A home described as the first of its kind now stands in the Nak’azdli Whuten community near Fort St. James, B.C.
The home is a prototype for an Indigenous-led housing system that uses low-grade locally-sourced wood to produce prefabricated housing kits for northern communities.
The concept is to take trees from the local territory, mill them locally, and then have local workers use that lumber to build panels, which are then used to construct a house in a matter of days.
“You can build the panels through the winter months, and then in the summer you can erect the houses a lot quicker. The idea would be instead of producing two or three houses, we could maybe do 10 houses in this area with our construction crew and local contractors.”
Yeah but, how much does that cost? What we need, in addition to that, is half priced housing.
As great as that is what’s it going to cost? Having a bunch of locally sourced/built houses is great but what’s the point if no one can afford to purchase one at a reasonable price.
You’re thinking a bit one dimensionally.
Locally produced also means local jobs (with the spinoff spending that comes with more people having better jobs).
And means building the local infrastructure and skill base to sell your products to other places.
No matter what it costs, it is cheaper than what we are doing now, and housing is built in days instead of years.
Instead of asking questions use your commenting device on a search engine and tell us the breakdown on pricing.
First Nations’ housing is paid for by the federal gov’t. As such no person living on rez land owns their own home (with a few exceptions).
Then that’s perfect.
For many places, this could cut to costs of a lot down where places are allowing lot splitting. I’ve noticed its common for a family to build a smaller house in the backyard, where zoning laws allow it, so that their kids/parents/in-laws/best friend can live there.
Is it as great as having your own lot? Probably not but it would cut down a lot of costs, keeps you close to family and beats the hell out of living in the basement instead.
