BC Housing is rolling out a new online tool aimed at speeding up the construction of affordable housing.
The online platform, called Digitally Accelerated Standardized Housing, or DASH, is designed to help builders and architects access prefabricated parts and standardized designs for three to six-storey buildings.
The province said it will also help builders access materials that are made in B.C.
The site also includes guidelines intended to help local governments approve the projects more easily.
Housing Minister Christine Boyle said DASH will help the municipalities continue to shift away from “restrictive” single-family zoning.
She said the platform is the first of its kind in Canada.
“DASH is a game changer,” said Boyle. “It brings together everything that builders, developers, architects, and manufacturers need to create homes.”
Lisa Helps, with BC Builds, said the tool will help residential construction move from on-site construction to off-site building in factories. She said the prefabricated housing components are delivered to the site for assembly.
“We’ve been building this in lockstep with industry and they like to think of DASH as their new digital workbench for everyone involved in the residential construction industry to collaborate to get homes built more quickly,” said Helps.
She said the platform, launched on Thursday, is a prototype and will take some time to scale it up and start getting homes built with it.
“Some of what this means for local governments, they’ll need to digitize their approvals process, have machine-readable submissions,” said Helps.
“This is not to take away any municipal staff. It’s just to free up their time for more complex projects,” she said.
Helps estimates the digital tools could get buildings designed in half the time as usual, and shave off up to 25 per cent of building time.
She adds it’s still too early to say how much cost savings it could provide for builders, but said federal estimates put the savings at 20 per cent.
She said the platform’s digital tools use a rules-based generator, not artificial intelligence, to produce designs, though she didn’t rule out incorporating AI tools in the future.
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