Scale, But Smart: Why National Housing Solutions Must Be Regional
In my last post, I argued we need to build homes like cookies—in batches, not one at a time. The shift to efficiency is non-negotiable for solving the affordability crisis. However, that doesn’t mean a single mega-factory churning out identical, one-size-fits-all houses for the entire country.
Scale is about efficiency, but for a country as vast and diverse as ours, that efficiency has to be adapted to place.
The Logistical and Climate Realities
The vision of a single, centralized factory in the middle of the country cannot work. Canada is nearly 5,000 km wide, and the math for long-haul shipping quickly annihilates any cost savings achieved in the factory.
The Logistics Reality
Freight isn’t cheap, dollar-wise or environmentally; the economics of moving modular units are prohibitive over long distances:
High Cost per Kilometer: Moving a modular unit costs ~$10-$15 per kilometer per load. A typical home (roughly 1,500-2000 sq ft) often requires 2–3 separate loads.
Cost Elimination: At a distance of just 1,000 kilometers, you’re looking at a shipping bill of $20,000-$45,000 per home in freight alone. This immediately wipes out a significant portion of the construction savings intended to bring the final price tag down.
The Regional Reality
Furthermore, building codes and climate needs are not uniform. A home built for Vancouver's code cannot survive in Yellowknife's climate, proving that centralized standardization is a non-starter for resilience and quality:
Foundation and Frost: Frost depth mandates vary dramatically: meters in southern Ontario versus meters in northern Alberta.
Energy Demand: Heating demand can spike from 92 GJ/year in moderate regions to 120+ GJ/year in colder provinces.
Localized Risks: Every region has specific codes: specialized soil basements in Manitoba, hurricane bracing in the Maritimes, high-level fire resilience in B.C.
That's why building smarter doesn’t mean "one size fits all." It means decentralized specialization.
The Model That Works: Distributed Manufacturing
The key to achieving mass-scale efficiency without sacrificing regional integrity is to adopt distributed manufacturing—creating a network of regional production hubs.
The optimal model consists of regional facilities serving a limited kilometer radius (~300-500 km). This strategy immediately neutralizes the high cost of long-distance freight while allowing for climate and code specialization.
Benefits of the Regional Hub Model:
Cost Efficiency (Local Bulk): Each hub buys materials in regional bulk, keeping crews on-site for continuous work flow and eliminating expensive downtime.
Logistics Optimization: Keeping the shipping distance low ensures that the logistics costs do not erase the factory savings. By staying within a 500km radius, freight costs remain manageable.
Local Adaptation: Each plant standardizes what can be standardized (internal systems, assembly lines) while still adapting the structural elements and materials to local codes, climates, and market demands.
This approach means that instead of 30 homes trickling out one by one, we build them together, regionally, at the sustainable price point the local market actually needs.
What Canada Can Learn from Global Scale
Other high-cost, advanced economies have already shown this regional model is successful and scalable:
Sweden: Builds over 80% of its detached homes with prefabrication, relying on regional factories that serve nearby cities and towns, ensuring both efficiency and local employment.
Japan: Uses a dense network of modular plants, each tailoring homes for high earthquake resilience while keeping costs low and timelines fast.
The UK: Is rapidly scaling up regional modular hubs to meet housing demand, aiming to deliver over 100,000 homes annually through this method.
Canada can and must do the same. We have a housing supply problem not because it’s impossible, but because we are failing to adopt proven, industrialized building methods at the pace this crisis demands.
The Choice is Ours
The choice is right in front of us:
Keep building one house at a time, priced at , with "coming soon" signs that sit for years...
Or build like others already are—fast, smart, at scale, and close to home.
It’s time to adapt. It’s time to batch-build our future. Scale is the key—and local adaptation is how we unlock it.
Continue the Conversation
If your city or town were building a modular housing hub, what single regional code (like extreme cold protection or specific foundation requirements) would be the most important priority?
Share your thoughts in the comments. Speak soon!
