Build Canada Homes Just Got Clearer... And More Concerning
The purpose of Build Canada Homes (BCH) is now clearer: The new Investment Policy Framework released this weekend confirms BCH’s core mission: financing, building, and industrializing social and mixed-income housing on federal lands, with a strong tilt toward modern construction methods. BCH’s design choices skew heavily toward small, low-rise homes: By prioritizing standardized designs from the CMHC Housing Design Catalogue, almost all 1-3 storey buildings with very few family-sized units, BCH risks deepening Canada’s shortage of three-bedroom and larger homes. BCH lacks the tools needed to drive homebuilding in innovation: The Framework acknowledges the need for modern construction methods but offers only procurement (a PULL tool), with no complementary PUSH or GROW supports, pushing new technologies into a familiar “valley of death.” Regulatory barriers remain the elephant in the room: BCH assumes that new technologies can be adopted once they reach scale, overlooking that zoning an
The purpose of Build Canada Homes (BCH) is now clearer: The new Investment Policy Framework released this weekend confirms BCH’s core mission: financing, building, and industrializing social and mixed-income housing on federal lands, with a strong tilt toward modern construction methods. BCH’s design choices skew heavily toward small, low-rise homes: By prioritizing standardized designs from the CMHC Housing Design Catalogue, almost all 1-3 storey buildings with very few family-sized units, BCH risks deepening Canada’s shortage of three-bedroom and larger homes. BCH lacks the tools needed to d
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