The federal government intends to resurrect a post-war effort to ramp up housing construction across Canada — but with a 21st-century twist.
A consultation process will begin next month on developing a catalogue of pre-approved home designs to accelerate the home-building process for developers, Housing Minister Sean Fraser said Tuesday.
It’s a reboot of a federal policy from the post-Second World War era, when the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. developed straightforward blueprints to help speed up the construction of badly needed homes, Fraser said.
“When many thousands of soldiers were returning home to be reunited with their families at once, Canada faced enormous housing crunches,” he said.
“We intend to take these lessons from our history books and bring them into the 21st century.” … [More in the article]
Is this a substantially different idea from what the feds are already doing? They are currently working with various cities to update zoning laws to allow for easier building of higher density in exchange for the feds spending a bunch of money to subsidize building homes in the city.
Providing interest-free lones to developers feels like a similar program with different pros and cons.