The "Digitally Accelerated Standardized Housing" project, led by BC Housing, BIMOne, Metro Vancouver, and Scius Advisory, aims to standardize and accelerate mid-rise housing construction in Canada. By utilizing digital tools, prefabrication, and collaboration, the initiative seeks to make housing more efficient, affordable, and scalable, addressing Canada's housing crisis.
The current challenge in British Columbia is the inability to build housing quickly enough to meet growing demand. Home prices are skyrocketing, decoupled from income, and rental rates are outpacing wage growth, making it difficult for many residents to find affordable housing. With a rental vacancy rate around 1% and over 26,000 people experiencing homelessness, the situation is critical. BC's population is expected to grow by 2.2 million people by 2046, further straining the housing market.
To meet this demand, the province needs to build one million homes in the next decade. At the same time, construction costs must be reduced by 54%, labor productivity needs to increase by 60%, and carbon emissions per home must be lowered by more than 20% to align with climate commitments. The construction industry currently delivers only 30% of the required housing, hampered by inefficiencies, high waste, and a slow, traditional building process that fails to keep up with demand.
The "Digitally Accelerated Standardized Housing" solution addresses the housing shortage in British Columbia by introducing a platform that accelerates the delivery of mid-rise residential projects through digital tools and prefabrication. The core of "Digitally Accelerated Standardized Housing"’s approach is a set of pre-approved blueprint designs that are optimized for prefabrication and developed using Building Information Modeling (BIM). These designs streamline the design and construction process by enabling faster approvals, reducing design iterations, and minimizing errors.
"Digitally Accelerated Standardized Housing" integrates a generative compliance configurator that evaluates potential building sites and automates regulatory reviews. By utilizing this system, housing providers can quickly assess site feasibility and optimize building massing. The platform’s prefabrication configurator further supports the design-to-tender process by aligning designs with prefab manufacturing capabilities, improving cost estimates, and ensuring design quality.
In collaboration with municipalities and housing authorities, "Digitally Accelerated Standardized Housing" simplifies the pre-approval process by standardizing designs to comply with local building codes. This reduces time spent on approvals and construction, while also addressing labor productivity challenges by cutting the need for manual rework and reducing construction waste.
Overall, "Digitally Accelerated Standardized Housing" enables faster, more affordable housing construction while supporting sustainability goals by reducing carbon emissions and material waste. It creates a scalable solution for BC’s housing crisis, which can be applied to other regions.
