Good morning. Modular housing is making a well-funded comeback – more on that below, along with the second round of conclave voting and the 80th anniversary of V-E Day. But first:

• Pakistan says it shot down 25 drones, while India says it pushed back Pakistani retaliation
• The RCMP are scaling back their search for two missing children in rural Nova Scotia
• The complainant in the Hockey Canada assault case says she felt she had to participate in a “porn scene”
• Mark Carney will meet with provincial leaders in Saskatoon in June

For a brief period just over 100 years ago, it was possible to purchase a Frank Lloyd Wright home for US$2,750 – which would shake out to US$75,000 today. The house had strong horizontal lines, a deep roof overhang and wraparound windows. Inside, the layout was open; out front, rows of planters stepped from the door to the lawn. Wright created seven variations on this Prairie Style model. Each one came in a kit.

Turns out the Fallingwater architect was bullish on prefab homes. During the mid-1910s, Wright and his associates produced nearly 1,000 drawings for a project called American System-Built Homes, which sought to bring affordable – and architecturally distinctive – housing to the middle class. He promoted the kits in the Chicago Tribune and Ladies’ Home Journal, but fewer than 20 were actually assembled. The United States entered the First World War, and lumber shortages ground the work to a halt.

Good news: Canada has a boatload of lumber. And Mark Carney seems to share Wright’s belief that modular building can help address the housing shortage. The Prime Minister has promised to double the speed of construction to roughly 500,000 new homes each year, with federal investment in prefabricated units a cornerstone of that pledge. He’s said the government will provide $25-billion in loans and $1-billion in equity financing to companies that build homes in factories, rather than on construction sites. Ottawa will also place bulk housing orders to help jump-start the industry, since the Modular Building Institute estimates there are only about 40 prefab manufacturers in the country.

“Experts say the plan is visionary – and laden with risks,” The Globe’s personal economics reporter, Erica Alini, writes in her recent analysis. Let’s take a closer look at the promise and pitfalls of Carney’s big prefab bet.

The promise

The benefits of this sort of building sound almost like a Daft Punk song: cheaper, better, faster, safer. Because structural elements – including floors, walls, ceilings and windows, plus fully equipped kitchens and bathrooms – are built on assembly lines in a factory, labour and construction costs are markedly lower. A 2024 report from the University of Toronto found that modular housing can cost half as much per square foot as homes built on-site. Construction time is shaved by up to 25 per cent, and the whole project is a lot greener. That same report estimates prefab housing reduces both landfill waste and delivery-vehicle emissions by 70 per cent.

Japan first turned to modular construction in the 1950s, when the country needed a speedy and cost-efficient solution to the housing shortage caused by widespread bombing during the Second World War. Now, nearly all construction in Japan is industrialized, and prefab homes make up 15 per cent of the single-detached stock. In Sweden, where 42 per cent of homes are modular, year-round off-site construction means there’s no hold up for bad weather. That translates to safer working conditions – people aren’t trying to build roofs in the snow – and more predictable hours, which helps attract a more diverse labour force. At Lindbäcks, a Swedish prefab construction company, women represent 30 per cent of the workforce. On-site in Canada, it’s more like 5 per cent.

The pitfalls

Prefab housing only becomes cheaper at scale, and right now it accounts for less than 5 per cent of the residential construction here. A giant obstacle to mass production is Canada’s wide-ranging building codes, which determine everything from roof shape and window appearance to the thickness of materials, and which vary between provinces and even cities. “The complexity of building code differences can make scaling up across provinces and territories, or even scaling up beyond one municipality, difficult,” the U of T report laments.

North American building codes are “prescriptive,” and so dictate the thickness and required layers of drywall that have to be used for fire resistance. Sweden opts instead for “performance” codes – a wall just needs to withstand burning over a certain time, and it’s up to the engineers to work out how to do it. But streamlining our building regulations would be a big undertaking in Canada. We’re still trying to get a bottle of wine to Ontario from B.C.

Then there’s the unfair perception that modular housing is boring or bare-bones or homogenous. (I’d invite you to google “Muji + prefab home” and see what the Japanese retailer has cooked up.) There has to be an appetite for this kind of housing – otherwise, new builds could find themselves as vacant as condo units in Toronto. Canada will need to determine how to boost prefab demand, as well as its supply. Maybe we could start by ripping off a few of those Frank Lloyd Wright designs.

Tens of thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square with their eyes locked on the Sistine Chapel chimney – and after this morning’s first vote ended, it was black smoke that appeared. There will be as many as four rounds of voting today to see if two-thirds of the cardinals sequestered can agree on the choice of a new pope.