle income, but what we'd call moderate income. So, someone with a starting salary, because it was very much intended to be first homebuyers buying this. Prefabrication has considerably reduced the cost of housing, and by priority purchase and mass buying, wartime housing is able still further to reduce the cost. So yeah, I mean, it was incredibly inexpensive in relation to income,

and that's really the only way that you should measure house costs in relation to household income. Now it's about nine times across Canada. So in other words, in relation to average income, the average price of these places was a third, less than a third of what they'd be today. Wow. I'm having historical envy, I guess. I don't know what the term is, but a big difference. So can you give me a sense of how quickly we were able to build these pre-approved design houses? There are examples of homes being built in as little as 36 hours. And that's something that the minister mentioned. A wartime house can be erected from floor to chimney in less than 36 hours. Each crew works at a single job only and moves on from house to house

with all the precision of assembly line technique. Very similar things were going on in apartment buildings in both Singapore and Sweden, to give two examples, in the 1960s, where you have the people who loan money, the finance providers, are comfortable with this being a good idea. And then the third aspect of it is factory building of components. So the 36-hour – sorry, I'm still stuck a little on the notion of a 36-hour build. I know. It's hard to believe what we've forgotten. We like to believe that things get better over time, but we've actually lost a lot of the sort of sense memory of what works. And so these are like – I used to live in a neighborhood in Toronto where we would see these little – I mean, I rented one for a while, these little victory homes. And, I mean, they're solid.

This was still a good place. So that 36 hours is not correlated with with shoddiness, is it? No. I mean, quite the opposite. If you have factory-built components and 42% of housing in Sweden is still mostly factory-built, you can have a pretty high level of quality control. level of quality control. It's also handy for northern climates where the construction season might be relatively short because you can assemble the components beforehand and then in some cases just lift them into place, in other cases sort of bolt them into place in a relatively short period of time. In Vancouver, British Columbia, wartime speed is applied to

constructing a complete bungalow in only eight hours. Solidly built, the home is guaranteed to last for 30 years. In general, I think people would prefer to work in factories than working on site in snow, in rain, in punishing heat, etc. So moving a lot of the construction from sort of bespoke on-site into a factory setting is a great way to address some of the labor shortages we've seen in recent years. So you mentioned Sweden. You know, Canada is not the only place that has done this big build sweep, you know, post-World War II. So maybe you can take me into what that was like in Sweden during the 60s and 70s. Sure. I mean, in 1965, and again, in response to very rapid urbanization, people moving into cities, the Swedish government announced a really ambitious goal, a million home program over the next decade. And remarkably, it achieved a million homes by 1974, with the program having started in 1965. The keys were a high level of

national government leadership, a lot of agreements with municipalities, not just big cities, but a lot of the small towns as well, that was involved in an understanding of who was in housing need, what population projections were, etc. I guess the only flaw of the Million Homes Program, and they overbuilt slightly, and actually Canada was in the same situation in the early 1970s. We were literally building, completing more homes in 1972 than we did in 2020, 2021, or 2022. I wasn't aware of this until I started looking into this, but that big housing boom in Sweden too was also responsible for a certain famous do-it-yourself furniture maker. Yes. IKEA was a huge beneficiary from the Million Home Program. There were a lot of studies done on, because it was such an ambitious housing program, what would be an efficient living room, what would be an efficient kitchen. the size that were developed as part of this modular housing initiative. And IKEA said,

oh, we can create kitchen cabinets, et cetera, that fit those requirements. We can create bookcases and sofas for living rooms and bedrooms that fit those requirements. And so IKEA became a cheap way to get furniture for this inexpensive new housing. So both Ikea and also these prefab designs, I suppose, it's hard to think about those things without thinking of the song Little Boxes, right? Little boxes made of ticky tacky little boxes on the hillside. So the post-war housing boom, you know, full of ticky-taki houses or cookie-cutter homes, whatever you want to call them. There's a lot of criticism about these being impersonal and conformist. But that's true whether it's private sector or public sector-led.

And it's also true today where you have great areas of sprawl where I imagine it would be very hard to find your front door after a good night out, you know, even assuming that you could walk there, of course, which you can't. There's always criticisms, no matter what the design is, that it's somewhat monotonous. I mean, that's what happens when you have, well, let's put it this way. If you expected each car, if you expected each desk to be designed individually, go through individual approvals, be treated like a unicorn every time it rocked up, then you might have more diversity of cars and more diversity of desks. But they would cost about 100 times more than they do. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. Fifty percent. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Okay, so let's come back to the present then. So last week, Minister Fraser said that they're starting to consult on these pre-approved catalogs next month with the hopes of getting them out towards the end of next year. But he also said that this time there'd be more variety, like more types of homes. I will be looking for pre-approved designs for multiplexes, for mid-rise buildings, for student housing, for seniors residences, and other small to medium scale residential properties. This will include

garden suites and laneway homes and different kinds of houses that will solve the challenges that our communities are facing today. So maybe you can help me understand why we need different types of units if this is going to help with our current housing crisis. It's hard to know where to begin, Damon. So, in 1991, as the federal government got out of housing policy, students weren't included in the way that we measure core housing need. And so, we have over three decades of student housing not being part of anyone's responsibility with somewhat predictable effects of, yeah, there's still tertiary students. Some of them live at home. Some of them don't want to live at home. Some of them can't live at home for various reasons. There is a huge need for long-term care homes and assisted living as the population ages. That too has been neglected

by provinces. And then there's also the issue of zoning getting more and more restrictive, particularly in the early 1970s, which means that it was so much easier to knock down an existing single-family home and replace it with another single-family home instead of a duplex, a triplex, or a small apartment building. So my understanding is that those designs will cover small apartment buildings that can be built on a single or double lot. They'll include models for student housing, which might have more stories, be a little bit larger. And my hope is that it will include design for seniors living. So I can see the need for, you know, moving beyond, you know, single family dwelling of the type we're talking about after the Second World War.

But why is it so important to Sean Fraser to have these pre-approved blueprint ideas? Why is that part of the solution? Well, yeah, I mean, I've heard a little bit of a criticism of the pre-approved designs arguing that design is maybe 1% of the total cost. But the thing is that by focusing in on pre-approved designs, you're also addressing some of the zoning and building code barriers to building more housing near public transit and jobs and services. So really, the pre-approved designs become a way to address many aspects of the complex housing system.

Why is it so hard for some kinds of housing, for instance, shared housing, to get finance? Why is it so hard to build supportive housing everywhere that it's needed? So to me, it's sort of shorthand for a industrialized, as Sean Fraser has said, wartime approach and one that we desperately need. I've recently completed some research that indicates that we need about 3 million homes that are available at less than $1,000 a month rent. That's still a really hard price point. In fact, almost impossible, I'd argue, without some really serious changes to the way that we build housing. So, pre-approved housing is contingent on these plans, of course, these blueprints. But in the last post-war housing boom cycle, it was also

accompanied by other aggressive housing policies, right? So, if Fraser is right and they're able to deliver a catalog of these various blueprints, what other policies need to accompany that to make it work? Well, of course, it won't be just design. It won't be just construction and it won't be just the private sector because in general, the private sector has never been interested slash capable of meeting the needs of low-income people. So that means that we need a new era of non-market housing, public housing that's owned by a level of government, usually municipal, cooperative housing, cooperatively held by the people who live there, and community housing, including supportive housing,

where the housing's owned by a non-profit organization. I can't think of a country in the world that has seen improvements in terms of homelessness or improvements in terms of the cost of housing or the security of housing, for that matter, without a healthy non-market sector. And by a healthy non-market sector, I mean 20%. Carolyn, thanks so much. It's been really interesting talking to you. Thank you, Damon. All right, that's it for today. I'm Damon Fairless.

My burner will be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.