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British Columbia is in the grips of a housing affordability crisis decades in the making. The Province has an ambitious plan to tackle the crisis through the largest investment in housing affordability in B.C.’s history. Tasked with building tens of thousands of homes in hundreds of communities is BC Housing, the agency responsible for developing, managing, and administering a wide range of subsidized housing and homelessness services across the province. BC Housing doesn’t do this alone, they work with hundreds of partners. In this podcast, you’ll hear from those tackling the crisis head on.
At the end of the day, when we're all more excited about something that is positioned to
make it easier for us to build the right homes and be able to meet people's needs so that
people can thrive where they feel safe and secure and at home, that's really the benefit
for everybody.
A home.
It's something we all need.
But for too many, having a safe place to make a home is out of reach.
The challenges can seem insurmountable.
And yet, each and every day, people are coming together to provide safe, quality and
affordable housing for those in need.
Welcome to today's episode of Let's Talk Housing.
I'm your host, Meeta Naidu.
I'd like to respectfully acknowledge that I am joining you from the ancestral and unceded
territories of the Musqueam, the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh nations, where this
episode was filmed.
Today, we are talking about one of the biggest challenges facing BC, building more homes
faster.
To help us understand how new tools and designs are speeding up housing delivery,
We're joined by two amazing guests, Esther de Vos and Chris Hill, who have played key roles
in the development of DASH, BC's new digitally accelerated standardized housing platform.
Together we'll explore how innovative tools can empower communities and help get more
homes built for people across the province.
For transparency, this episode is being recorded in December of 2025 and reflects the
issues and priorities of the time.
Esther and Chris, welcome to Let's Talk Housing.
Thanks, Meeta.
Really happy to be here.
And I'm also calling in from the traditional unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish
and Salatouth peoples and really honoured to be able to reside here as a settler.
To start, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role in this project?
Yes, my role in the project I was brought on, I was actually brought on from Metro
Vancouver and worked on the early zoning portion of this.
and advising to the offsite construction side of it and how you can make municipalities,
if they can change their zoning and rules to make it easier to accelerate housing.
That also then brought me into the BC housing side of it, where I was able to focus.
I think my official title is lead prefab and supply chain.
So I get to work with all the manufacturers and the people that are going to deliver the
projects with practical experience and make sure what we're doing is going to actually
increase productivity in the long run.
So I work as the executive director of research at BC Housing.
It was actually, this came about as a project out of the research center led by our
technical team with Dr.
Danisa Ionescu and Cindy Moran, along with some key partners, Metro Vancouver, Asaius
Advisory, Chris Hill, Iredale Architects.
And uh we came together
uh to essentially see how we could address the workflow from sort of the design portion of
like deciding that you need to have a building to actually getting it built.
And how could we facilitate that to be more effective, cost efficient, and essentially
trying to get homes built faster without compromising on the quality and sustainability.
of those designs or of the build itself.
Right.
So that's the problem Dash is trying to solve.
How to get quality, sustainable, but speedy access to more homes.
Yes, absolutely.
So when we brought together the core team, as well as people from the offsite
manufacturing industry, the municipal government, as well as architects,
We really looked at where are the slowdowns, where are those pieces where technology can
intervene and help speed things up so we can retain that creativity and the desire to have
really good design buildings, optimizing sites for as many homes as we can that make sense
on a site while still being able to move through the development approval process.
in a really good way, minimizing some of the challenges for municipalities, approving
those permits, and then also going to construction.
And in this case, Dash allows you to translate your design into, through using a kit of
parts engine, into a list of offsite manufactured components.
So if you think about Lego, different pieces, they're all standardized and they can all be
brought on a truck and you can build your building.
Okay, I want to break all of that down.
That was a lot.
So assuming that lot of people don't know about manufacturing and the technology of home
building, you mentioned permits.
What are some of the other big barriers that you see when it comes to getting new housing
projects approved and built?
If we're breaking this all down, what are some of the other barriers?
There's been a lot of uh inconsistency within the policy side of this and permitting.
So each municipality
You have 25 municipalities in Metro Vancouver alone.
I don't know how many in BC, thousands.
There are the different step code, which means different assemblies, which means different
details.
So consistency is really critical in that regard.
And then even just consistency when working within the individual municipalities of how
they go through their process.
It's just, it's a little bit disjointed right now in that regard.
I would suggest the other part, if I go strictly to offsite construction, there's a
financing gap.
If you're going to build stuff in a factory, you typically don't get funding until it
arrives on site.
so that somebody's got to pay for all that material, all that expensive wood beforehand.
And so there's often a bit of a financing gap with offsite construction and you're
building things so fast, potentially, and I do mean potentially, that the current system
doesn't necessarily keep up to that speed of your draws and construction loans and those
sorts of things.
Even the appraisal process, it changes risk.
So we start to look at insurance and where risk lies.
So if you're going to pay for stuff in a factory, do they have the appropriate fire?
Do they have all the appropriate risk analysis in there?
So those are the problems that are there.
This is exploring a different way of doing things.
And I think we, another part of what I'm really excited about with Dash and I'm pivoting
slightly is the ability to set a program that we can track KPIs.
We can track this productivity and say, this worked and we can validate.
this investment or this tool, because typically you've got to invest a little bit more in
pre-construction.
You're investing more upfront to get the value of speed.
And if we can prove that it has speed and it reduces cost over time, we need to be able to
have that data and track it.
And then that starts to open up the potential and opportunity.
And so that's a big part of what programs like Dash can really do is set a framework in
place for these KPIs to validate this work as we move forward.
Some of it is just being able to really have an idea of what you can do on a site and how
you can optimize what your building footprint will look like.
So if you think of a building, we call it a footprint, it's sort of how much the building
takes up on that plot of land.
In every municipality, there are a set of rules set out in zoning bylaws around how far
back that footprint has to be.
whether there are utility right of ways, if there's trees to be taken into account,
waterways, those kinds of things.
There's also a level of requirements from utilities companies as well.
What Dash allows in the first instance is for you to decide how many sort of homes you
want in, let's say, a three to six story building.
say that you want to build at 123 Fifth Street in whatever municipality, and you can sort
of go onto the platform and say, this is what I want my building to have.
I want to have, you know, four, five bedrooms, I want to have three, four bedrooms, and I
want the rest to be mostly two and three bedrooms, let's say, and some one bedrooms.
And it will
tell you what kind of options you may have to fit that kind of uh building on the plot of
land at that address.
And you can then also get a sense of what is surrounding it.
So if there's existing buildings taking into account where the windows are placed, doors
are placed, what kind of sunshine you're going to be able to get in.
so for the architect who is doing that work, some of the sort of more
routine work is taken up and done by the computer system and allows that architect to
really focus on the design, making sure that you can adjust how you want your suites to
look, looking at your accessibility needs and accommodation needs within each suite, and
also determining what kind of wall systems you need.
for northern climates, warmer walls.
uh and seismic requirements sort of down on the coast and lower mainland and on the
island.
And so that's the sort of first iteration of the workflow on Dash.
So I hear architects, I hear builders.
Who else is this platform useful for?
Ultimately, it's useful for whoever is owning the building that is about to be built and
allows that owner to respond to the community needs and the community that they're
building for.
to find sort of their best fit design and to be able to shave off the time that
traditional construction methods take to be able to move people into their homes.
So in a way, this is supporting community as well to build the housing they need, right?
Tell me more about that.
Yeah, sure.
So I think that's really at the forefront of all of this is looking at the different
construction methods.
the technology that we now have available to us and looking at the way that we do
construction of homes and seeing how we can continue to iterate and do better so that we
can meet the needs of community and families across the province, across the country even,
to be able to move into homes that are of high quality, sustainable, and allow them to
live with agency and dignity sooner rather than later.
uh
tools out there.
There's a lot of different platforms for building housing.
So what makes Dash different?
Is it the speed?
Is it the streamlined efficiency?
What makes a difference?
Why would people in BC be excited about Dash?
I think what makes a difference is it's got, it's taken a bit of a process approach.
It's not focused specifically on a product.
It is really digging into the process.
Over the last year, it's had really great buy-in.
It has been talking to the manufacturers.
been talking to a number of different stakeholders to get their opinion, to get their
feedback.
What can they do and what really makes sense?
There's been a great amount of collaboration in the development of that.
It isn't a digital tool in itself.
uh The tools that we're using that are really cool, they are tools.
They're interchangeable.
There's lots coming out in the marketplace.
So there is ability to grow on that, but that core platform is there.
And I got to applaud the people at BC Housing for really picking it up.
That is, they have the ability to push this really far.
And if we start to dig in as an industry, as the team of executors, that's where BC
Housing doesn't have general contractors and different pieces.
So if we really dig in as the industry, and that's part of what I speak to a lot, and
support this, we can really push it along and set a really solid example.
And the back channel for the industry is they start to see structured demand, clustered
purchasing.
We start to inform how this change can occur collaboratively.
So what Dash has done is it's taken a number of the different pressure points and brought
them all together into one workflow.
So you're right, there's other tools out there, there's other methods.
Industrialized construction is a good example of that, where pieces of walls are built
off-site and then brought on-site as one big piece.
That has already been existing for a long time.
The challenge has is that they've never been sort of woven together, where all of it is
brought under one umbrella, and where all of those different partners are talking and
making sure that their challenges are heard by the other perspectives that also have a
part to play.
And that's really what Dash has done.
So the team in building Dash brought together all of those different perspectives from all
of the different professional bodies involved in building housing and delivering housing
for community and sort of said, how can we make this as streamlined as possible?
And we're able to uh do so altogether.
There's something interesting about this particular platform as well.
I heard it's using Made in BC components.
So how does working with local manufacturers using local products help the economy, help
BC, help keep costs down?
mean, a big part of it is obviously it's hard not to go past the day without a mill
closure or pulp closure.
So obviously the forestry industry has changed a little bit in the last little bit.
So we've definitely taken a wood focused approach as much as I try to be material and
method agnostic.
But we've done amazing wood.
I call it the echo effect construction in general.
It's the pebble in the pond and the rim and the echo effect.
So there's those secondary and third sort of jobs that it supports.
So the more money we spend locally, the better construction is a great example.
I think it was like, I forget my stats, but it's a high stat 85 to 90 % of the dollar
spent in construction goes locally.
It doesn't go to Walmart and disappear.
It does go to those local trades, those plumbers, those people working.
The effect of that labor is strong.
And offsite construction isn't about taking jobs away.
There's a lot of jobs available in this industry.
It's making those jobs more productive.
And so I think that's the really key, the echo effect of that dollar spent is significant
in construction and using our local materials and suppliers.
There's an interesting piece as well that's coming up.
I think we need to be aware of in this, in the space of offsite construction and modular
and prefab.
We're not known as manufacturers.
It's not our strongest suit.
We don't have a huge secondary manufacturing industry, especially if you look at forestry.
We are primary raw material producers for the most part.
So where can we be strong in this?
And it is, and I believe it is through that structural elements of a home that we're
really focused on with Dash.
So those structural elements made from wood locally, made in local factories.
If we go too far down the offsite route,
internationally, if you look across the world, we are not even remotely as advanced.
Sweden produces 80 % of their housing stock in factories.
China, India, other countries are producing a lot more and have a lot more sophistication
in their process.
But if we're not careful within our bid process and go outside of that, we're going to see
a lot of import in this space.
And we're already starting to see that.
I've been really working with manufacturers to like, what can we do?
And what's the logical step?
And the analogy I often would say is, let's not step into an NHL playoff game as a junior
B team.
What you're referring to is sort of the offsite manufacturing or industrialized
construction aspect, primarily.
Every province and territory has their own industry, but we're really proud of the one we
have here in BC.
And we have a number of really strong manufacturers across the province who also gave us
some really good advice on this project.
So just a big shout out to them.
The advantage of having it located in BC is one, we also have our forestry sector here, so
there's that tie-in right away with uh all of the natural resources that we're able to do
here in BC.
The manufacturers are located across the province, so from an environmental perspective in
terms of getting your panels delivered to different sites, you have some different options
there, uh less transport costs.
The other advantage of doing offsite manufacturing that we've seen in some of the uh sites
that we've gone to for different manufacturers is the ability to really be a much more
inclusive construction industry because they're inside.
And so they're away from the elements.
It decreases some of the risk experienced by people going up ladders and doing different
things in the cold.
It also allows them to work together more as a team, working on one.
panel at a time, and then moving to another spot and sort of being able to attract the
labor where the labor is without then necessarily making it difficult for communities that
don't maybe have the same construction labor pool to be able to still have access to those
same panelized pieces.
So they can still get those delivered to them, still be able to build their buildings in
good time without being worried that they don't have the labor pool.
available.
I really dig this idea of DASH building community, its own community of housing builders,
its own connection to various, you know, potentially remote communities who are getting
support through DASH.
You know, we know that people in BC are a blend of many diverse communities, right, with
different needs, unique needs when it comes to housing.
For example, bigger kitchens or communal spaces for intergenerational living.
How can DASH
build on this idea of community?
How can Dash empower communities to build their idea of home?
First of all, when people hear the word standardized housing, they're envisioning sort of
one model of a building that will get plunked down everywhere, no matter whether it fits
into the neighborhood in which it is being built.
And that is not Dash.
Dash allows you to use standardized pieces.
of a building and some standardized sort of rules around building.
But at the end of the day, the architect can really work with the owner of the building to
make that development meet the aesthetic of those neighborhoods, meet the needs of the
community.
And as we work to add more and more blueprints that are informed by different ways of
living in space, so whether you want to have larger public spaces and smaller bedrooms,
or you want more units that are multi-generational focused or just have larger number of
bedrooms beyond two and three bedrooms, you can design that and be able to still get a
great building in the same footprint, but being able to try those different options really
quickly and really rapidly using the technology.
so instead of trying to do it more manually, you can try all the different options out.
Um, with sort of just changing some parameters on the system.
It is reminiscent to what I call the product platform going deep into another analogy.
You know, the vans shoes that everyone wears, they got the stripe down the side and like
you've seen them in a million different colors and couple different shapes.
But at the end of the day, they're a very common platform, but they're very customizable.
And that's what a product platform can deliver.
And that's a big part of the thinking behind Dash, especially around kit of parts and
components and how they fit together.
So you need flexibility.
to be able to create something that the market wants.
You got to make it standardized to a point that you can repeat it over and over again to
make it cost effective and speed.
So the intent in Dash is to have quite a bit of flexibility.
This really counteracts the idea of one size fits all.
You you hear the word standardized, the S in Dash, and people worry that all the homes are
going to look the same.
But you're really telling me that it's the opposite, right?
Dash encourages unique and attractive designs, and it empowers communities to build their
idea of housing.
Tell me more about like, the idea of sustainability, you mentioned it earlier, and climate
change and how does Dash protect people from those kind of effects?
while we've been designing the blueprints, we've been doing it at a step code four level.
So that's already anticipating
for people who don't know what step code is?
Step code is sort of the level to which you build for climate resiliency and
sustainability, energy efficiency and those kinds of things.
And there are five steps and a lot of buildings are currently being built at step code
three.
Doing it step code four allows us to start building in even more resiliency.
You can also...
choose your materials.
So some of the designs that we're looking at are bringing in more mass timber rather than
sort of traditional wood frame.
uh Laminated mass timber is another wood product uh that is also really strong, another
product of BC, and is just another way that we can build uh using our natural resources in
a more sustainable way.
It doesn't have any more fire risk than a wood frame building.
Yeah, and so in terms of that worry about standardize standardization, meaning boring or
the same, that's really been top of mind as we have focused on enabling architects to
still really retain that creativity uh element for the building that they're they're
looking at developing.
What this really does is just allows for all of the people involved to be
brought on board a little bit earlier into the process as well to help design that
building and then be able to build it more effectively because you don't have the same
kind of challenges of someone not thinking it through for electricians, for instance, or
where the plumbing needs to go.
If you move a wall this way because you suddenly realized on site you need to move it.
Part of what Dash also does is it brings
the design into a digital twin.
So you have a digital representation of your building that you can see in 3D.
And so you have an idea of if you move something, what then it impacts across the entire
building and people can respond in real time before you're actually doing that in real
life with real components.
So there's also a sustainability measure that way of sort of reducing some of the waste.
products that sometimes happens when those changes are made.
It's feeling Lego like.
Someone introduced that analogy to me when we were first sort of trying to talk about
Dash.
And I've really brought that forward in all of the conversations I have about Dash because
I find it the easiest way of understanding what Dash does.
I used to play with Lego when I was younger, probably dating myself because it was back
when it was mostly like the yellow.
like skinny blocks and not any of the fun stuff that you see in the kits today.
But you know, a two block was a two block and a four block was a four block.
And really in similar fashion, you have those like little green uh bottoms that are your
your plot of land and you decide what footprint you basically want to build and what
building you want to build.
And it's just all standardized pieces that you're putting together rather than a
standardized design.
overall.
So you're not just plunking down a building, you're still building the building.
It can be L-shaped, it can be U-shaped, it can be just one big building on that lot.
Whatever makes most sense for the needs of whoever's going to be living there.
Yeah, I love that analogy.
That breaks it down really beautifully.
So for developers and for nonprofits who are hearing about Dash for the first time, and
this podcast may be the first time they're hearing about it, why would they get involved?
Why should they get involved with your project?
We're really excited to share this with developers, especially nonprofits, looking at the
buildings that we have used for modeling to inform how Dash operates.
We've seen a reduction in costs during the building phase, which is always really
important because often as costs become close to overrunning, things have to be cut from
the building.
And often it's some of the sort of
nice to have things or the things that are considered nice to have like green walls and
things like that.
And so this allows us to really be able to contain costs to really bring all of the
contractors in together.
So it's more of a team approach to the building as well.
And at the end of the day, looking at being able to move people in sooner than how a
traditional building would be built.
more homes faster.
better collaboration, more flexibility, sustainability, climate resilience.
These are such amazing benefits of this platform.
How many homes do you hope to build?
As many as people are willing to put through the workflow.
So the beauty of DASH is, while it's been created and it's hosted by BC Housing as a
public sector organization,
We're doing this for the benefit of everybody in the province.
so whether you're a nonprofit for profit, really you have access.
It doesn't cost anything to go into and create an account with Dash.
Now it is more appropriate at this point for the blueprints that we have on the system to
be an architect or an engineer going through the workflow and creating an account.
At some point we'll be looking at adding designs for single detached.
homes or uh multiplexes that can fit on a single detached lot.
But at the um end of the day, right now, it's geared towards more of those housing
professionals than the everyday person.
And really, they can go through and do what they need to do and use the platform to just
make their jobs a lot easier.
And we're hoping by having the
a kit of parts engine and a virtual marketplace to the offsite manufacturers, that that
will just, you know, sort of really lead people into that sector across BC where people
can uh order their panelized goods and have them delivered on site and then put together
on site uh in a faster way than traditional wood frame building.
Even if you think of the BC housing team,
municipal teams, general contractors, all second-hand owners.
If we are more productive in our ability to deliver houses, there will be more.
And so that makes it less strain on the resources in that entire system.
I realize that's a massively big statement, but it's a massively big problem.
So I think that is also is what I applaud of Dash.
I'm a fan guy that jumped on the bandwagon.
I've had my fingerprint on it, but it's not my origin idea.
They took on a big problem and it was, and it's that kind of work of like vision that you
see this is the big one and let's, let's tackle it end to end.
not where it's not a piece.
This is a, this is working towards a full complete end to end solution.
And I think, you know, whether you're a builder or a nonprofit, if you sit outside of
those kind of two groups, ultimately dash from what I'm hearing from you impacts
affordability and.
the efficiency of getting more homes out there more quickly?
Definitely.
And I remember when I was living in Edmonton down the street, they had a house that was
built with offsite manufacturing panels.
They all showed up on a truck and the house was framed out in like a day or two instead of
a much longer period.
So for the neighbors, it was also a lot quieter and sort of a little bit less destructive
to day-to-day life for the whole sort of
duration of the time.
uh It gets noisy when we build and that noise is necessary, but can still be really
frustrating for the rest of the neighborhood.
So I think this is a win-win for everybody.
It's also, I see it as a win for municipalities who have been getting a lot of attention
around the timelines for their development permits.
Part of the challenge is that development permits aren't completed in full and so the
municipalities have to go back and forth.
Sometimes it's the design itself that needs a lot of attention.
One of the benefits of using standardized designs for different components is that it goes
through the approval process faster.
For the most part, planners are like, yeah, if you can give us something that we agree to,
that streamlines in a consistent package, that makes their job easier.
Okay, these designs are pre-approved.
I wouldn't say they're pre-approved.
They are regulatory ready.
What's the difference?
So the difference is that it's not like we're going to a municipality and saying, can you
please pre-approve this?
What it means is that we know that their system or their administration will recognize
that this is a standardized panel and that it meets their criteria.
And so they can check it off faster than if it was a different wall panel every single
time they looked at a design.
Okay, so the municipalities are still the body that approves or not approves these
designs.
Absolutely.
We still have not changed that.
You still have to go and get all of your permits from the city.
And what this does, as I see it, is just partnering with municipalities in a very
different way to enable their rules about what is allowed to be built to be available
earlier in the process.
So by the time you're bringing your designs to them for the permits,
you have a better sense of uh whether you followed all the rules.
Got it.
Yeah.
And that's huge.
That's it is and hopefully less frustration on both sides for people that they can just
focus on sort of the pieces that aren't standardized.
Because there's always something that will will need to be sort of factored in because
every site is different.
But it's not the whole building that has to be reviewed in the same way.
Because you'll be able to rely on standardized pieces.
What surprised you the most about all of this?
Partly, I was surprised that no one had done this before.
So this is a huge opportunity for us and it's a really exciting one and one that uh we
were really excited about.
And then as people started hearing about it, I think that's what really surprised me is
just how uh supportive people have been across all of the different industries, leadership
within BC Housing uh and government, and even hearing from other
people in other provinces or parts of Canada that have heard about DASH and want to hear
more, uh which may not be as exciting for the person who's saying like, I just want my
house built, or I just want to be able to find a home that my family can thrive in.
But at the end of the day, when we're all more excited about something that is positioned
to make it easier for us to build the right homes and be able to meet people's needs so
that people can thrive.
where they feel safe and secure and at home.
That's really the benefit for everybody.
And I agree.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights and for educating us on this amazing new
platform.
There's really just so many impacts and potential ripple effects to Dash.
It's been intriguing.
For listeners who want to learn more, visit acceleratedhousing.ca.
uh
or explore the Dash Design Library to see how innovation is helping shape the future of
housing in BC.
To learn more about BC Housing, including how to apply for subsidized housing in British
Columbia, visit www.bchousing.org.
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