Louis Shalako: On Wartime Housing. Louis Shalako.

Sunday, June 1, 2025

On Wartime Housing. Louis Shalako.

730 square feet.

Louis Shalako

The new federal government of Canada is promoting home-building, and one aspect of the plan is pre-approved home designs.

There have been references to ‘war-time’ housing, which was built in large numbers and all across this country after WW II. Large numbers of service men and women were coming home from Europe and other theatres, and they needed two things. They needed housing, and they needed employment.

A large housing program served both needs, bearing in mind circumstances are different in the modern context. We have both a housing shortage, and a labour shortage. Funny thing is, there's no real shortage of money. Just look at the homes people are buying now, more importantly, look at the mega-homes that are being built.

By eliminating the basement, and putting the furnace, hot water tank, laundry tubs on the ground floor, you simply bump out the side of the kitchen and add a few more squares. You also save a big chunk of up-front money.

Young people could, in fact, afford a small starter home. The design, #50-13, seen above, stands at 730 sq. feet. My two-bedroom apartment is roughly equivalent. With pre-fabrication, the components relatively small, (for highway trucking), the longest elevation at 30', you could pump these out like so many hot rolls. You could sell these at $299,000.00, with the feds splitting the 10 % down payment, and a mortgage amortized over 25 years, at some rational rate. I’ll go three and a half percent compounded monthly.

All the interest has to do is to cover the costs of the program. Developers make their money by actually building the homes in a speedy and efficient manner. The faster you can build them, the better, and if you build it, they will come.

We have to start the conversation somewhere, after all.

All prospective owners would be subject to means testing. Essentially, are you poor enough to both need the program, but also, can you pay your own way insofar as you must—a very specific demographic group, largely consisting of what we might call ‘mature renters’, a group who might like to get out from under the stern eye of the landlord and maybe build a little wealth of their own, for, essentially, the exact same money.

The basic idea is that people could buy a house, on their own land, for $1,000.00 a month, of course on top of that would be municipal taxes, electricity, heat, water, and insurance and maintenance costs. The entire kit fits on a flatbed or inside a standard semi-trailer.

The kit might include all structural elements, and basic amenities like the furnace, hot water tank, bathtub, shower, fridge and stove, pipe for plumbing and rolls of wire and boxes of electrical components, bundles of shingles, stacks of drywall board, all of it packed into one or two long trailers. You can use the stock colours or upgrade at your own expense, however these are in no way ‘custom builds’. These buildings do not require marble floors and bronze countertops, and zirconium-encrusted platinum toilets a la the bourgeoisie.

We're building homes, not status symbols, or stroking the egos of the unrepentant hedonist.

Those people already have money, they already have their McMansions, if they have over-leveraged their credit portfolio, that is their problem and they can suffer the consequences of their own greed and ignorance, their lack of foresight. For all I care, let them rot or let them sell the his and hers Harleys to make next month's payment...but I digress.

Assuming services are on site to hook up to, the basic assembly is rather quick, finishing takes longer, and in some narratives, in the old 1 ½ story housing, the upstairs bedrooms might not have been finished, the basement, almost certainly not. Garages, privacy fences, decks and hot tubs can come later.

Actual plan from the era.

At any time, after the first five years, you could buy out the balance and own it free and clear. This allows for people to resell at a profit and pay off their debt to the Crown and the taxpayers. The initial covenant does not extend to the second buyer. They will pay something a little closer to a going rate.

After five years, the first owner has built up some minimal equity, been ‘forgiven’ the federal contribution to the down payment, and with a relatively stable housing market, the ‘going rate’ for a property of this nature probably has increased a nominal ten percent in value. Simply put, your new home value is at least, (and probably more than) $330,000.00. With payments, offset by interest, over five years, you probably have thirty grand, perhaps a little more of your own equity. If you sold right now, you have paid all monthly costs, but at least you get some if not all of your money back in terms of that $60,000.00 difference in home value.

(Thirty grand of your own and the increase in value combined. - ed.)

You ain’t going to get that in the rental market, are you—and now, perhaps, with a little in savings, with your personal circumstances now different, you might even go looking for something a little more up-market.

Okay, so the government and the taxpayers are not too interested in funding large-scale, tract housing with a bunch of ‘tiny homes’, eight by ten and with a hot-plate beside the door and a tiny chemical toilet in a box under the bed.

We are talking real homes, on perhaps a fairly narrow frontage, in order to maximize the impact of municipal services, including water, sewer, utilities like gas and power. I would suggest forty-five feet with no more than eighty or one hundred feet of depth. This allows for a one-car garage to be built at a later date, and a substantial yard with garden, play areas, etc. It’s a green space.

(The secondary or pass-on covenant, which is passed on to the next buyer, deals with issues like second dwellings, over-sized garages and other obnoxious uses. Human nature being what it is, this will have to be backed up by municipal zoning and ‘covenant’ enforcement bylaws. The financials are free market terms at this point. We would also like to see pure speculators kept out or penalized on subsequent sales. Call it 'capital gains' or something like that. Under the terms of this covenant, the owner must live in the dwelling. Buying one and then renting or leasing it out would be strictly prohibited.)

It is private property after five years. It is yours, free and clear, admittedly with a mortgage on it. In that sense, the right to private property and capitalistic concerns are acknowledged.

I don’t like concrete pads sitting right at grade level. I prefer a two-foot crawl space, this would be well insulated, but it also gives heating ducts and plumbing somewhere to go. It is not a living space and should not be treated as such.

What you want is a proper foundation below the frost line, a wooden deck with floor joists and the like. Construction is ‘stick-built’, but major components are done in a factory. With a floor plan of 30’ x 24’, that floor/deck is essentially three ‘panels’ of rectangular shape, each of which can fit on a semi-trailer. They’re all framed up, all you have to do is to drop them on the foundations and fasten them together. A note here. Some of the original designs were literally sitting on concrete blocks; which may, or may not have been set on footings below the frost line. However, in terms of the front wall or elevation, in terms of the factory-built model, the wall is all framed up, sheathed, insulated, electrical roughed in with coils of sufficient length sort of taped securely. Once the four walls are standing, trusses in place, plywood on the roof, windows and doors in, the wire can be pulled out, routed through the ceiling space to an electrical box in the utility area of the kitchen. Essentially, heat and plumbing are down and under, electrical goes up and over and back down, in my concept. A few bags of insulation for the ceilings, and voila! And it is time to move onto trimming and finishing out, perhaps carpet on plywood for the first few years, but it is a snug and viable home for those who qualify.

There is a new apartment building in town, and there are laundry facilities in each apartment. It’s a compact installation—each unit also has a separate meter for water and electricity, very much a trend in new apartment construction in this country. The rent is one thing, the monthly costs are another. In that sense, it is similar, and yet you own the end result.

To try and improve this design is to make it bigger, which seems fair enough. There would have to be a series of designs, all of them under $500,000.00, including a building lot and all service hookups. When you see the new builds in town here in Sarnia, Ontario, semi-detached and starting at $569,000.00, with a garage, a basement, a second floor, it shows what is possible using some imagination.

Another quick note, virtually none of these buildings are wheelchair or mobility accessible, which would require a single-floor design, with large doorways, ramps for access and much larger bathrooms, specially-designed kitchens for example.