Dear Prime Minister Carney, Premiers, and Team Canada housing leaders,
Canada’s housing goal requires closing the gap between the homes we are producing and the homes Canadians can actually afford. CMHC says we are on track to build about 250,000 homes per year, while restoring affordability requires roughly 430,000 to 480,000 homes per year.
That is a large production gap. It is also a demand gap.
Builders need customers who can afford what they build. Lenders need buyers and renters with enough income to carry the payments. Municipalities are already carrying the visible costs of the housing crisis: homelessness, hunger, emergency shelters, encampments, food-bank demand, policing pressure, and overwhelmed local services. They need projects that lower those pressures rather than add more units people still cannot afford.
So the question is bigger than “How many homes can Canada build?” The real question is: “What kind of homes can Canada build at prices ordinary people can actually carry, in places that also help keep people fed?”
Land-based prefabricated villages are the missing supply stream.
Canada already has what this moment requires: land to place villages on, timber and factories to build the parts, tradespeople to assemble them, and people who need homes. The work now is to bring those pieces together into a national housing-production system.
These villages would use four-season yurts, cabin-yurts, small cabins, and modular homes clustered around shared infrastructure on Crown land, farms, or underused rural land. They would create homes people can carry while making room to grow food, produce firewood, and support local care.
This is a Team Canada nation-building project: affordable homes, productive villages, Canadian factories, people housed with dignity, and communities better able to keep people fed.
1. The affordability test
The affordability test should use the incomes people actually have. Statistics Canada’s 2024 figures show a working single adult at about $42,700 after tax, while the broad household median is about $75,500 after tax.
A practical affordability target is about 3 to 5 times after-tax income. Around 3 times income is solidly affordable. Around 4 times income is stretched but still possible for many households. Around 5 times income is the outer edge. Once housing costs move far beyond that, the customer base shrinks, financing becomes harder, and production becomes harder to scale.
At 30% of after-tax income, a working single adult can carry about $1,070 per month for housing. The broad household median can carry about $1,890 per month.
Compared with current national home prices, the gap is stark:
| Housing Type | Delivered / Benchmark Cost | Working Single Adult | Broad Household Median | Projected Monthly Charge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-family home benchmark | $742,400 | 17.4× income | 9.8× income | about $4,040 |
| Townhouse / multiplex benchmark | $603,900 | 14.1× income | 8.0× income | about $3,300 |
| Condo / apartment benchmark | $466,900 | 10.9× income | 6.2× income | about $2,660 |
| Upgraded service-core yurt / cabin-yurt | $345,000 | 8.1× income | 4.6× income | about $1,980 |
| Practical yurt-hamlet home | $235,000 | 5.5× income | 3.1× income | about $1,410 |
| Lean yurt-hamlet home | $160,000 | 3.7× income | 2.1× income | about $990 |
Projected monthly charges assume 90% of capital financed over 30 years at 4%, plus operating, maintenance, insurance, tax, and reserve allowances.
The table shows why the kind of supply matters. Conventional new housing is far beyond the 3 to 5 times income range for a working single adult, and still badly stretched for the broad household median. The lean yurt-hamlet tier is close to what a working single adult can carry. The practical tier fits the broad household median well. Even the upgraded service-core tier is closer to ordinary affordability than today’s standard ownership options.
This is why affordable supply is central to production. Builders can only keep building if enough people can afford what they build. Lenders can only lend safely if the payments make sense. Municipalities can only support growth if new projects lower pressure instead of adding to homelessness, hunger, and service overload.
2. Why today needs a different model
Canada’s postwar housing boom happened during the great oil pulse. Fossil fuels were cheap, abundant, and expanding. That made suburbia possible: detached houses spread across the land, highways connected them, and long supply chains kept them supplied.
That world is passing. World oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s. By around 1985, the world was producing more oil each year than it was discovering. The old suburban model made sense near the peak of that fossil-fuel pulse. It was built for expanding surplus energy, cheap transport, and rising household purchasing power. It makes much less sense in a world of tightening energy, rising infrastructure costs, and strained household budgets.
The same reversal is now showing up in food. For roughly 200 years leading up to 2014, each generation inherited more net energy from fossil fuels: more machinery, more synthetic fertilizer, and more transport capacity. That made food seem like a retail problem, something solved by stores, prices, trucks, and distribution. But the modern food system often uses about 10 fossil-energy calories to deliver one calorie of food. As the net energy of produced fossil fuels declines, fossil-fuel-dependent food costs more to grow, move, and keep cold.
Food is first a biological problem. Soil must be built, crops must grow, fertility must cycle, and harvests must be stored. Low-input systems build fertility over time through perennial crops, compost, small livestock, and careful land stewardship. They require more people on the land, and that is the point. This is how we build strong, healthy communities: people close to food, children close to nature, elders close to care, and households with useful work to share. It means lower and more stable food costs, but it also means a better future together.
That is why Canada needs a housing model that reduces the load. Share the expensive parts. Put homes near productive land. Build smaller warm homes that people can carry. Reconnect housing with food, fuel, care, and repair.
The real nostalgia is pretending Canada can solve this with the two old oil-pulse patterns: cluster people around cities in suburbs with too little productive land per person, or pack them into urban units disconnected from land and food altogether. Since 2014, that bargain has been breaking down. Fuel, fertilizer, building materials, transport, and refrigeration all depend on a tightening energy base. As that energy base tightens, fossil-fuel-dependent homes cost more to build and fossil-fuel-dependent food costs more to grow and move. Landless settlement becomes impossible for a growing number of people to carry. That is why homelessness, shelter demand, and food-bank pressure keep rising.
The path ahead is to combine sustainable village settlement with the best tools Canada has now: compact design, productive land, shared infrastructure, modern building science, and prefabrication.
3. What a land-based hamlet looks like
A land-based hamlet starts with the land. A practical planning guideline is about one hectare, or 2.5 acres, per person. That does not mean each person lives on a separate 2.5-acre lot. It means the hamlet has enough land for homes, food, firewood, water, habitat, and small livelihoods.
A 140-acre site supports about 56 people, close to the ideal hamlet size of 50 to 60 people. That is large enough for cooperation, childcare, elder support, food production, and community life, while still small enough for social cohesion.
The homes cluster on a small building envelope, perhaps about one hectare, so roads, water, power, paths, wash houses, and shared buildings stay short and affordable.
The rest of the land is designed as a whole, then assigned in clear household microlots. A household’s share can include a compact home site, nearby garden beds, orchard or nut-tree rows, and coppice or firewood rows.
Because those microlots are distributed through the landscape, households become interwoven with the land rather than divided into separate lots. That keeps the farm whole, reduces the risk of future severances, and still gives households real use-rights, responsibility, and autonomy.
This follows a village logic with both historical and modern parallels: British open-field strips, China’s household responsibility system, and African customary tenure all show that land can remain whole while households hold clear places to work, improve, and steward.
That structure gives people freedom without creating sprawl. Households can grow food, manage trees, stack firewood, start nursery beds, or put up a small hoop house within agreed rules. Shared systems support daily life without controlling every ordinary decision.
The private homes are simple, warm, and dignified: four-season yurts, cabin-yurts, small cabins, or modular homes.
4. Why the shared buildings matter
The private homes do not need to carry every function of a detached house. That is one of the main reasons the hamlet can be affordable.
A household needs a warm, dignified place for sleep, privacy, family life, and rest. The larger and more expensive functions can be shared through a lodge, wash buildings, workshops, and storage.
In many rural properties, an existing farmhouse could become the first lodge. It could hold the shared kitchen, dining space, laundry, office, pantry, and care space. That avoids starting with an expensive new community centre.
Wash buildings can provide showers, laundry, compost toilets, and accessible sanitation close to the residential cluster. They make it possible to keep yurts and cabins simple while still maintaining dignity, health, and comfort.
Workshops matter too. A wood shop, tool room, repair bench, and equipment shed can support daily maintenance, small businesses, firewood systems, nursery work, and local repairs. Instead of every household needing its own tools and storage, the hamlet can share the expensive equipment and keep it in steady use.
This is how the model reduces cost without reducing life. Private homes stay modest. Shared buildings carry the bulky and expensive functions. The whole settlement becomes more useful than a row of isolated units.
5. Building the national production system
This model becomes powerful when Canada treats it as a national production system, not as a collection of one-off pilot projects.
The goal is to build the whole hamlet kit: small homes, platforms, service cores, wash buildings, lodges, workshops, and food-storage buildings. These parts can be standardized enough for factories, lenders, insurers, and building officials, while still allowing each hamlet to fit its land, climate, and community.
At maturity, Canada could build toward 125 factory-equivalents producing about 250,000 land-based prefab homes per year. At an average of 26 homes and 56 people per hamlet, that would mean roughly 9,600 hamlets and more than 500,000 people housed each year.
| Region | Factory-equivalents | Annual homes | Main contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| British Columbia and Yukon | 15 | 30,000 | mass timber, wet-climate envelopes, mountain and coastal hamlet kits |
| Alberta | 18 | 36,000 | service cores, utility pods, energy systems, logistics, prairie deployment |
| Saskatchewan and Manitoba | 12 | 24,000 | flat-pack panels, platforms, foundations, greenhouse and root-cellar modules |
| Ontario | 40 | 80,000 | final assembly, service cores, wash buildings, cabin-yurts, modular cabins |
| Quebec | 25 | 50,000 | cold-climate envelopes, panelized wood, co-op and land-trust housing packages |
| Atlantic Canada | 10 | 20,000 | rural and coastal hamlet kits, timber components, farm-village packages |
| North and remote stream | 5 | 10,000 | severe-climate kits, repairable service cores, shippable community buildings |
| Total | 125 | 250,000 | a national prefab-village supply chain |
This is the Team Canada opportunity. Western Canada brings energy systems, logistics, wood, and prairie land. Ontario and Quebec bring manufacturing scale, finance, design, and large housing demand. Atlantic Canada brings rural settlement knowledge, timber, and coastal adaptation. The North and remote stream bring the discipline of building repairable, durable, severe-climate systems.
No province has to solve the whole problem alone. Each region can build the parts it is best suited to build, then share those parts through a national housing-production network.
Regional factories would produce the repeatable pieces. Local crews would assemble the hamlets. Municipalities would approve known patterns. Residents would move into homes connected to land, food, work, and care.
That is how land-based prefabricated villages become a nation-building project: Canadian materials, Canadian factories, Canadian trades, Canadian land, and people housed in places that help keep them fed.
6. Making it financeable and legal
The national production system only works if the model is simple for governments, lenders, insurers, builders, and municipalities to say yes to.
That means Canada needs a clear legal and financial pathway for land-based prefabricated villages: approved settlement patterns, approved building types, approved servicing models, and approved ownership or lease structures.
The financing should match the model. The land can be held by a land trust, co-op, municipality, Indigenous housing provider, non-profit, or public agency. Residents can lease or own their dwelling, build equity in improvements, and hold secure long-term use-rights to their home site and productive microlots.
CMHC and Build Canada Homes can help make this practical by supporting three things:
- Pilot financing: loan guarantees, low-cost debt, and patient capital for the first hamlets.
- Standard designs: pre-approved yurts, cabins, wash buildings, lodges, service cores, and utility systems.
- Permanent affordability: land trusts, co-ops, long leases, resale rules, and resident equity pathways.
The goal is to make the first projects safe, legal, insurable, and repeatable. Once the pattern works, Canada can scale it through regional factories, bulk procurement, and local crews.
This is how the model moves from good idea to buildable national programme.
7. What Team Canada can do next
The next step is a national pilot stream for land-based prefabricated villages.
The Prime Minister and federal ministers can direct Build Canada Homes, CMHC, Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and Natural Resources Canada to develop the first pilot pathway.
Premiers and provincial ministers can create the planning and building-code routes needed for clustered low-impact settlement, compost-toilet systems, shared wash buildings, farm-based housing, and long-term land stewardship.
Municipalities and regional partners can identify suitable sites, local builders, food producers, service agencies, and residents who need homes.
A practical first round could focus on three things:
- Choose sites: Crown land, municipal land, farms, or underused rural land with water, access, and local support.
- Approve patterns: one residential cluster, one lodge, wash buildings, microlots, and clear fire, water, sanitation, and access rules.
- Fund pilots: finance the first hamlets, document the costs, improve the designs, and prepare the factory orders.
Common concerns can be answered through design. The homes are clustered, so the land remains whole. Households have clear microlots and by-right productive use, so the model supports autonomy rather than committee control. Shared buildings provide sanitation, storage, work space, food facilities, and care, so small private homes can remain dignified. The land helps keep people fed, so the model provides more than shelter.
Canada can begin with pilots, learn quickly, then scale what works.
The outcome would be homes people can carry, land that remains productive, factories with repeatable orders, municipalities with a model they can approve, and communities better able to house and feed their people.
Land-based prefabricated villages are a practical way to build homes and producers at the same time. They give Canada a supply stream that is affordable, productive, financeable, and scalable.
This is how Team Canada can build homes people can carry, keep land productive, strengthen food security, and help communities house people with dignity.
Sincerely,
Andrii Zvorygin Owen Sound, Ontario
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