“There is a single point of accountability, integrated design and construction teams, and performance specifications that make the builder responsible for how the asset performs over its lifecycle, not just how inexpensive it is on day one.”
I have advocated that one of the strongest models is to approach affordable housing with the same discipline Canada has brought to major social infrastructure over the last 25 years.
When we deliver hospitals, courthouses, or transit, the focus isn’t simply on putting up a building - it’s on delivering outcomes for communities. There is a single point of accountability, integrated design and construction teams, and performance specifications that make the builder responsible for how the asset performs over its lifecycle, not just how inexpensive it is on day one.
At EllisDon Community Builders, we’re applying that same discipline to affordable housing.
First, we have developed Housing as Infrastructure® - EllisDon Community Builders’ housing delivery model using the same principles that have been used to deliver major social infrastructure. It is built around integrated delivery, risk transfer, fixed-price and date-certain commitments, construction financing, standardized documentation, and long-term financing certainty for housing providers. The model uses a design-build-finance approach in which we take responsibility for planning, design, construction, and construction financing, while the housing provider retains ownership, public benefit, and long-term operations, with take-out financing arranged and committed at the beginning of the project.
Nick Gefucia, SVP Affordable Housing
The value is that it helps non-profit, municipal, Indigenous, and government-affiliated housing providers move from one-off real estate development to scalable portfolio delivery, reducing exposure to interest rate risk, uncertain costs, schedule delays, and equity drawdowns before units are delivered.
Second, we have developed what we call Base DesignTM - a standardized, repeatable kit-of-parts template that’s scalable up to ten storeys, designed from the outset for CMHC compliance. It’s not a cookie-cutter. It’s a flexible chassis that lets us lock in energy performance, structural quality, and accessibility from the start, and then adapt it to local context. Because the design is repeatable and scalable, it supports true portfolio building rather than one-off projects, while giving local trades, manufacturers, and suppliers the predictability they need to optimize production, logistics, and procurement around modern methods of construction. That repeatability is what drives cost out, not cutting building performance.
A Sustainable Approach to Housing
The biggest cost drivers in housing aren’t energy-efficient windows or better insulation. They are soft costs, delays, approvals, redesigning from scratch every time. When you standardize the approach, you compress timelines and reduce risk, and sustainability comes along for the ride because it’s baked in, not bolted on.
The split incentive question—who pays versus who benefits—actually disappears when you think like a social infrastructure developer. When delivering a health care asset, for instance, the developer cares about lifecycle cost because they’re on the hook for it. Housing needs that same alignment. If you’re building for a non-profit operator or a housing provider that will own and operate for 30-plus years, the conversation shifts from “what’s the cheapest to build” to “what’s the cheapest to own.” That’s where energy efficiency pays for itself.
The Housing as Infrastructure® model would inherently drive sustainability because the performance specs can include energy targets, resilience standards, and lifecycle cost thresholds. The delivery partner is motivated to meet those targets efficiently rather than fight them as add-on costs. And because you’re bundling financing, you can structure it so that the energy savings over the building’s life are factored into the financial model from day one, reducing the effective cost of capital.
Enter Modern Methods of Construction (MMC)
There’s a misconception that MMC is just about speed and cost - snap it together faster, move on. But if you look at what prefabrication actually enables, it’s a quality play as much as a speed play.
When you manufacture building components in a controlled factory environment, you get tighter tolerances, better air sealing, more consistent insulation installation - all of which directly drive energy performance. The things that make a building leaky and inefficient are almost always workmanship issues on site: gaps in insulation, poor air barrier continuity, misaligned assemblies. Factory conditions can solve that.
Social infrastructure builders understand this intuitively. When we deliver a hospital, every system is integrated, tested, and commissioned. MMC gives us the ability to bring that same rigour to housing at scale. You’re not hoping the framing crew on a cold February morning installs the vapour barrier correctly. You’re verifying it in a controlled environment with quality assurance protocols.
The Base Design concept we’ve developed is purpose-built for this. It’s designed so that wall panels, mechanical systems, and bathroom pods can be manufactured off-site and assembled rapidly, with energy performance locked in at the design stage rather than left to chance in the field.
The Takeaway
While we can certainly look to the UK and Australia for exemplary infrastructure models for housing, we can also look inward. Canada already knows how to do this. We’ve done it for decades in social infrastructure with the development of hospitals, transit, courthouses. Canada and its provinces and territories have delivered billions of dollars of projects under exactly this model. The delivery partner takes on design and construction risk, arranges project financing, and is held to performance specifications over the life of the asset. It aligns incentives completely: you don’t get paid to build cheap, you get paid to deliver outcomes.
That’s how Canada builds.