BC releases standard multiplex designs
A mix-and-match approach
B. C. Standardized Housing Designs Catalogue, September 2024.
Last week the BC government released a catalog of free standardized designs for multiplexes. They’re compliant with the BC Building Code.
A mix-and-match design approach
Within each design, the individual homes are side by side, rather than stacked as in Montreal plexes: “Units that are arranged side-by-side instead of stacked on top of each other are simpler to build from a building code perspective.”
The catalog takes a mix-and-match approach, providing flexibility and customization, while still allowing the use of standard components to lower costs. The lead design team appears to be Leckie Studio.
You can decide which floor plans to use, and what type of roof to use (depending on local climate). Each floor is a bit more than 500 square feet. Typically the bedrooms are upstairs, while the kitchen and living room are downstairs.
Examples:
You can decide whether the cladding should be wood siding, corrugated metal, fibre cement, stucco, or standing seam metal.
You can decide how many units to include, and how they’re located on the site. For example, you can set up a four-plex with the units staggered (as shown above), so that each unit has some private outdoor space.
You can include optional solar shading:
There’s example designs which combine these design elements for a laneway house, a duplex, or a fourplex. For example, here’s the floor plans for the four-plex shown above, with two 2BR units and two 3BR units.
Cost estimates
The catalog includes a Class D cost estimate by Chris Hill. Looks like hard costs (labour and materials) are about $400 to $500 per square foot.
Will municipal governments pre-approve these designs?
According to the province, municipal governments haven’t pre-approved these designs yet, but there’s some interest. Joanne Lee-Young, Vancouver Sun:
The ministry of housing said no local governments have adopted the plans yet as the designs were only recently finalized.
However, the province has been in touch with some local governments that have shown some early interest and is working to identify which ones might be interested in a pilot project to expedite approvals for designs from the catalogue.
A few B.C. municipalities have already been using pre-approved home designs to expedite building and lower costs with some, like Kelowna, holding design competitions to refresh offerings.
More
Previously: pre-approved designs
B.C. unveils standardized home designs with focus on faster approval, lower building costs. Joanne Lee-Young, Vancouver Sun.
Vancouver Special 2.0: B.C. unveils free, standardized multiplex housing designs. Simon Little, Global News.
BC rolls out "building blocks" to build small-scale, multi-unit homes faster. Claire Fenton, Daily Hive.
So the housing costs are not just about land and permits and so forth. My parents got our 1600 sf house on a serviced lot in Calgary in 1969 for $30,000. That's almost exactly $250,000 today.
And now it costs twice that in labour and materials to build a 1000 sf house, with no land.
Frankly, it goes against all other manufacturing trends that the building alone has gone up so much in price when the relative cost of building, say, furniture has gone down, versus inflation.
Is this that labour has gone up so much, rather than materials? The Buckminister Fuller problem that we "build a car in your driveway", rather than manufacture them. But we've tried about nine ways to make homes in factories, and the price does not go down. Frustrating.
Wait, I'm still struggling with the final number here. So the upshot is that if you could be given free serviced land, and built a 4-plex of 1000 sf units totalling 4000 sf, that would cost $2 million simply to construct, upon the free land.
The blog says labour is about half, so the 4000 sf is a million bucks of materials, and a million bucks of worker-hours, that is, ten worker-years at $100K/year. Which just seems high.
The continued existence of those "build your off grid cabin" kits for a few tens of thousands suggest that the actual materials for construction don't cost a million bucks for 4000 sf, either.
I'm aware that I'm stomping into the most-reviewed and agonized-over area of business and technology, and I don't believe that a million constructors are in a secret conspiracy. But I just can't make the numbers make sense.