The federal government on Friday unveiled a list of 50 pre-approved housing designs as part of its promised catalogue aimed at speeding up construction of homes across the country.
The pre-approved designs are aimed at cutting red tape and reducing approval time for new builds and include designs for rowhouses, fourplexes, sixplexes, and accessory dwelling units across the country.
Specific designs were released for all of Canada’s provinces and territories.
The size of pre-approved designs released on Friday range from additional dwelling units (ADUs) of 50 square feet to three-bedroom sixplexes of 739 square feet, depending on which province or territory the design is approved for.
These standardized designs will help smaller homebuilders cut through the complexity, speeding up the time between concept and construction and lowering costs of building,” Housing Minister Nathaniel Erskine-Smith said in a statement.
While designs for fourplexes were expected in the catalogue, the government also included design for sixplexes.
A fourplex is a single residential building or complex with four distinct housing units.
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A sixplex, correspondingly, will have six housing units.
This comes after last year, when the B.C. government released its own set of free, standardized designs for small-scale, multi-unit dwellings.
The federal government hopes having standardized designs will help with boosting the construction of pre-fabricated homes.
Pre-fabricated housing or prefab construction is a method of building where the bulk of the construction happens off-site, often in a facility like a factory.
Either a fully-constructed modular home or parts of a house are then shipped off to the location, where it is assembled and connected to utilities.
The potential has been a growing topic of conversation as provinces and the federal government eye ways to standardize and accelerate home building.
Having standardized designs means developers can cut through the red tape and start building quickly.
A statement by Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation (CMHC) said this catalogue was “inspired by history.”
“This catalogue draws inspiration from CMHC’s post-war housing design catalogue, developed between the late 1940s and 1970s. The original catalogue provided builders with cost-effective standardized plans to accelerate housing construction,” CMHC said.
When thousands of veterans returned to Canada after the Second World War, Canada was facing a housing crisis.
To cut through the red tape and accelerate the building and approval process, Ottawa released a catalogue of pre-approved home designs that builders could start constructing straight away.
Hundreds of thousands of new homes were built in Canada over a short period of time.
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