After more than a year of planning and consultation, the Government of Canada has released today the final details of its Housing Design Catalogue — dozens of standardized templates to help achieve housing affordability for low-density infill developments.
In preparation for the full rollout of the catalogue, the federal government is providing final renderings, floor plan layouts, and key building design details to provide builders with a head start to consider using these templates and begin planning.
The intention is to reduce design and construction costs and simplify and accelerate housing approvals and construction for builders who choose to use these templates. As well, these templates help estimate construction costs.
“These standardized designs will help smaller homebuilders cut through the complexity, speeding up the time between concept and construction and lowering costs of building,” said Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, the federal minister of housing, infrastructure, and communities, in a statement.
In total, the catalogue features 49 standardized housing designs, including rowhouses, fourplexes, sixplexes and accessory dwellings, such as laneway houses.
These templates are designed for the unique technical requirements and considerations for all 10 provinces and three territories.
The considerations included adaptability and accessibility, energy efficiency, financial feasibility, use of regional construction methods and materials, and compliance with local regulations and building codes, which consider the varying differences in climate and seismic codes across the country.
For British Columbia’s templates, the federal government contracted Vancouver-based Michael Green Architecture.
For all other provinces and territories, Toronto-based LGA Architectural Partners was contracted to develop not only the designs for Ontario but also work with five regional teams in the other provinces.
Seven templates for varying housing typologies were created for each region.
The final architectural design packages — including architectural and engineering drawings and specifications — will be released in Spring 2025.
The federal government first announced its plans to create a Housing Design Catalogue in 2023 and spent $11.6 million on the project.
The creation of the catalogue was likened to the federal government’s housing strategy of about 80 years ago, created in response to the immense demand for housing after the Second World War.
The predecessor to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the existing federal crown corporation that carries out the nation’s affordable housing initiatives, was the Wartime Housing Corporation. CMHC created a series of housing design catalogues that helped spur the rapid construction of many new homes between the 1950s and 1970s.
One of the most common templates was called the “Strawberry Box” single-family house, which gets its name from the similar shape of the containers used to hold the berries. Over one million of these small bungalows were constructed in the post-war period to urgently meet the housing demand from returning soldiers and pent-up economic activity.
Here is a select sample of some of the 49 final designs found in the federal Housing Design Catalogue for Ontario:
The federal government’s contemporary national catalogue project was inspired by the Government of British Columbia’s catalogue project of its own to help achieve the same outcomes of improved speed and affordability for the creation of new housing. B.C.’s provincial government released its own catalogue in Summer 2024.
Some local governments also recently created their own templates.
