Can homes built in a factory fill Canada’s housing gap?

Apr 21

builder working inside a manufactured home in Hamilton Ontario — Renee Wetselaar, Executive Director of St. Matthew’s House, tours the 412 Barton project in Hamilton, Ont., on March 28, 2025. 412 Barton is an affordable modular housing project for Black and Indigenous seniors facing homelessness. (Photo by Nick Iwanyshyn for Canada’s National Observer)

By Hanna Hett

The 15 affordable apartments Renée Wetselaar dreamed of more than five years ago are nearly complete – and send a “mighty message” in Canada’s housing crisis.

Unlike most other housing projects, the walls, floors and roof were not built on-site at 412 Barton Street in Hamilton, Ont. Instead, they were made in a Quebec factory, flat-packed and shipped to the city’s east end for assembly into a narrow, six-storey building known as 412 Barton.

“Even though it is a small build, it has a mighty message,” Wetselaar, executive director of the nonprofit St. Matthew’s House, told Canada’s National Observer.

Canada needs to build millions of affordable homes quickly to address its worst housing crisis since the end of the Second World War. Prefabricated housing is in the spotlight as a faster, cheaper and more sustainable way to deliver those homes.

“The way we build homes needs to change,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said last month in announcing a Liberal housing plan to ramp up the prefab and modular industry and double new construction to nearly 500,000 homes a year.

The number of new homes built annually in Canada is roughly the same as the 1970s — about 245,000 housing starts in 2023 — while annual population growth has tripled in recent years, the Fraser Institute said on Tuesday in a new study on the housing crisis.

The Liberal plan provides $25 billion in financing and other measures to expand an industry that can deliver homes in half the time, at up to 20 per cent lower cost and less pollution than traditional building methods, Carney said.

Housing is a key issue in the April 28 federal vote and Liberals are proposing the most direct government involvement in the sector in decades. The NDP aims to release federal lands for affordable housing, while Conservatives are offering incentives and expedited project approvals.

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