"Centre for Housing Innovation" looks to get new builds up, and keep costs down

Northern Ontario's newest housing research hub is looking to explore how to get the number of new builds up, while keeping prices and environmental impact down. Laurentian University's Centre for Housing Innovation was approved by the school's senate on June 17.

The new centre will bring together students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields and social science backgrounds with building industry leaders to explore ways to address northern Ontario's housing crisis. 

Some of the key issues the centre will look at are the impacts of a shortened construction season and how it affects the costs of new builds, a shortage of skilled trades workers and supply chain availability, says Steven Beites, the Centre for Housing Innovation's director. 

"We're in the north and we have different climatic conditions," Beites said. "We are building homes in ways that might make sense in the south, but could be problematic in terms of the kinds of temperature swings."

Over the past few years, northern Ontario has faced a shortage of housing supply across the region, with a 2021 report by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation showing substantially lower residential development than in southern Ontario. The report also stated costs for new builds in smaller communities are especially high.

"Working in those communities, you don't get to walk down to a hardware store down the street to pick up stuff," said Harold Lindstrom, the manager for the Construction Association of Thunder Bay, adding the transportation of materials requires a lot of planning by the builders. "Everything has a cost associated with it."

As of March, realtors in northern Ontario were still raising concerns over a housing crisis in the region, seeing little relief on the horizon as housing prices continued to rise while new housing developments remained low.

New builds for First Nations

For First Nations in northern Ontario, a key part of the housing crisis they face stems from a lack of adequate housing, as decades old modular housing falls into disrepair. Back in 2019, three separate First Nations in the region declared states of emergency due to a lack of housing supply in their territories.

"My family's all from Fort William First Nation, and so we grew up in the shoebox reserve houses," said Kateri Banning, who owns MarKat Construction in Thunder Bay. "Most of the houses that are on the reserves right now in our northern communities are 20 years beyond when the government first recommended that they should be replaced."

MarKat works with First Nations across northern Ontario, including remote, fly-in communities, to build new housing while also taking care of other infrastructure needs such as water piping and road maintenance.

Banning explains that for remote communities in the region, the topography of the area can play a significant factor in the way houses are built, including differences in the appropriate types of foundations for each First Nation. The climate of a given area can also present challenges pertaining to the types of materials that can be used to sustain long winter months in the region.

The Centre for Housing Innovation will also look at how to address affordability of housing within these communities as it relates to prefabricated housing. Beites says for fly-in First Nations, the centre will look at the types of materials that can be cultivated in the surrounding area so prefabricated housing can be built in the communities, rather than being shipped from southern Ontario.

Improving infrastructure across the board

A lack of supply hubs in northern Ontario also contributes to higher costs of construction. Lindstrom says many of the materials for housing come from southern Ontario, as well as other provinces and the United States, with the transportation for these products only growing in recent years.

For remote and rural communities, transportation times can also greatly increase the amount of time it takes to complete new builds. 

"You place an order and it might take two weeks, it might take two months before it can actually come up to you," Banning said. 

Beites says research is already underway looking into where products, particularly wood products, are sourced from to locate efficiences in supply chains. "In doing so, can we start to develop strategies by which we're creating these local decentralized hubs where material can be used that is coming from the region where homes are being built?"

Local supply hubs are an idea that MarKat has been exploring as well, including building lumberyards and other material locations within remote communities to help alleviate the burdens of long transportation times.

The research centre will also look at how to incorporate sustainability into new builds by looking at more natural materials such as cellulose or wood fiberboard, Beites says.

Early, but hopeful, days

Despite still being in its early stages, members of northern Ontario's construction industry see value within Laurentian's new research hub. Lindstrom says he is hopeful the new research hub can help to fine tune building strategies already employed in northern Ontario, including looking at new methods for improving infrastructure for water supply, sewage handling and fiber optics, particularly for areas outside of urban centres.

Banning hopes the new centre will also work to address a lack of qualified skill labourers, increasing training centres for tradespeople in the region. She says a lack of qualified labourers has led to the inadequate construction of housing in Indigenous communities in northern Ontario in particular.

To address these concerns, Beites hopes the centre will be able to engage communities across the north, in order find solutions specific to the region.

"The north is a very different climate than in the south, and it requires different policies, not only climate, but from an economic, social, political, cultural perspective. So it requires, you know, strategies and solutions that are really specific to the north."