Are housing catalogues the solution?

As Canada wrestles with its deepening housing crisis, the federal government has once again reached for catalogue housing as its silver bullet solution. The new Federal Housing Catalogue, unveiled this spring, marks a shift towards infill growth — but does it truly address the complex realities of today’s development landscape?

Anyone who’s spent time in the trenches of real development knows the harsh truth: beautiful architectural drawings don’t build homes. Developers build homes — and only when the numbers work. While this catalogue is an important step forward for Canada, it will be interesting to see what happens once developers sharpen their pencils, run proformas and confront the economic realities of construction today.

A short history of Canada’s housing catalogues

Housing catalogues are nothing new — in fact, they’ve been a cornerstone of Canadian neighbourhood development for over a century. Historically, they’ve offered a fast and affordable way of creating housing for a variety of income groups.

housing catalogue federal pre-approved plan

From Canada’s Federal Housing Catalogue, 1947.

From the early Aladdin housing catalogue (1905-1952) to the Sears catalogue (1908-1950) and Eaton mail-order houses (1910-1932), these solutions provided accessible housing options when land was relatively inexpensive, making homeownership affordable and possible for a range of Canadians. In the Federal Housing Catalogue’s heyday between 1947 to 1960, approximately one million Victory Homes were built — rendering housing catalogues a great success.

In the beginning of the 20th century, Canadian cities grew at the fringe in the form of subdivisions, but also as homes on small, unserviced lots. Often, it was here where blue-collar workers would build simple housing structures to secure homeownership.

Catalogue houses produced a high-quality standard compared to shack districts and could often be built by any small group of handy people. At the time, building permits, building codes and zoning were slowly developing, but enforcement was not often prioritized by municipalities. Most homes were built on properties based on the discretion of what seemed reasonable to the builder.

Timeline of housing catalogues in Canada. Courtesy BuildingIN

Housing catalogues: Only one piece of the puzzle

Today’s housing landscape bears little resemblance to that era. Land costs have skyrocketed since municipalities began demanding sewer service for new subdivisions, dramatically pricing out the lowest income groups. Meanwhile, labour is more expensive, and we’ve developed a labyrinth of zoning rules and building codes that further complicate and increase the cost of development.

Those once-celebrated catalogue homes — symbols of postwar prosperity — have ironically contributed to the low-density, car-dependent neighbourhoods that now challenge sustainable urban development. These residential neighbourhood blueprints have set the bar low for density, making it difficult to support neighbourhood shops, transit and sorely needed infrastructure upgrades.

What Canada’s new Federal Housing Catalogue gets right

The new Federal Housing Catalogue offers 50 designs across seven regional areas, ranging from bachelor units to four-bedroom family homes. Unlike its predecessors, it focuses exclusively on multi-unit buildings and accessory dwelling units intended for urban infill rather than single-family homes for new subdivisions — a promising shift toward gentle density and fiscal-sustainability.

The Federal Housing Catalogue’s designs include options for stacked townhomes.

Additionally, the new catalogue would allow developers to build quickly and bypass most approvals, if the municipality accepts the designs “as-of-right.”

What the catalogue is missing

While this catalogue represents a significant step forward for the Canadian housing market, it fails to address several key issues. These gaps weaken the case for a repeatable business model that can produce the scale of housing development opportunities Canada requires to solve the housing crisis.

Here are a few key shortcomings:

No basement suites: The catalogue designs lack basement suites, which have become essential to making infill development financially viable for developers in many provinces.
As-of-right or nothing: For municipalities that don’t permit the designs as-of-right (or haven’t yet), zoning policies often prevent multi-unit buildings in most low-rise residential neighbourhoods. The detail of zoning bylaws would likely not permit the catalogue designs and without corresponding regulatory reform these catalogue designs remain theoretical exercises.
Inflexibility: The catalogue approach assumes a one-size-fits-all solution, but effective infill development requires adaptation to local conditions: existing trees, heating options, parking challenges and underground services all demand flexibility. Even if municipal governments implemented as-of-right permissions, these would only apply to the exact catalogue designs, preventing reasonable (and oftentimes unavoidable) modifications.

And sadly, even thoughtfully designed local adaptations that maintain the spirit of the catalogue wouldn’t be permitted, despite being great fits for the neighbourhood.

Municipal infrastructure challenges: Many neighbourhoods targeted for densification have aging infrastructure in need of upgrades to support their growing population — everything from parks to pipes to transit. Municipalities need an investment strategy paired with their plan for intensification.

Zoning for reality

For the Federal Housing Catalogue to deliver meaningful results, it must be accompanied by comprehensive reform of municipal regulations: zoning bylaws, site plan requirements, parking minimums, building code interpretations, development fee structures, stormwater management standards, sewer capacity assessments and fireflow requirements (i.e. water available to fight a fire). Without these reforms, even the most brilliant designs remain trapped on paper.

This is where BuildingIN can help.

Our program partners with municipalities to strategically update their regulatory frameworks, creating regulatory-supportive conditions for low-rise, multi-unit infill in carefully targeted neighbourhoods. The results are transformative: once these barriers fall, industry adoption accelerates dramatically.

This balanced approach transforms housing catalogues from rigid architectural templates that are siloed from regulatory, financial and infrastructure contexts into living documents that can adapt to the complex realities of each community.

While the Federal Housing Catalogue represents a well-intentioned step toward addressing Canada’s housing crisis, its effectiveness is severely limited by regulatory barriers, design inflexibility and disconnection from municipal infrastructure planning.

Real progress will require aligning building designs with comprehensive regulatory reform, flexible implementation strategies and infrastructure investment. Until we address these systemic issues, even the most thoughtfully designed housing catalogue will struggle to deliver the homes Canadians desperately need.