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*Winner - Best Tech Podcast - 2025 Quill Podcast Awards*
British Columbia is experiencing an unprecedented housing crisis. While addressing various aspects of the housing supply chain is essential, no single approach can fully solve the challenges we face in scaling housing production. So, what's the blueprint for growth?
In November 2023, DIGITAL — Canada's Global Innovation Cluster for digital technologies — launched its Housing Growth Innovation Program with support from the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs. The program brings together collaborative teams of industry leaders to accelerate technology-driven approaches that are driving real, tangible growth for British Columbia's housing production sector.
Amy Vilis, Director of Housing Growth Innovation at DIGITAL, chats with innovators doing groundbreaking work within DIGITAL's Housing Growth Innovation Program to develop and implement technology-based solutions within British Columbia's housing sector across the full scale of end-to-end production. These conversations showcase how ideas are making it into the real world where they can become comprehensive, viable and, best of all, achievable solutions to accelerate housing production for British Columbians.
Amy Villis (00:00.972)
Innovation in housing doesn't just come from tools or ideas. It depends on leaders and partnerships shaping solutions to fit communities. Welcome to Blueprint for Growth Innovation in Housing. I'm Amy Villas, Director of Housing Growth Innovation at Digital, Canada's global innovation cluster for digital technologies.
Joining me for this episode are two remarkable leaders who show that unlocking Brown-level housing innovation means putting Indigenous leadership, smart partnerships, and digital tools at the center of how resiliency is being redefined across Canada.
We've been in on this journey of integration with Western society. We are in it now. We're finding ways and solutions to sustain our people for the next seven generations.
First, Robin Billy, an Indigenous leader who's reimagining what's possible for Indigenous housing and infrastructure in Canada. He shares how Indigenous communities are driving transformation from wildlife recovery to offsite manufacturing, keeping decisions local means faster, smarter building.
I'm also joined by Neil Parkesh, principal at Parkesh architecture, whose design and technical vision is helping First Nations bring climate resilient, digitally enabled housing from concept to completion. By blending mass timber, oxide manufacturing and digital design flow, Neil's work is creating scalable, training rich pathways that connect cultural stewardship with modern construction. Their message, progress starts in partnership when authority, data and innovation are community led,
Amy Villis (01:32.184)
Homes are built faster, economies grow stronger, and housing truly reflects the people. My first guest is Robin Billy. Robin is a member of the Adam Lake Indian Band and a dedicated leader in Indigenous governance, environmental stewardship, and economic development, and has shaped major projects across Western Canada. From advancing title and rights negotiations to rebuilding communities after climate disaster, Robin delivers solutions rooted in First Nations values while ensuring sustainable, efficient, and long-term impact. His experience spans housing, infrastructure, technology, and resource development, making him a trusted partner for complex technical and Indigenous initiatives. So I'm wondering if you could share a story, rural or urban, where Indigenous-led housing poses a gap and delivered an innovative solution.
Robin Billy
I'm not sure if you heard about the Heatherlands, but that is a partnership between the Muscohm, Squamish and Sleigh-Wa-Tooth. So lot of the bands in the Lower Mainland have certain parcels of land that have gone undeveloped. I share the story with people all the time. You know, I know a lot of other First Nations have sat on their land for so long, there's a real opportunity to build those out.
And these houses aren't just for First Nations people, they're for anybody. Anybody can come and buy one of these condos and be part of that 99-year lease program. I've seen all types of developments on reserve that are structured as 99-year leases. So that's kind of the highest form of property ownership you can have as a non-Native person on reserve, but people are secure with that. This program is tailored to first-time homebuyers, so there's precedence for people that are buying for the first time.
There's certain income thresholds, know, what prevents kind of speculative buying as well. They have to be the primary residence of those people. They have all these different unique features in place that promote home ownership for people. think it's a really great, innovative way to increase the number of housing in Vancouver.
Amy Villis (03:33.518)
Okay, so wondering about the role of Indigenous data sovereignty, how it plays a role in housing, how it can be respected through every stage of a project and its development.
It's like you need data to make informed decisions. In lot of cases, First Nations just don't have that data. I think about a community needs assessment. Has your community done a community needs assessment? Is it up to date? Can you identify how many houses you need? Have you done a conditional assessment of your homes? So just say you have 300 homes on reserve, how old are they? How much are in need of future repairs?
Robin Billy
All that data is going to determine how much your house you're to need in the future. Population growth, a lot of different things factor into you developing a housing plan. So first and foremost, I think you have to generate the data and it almost has to be standardized across First Nations communities. I don't think there's a lot of capacity in First Nations communities to generate that data in the first place. Another area is land use planning. You know, do you have a land use plan? Have you identified areas for future housing development? Have you designated that land as future housing? So, you know, it's really important First Nations also have comprehensive land use plans. Areas that are close to infrastructure, water and sewage are a major challenge in lot of communities. So if you don't plan your housing developments around your infrastructure development, then you're going to have challenges trying to find services for these areas for development.
You know, there's a whole slew of data and I think it almost has to be categorized to say, okay, we need this data and we need processes for collecting and inputting that data. It's like we're generating a lot of the same data and First Nations can learn off each other by sharing that data. And the more we can control our own data is super important. You know, you have the whole housing framework and all the data generated with it. I think it's super important for First Nations to start playing an active role in generating and maintaining their own data when it comes to housing.
Amy Villis (05:34.958)
What partnership models have you seen work best to empower Indigenous communities in housing supply chain and project governance?
Robin Billy
I think one of the biggest things that we need as First Nations people is to empower ourselves. When we talk about housing, we almost have to negotiate a direct fiscal relationship with both levels of government, British Columbia and the federal government. You know, like looking at all of the taxes and revenue generated by federal and provincial governments and negotiating a direct fiscal relationship with both levels of government. And the easiest way and probably a pipe dream, but I think they should just cut us a check.
You know, okay, I need 10 million this year, cut us a check, no strings attached. We're gonna build a house that we need and the type of houses we need. Because right now it's very still paternalistic. Either it's paternalistic or we don't get the funding that we need. You know, I talked to several communities and they're like, yeah, we're not building this year. We just didn't get enough funding. If you don't build in a certain year, you're just falling further and further behind. So in order for us to quickly and effectively build homes, we almost need a no strings attached to delivering houses and we can do it.
Amy Villis
I would love if you could tell the story of how you helped develop a community that had been lost to a fire and within a calendar year, people were moving back into their homes because that is a true example of if you are left to build it, how that can be accomplished and how it can be accomplished so quickly.
Robin Billy (07:02.7)
We're in Squailix, BC here, so the community is called Squalux to Squamohulu, right off the little Shushwa plate. And the fire spread from over the Adams and ripped right through the flatlands of the community. So we only had about 25 minutes basically to get what you couldn't leave. The community has lost about 33 homes. Soon after the dust cleared, the community want to get back on rebuilding right away. I know other communities have gone through something similar and two, three years later, they're still having rebuilt with the RFP process. you know, I sent out a request for proposals. We know there's a lot of housing manufacturers locally and we put like an eight month timeframe in terms of rebuilding those 33 homes, which probably everybody thought was crazy at the time. Put it in there to see what the market response would be, right? So when we received the RFP back, a lot of companies said we can't do 33 homes, but we can do 17. So I thought to myself, okay, that's no problem.This company can be 17, this company can be 16. Let's partner with a couple different companies and then they can work collaboratively in terms of delivering these homes in that eight month timeframe. We wanted to focus on quality homes. We're really focused on energy efficient homes, quality materials, all natural materials. So we're able to factor a lot of that in. Even though was a rapid development program, we were still able to incorporate a lot of that into that development. We hit the ground running in terms of getting the infrastructure ready.
So fortunately the band had its own construction company called SRM. We were able to direct a lot of the work to them because they had all the experience, equipment and personnel to do all the civil works themselves. You know, the water lines, the sewer, roads, know, the clearing. And by day three they had water lines along the side of the road. And I was like, wow, these guys work fast. Start all the civil works and get all that prepped as the houses start being manufactured. Foundations being poured one day.
and then the houses started arriving as soon as that foundation's poured. Like all the houses were delivered up once we kind of sequenced them as they came out of the factory, but we're planning it so efficiently that the houses, the foundations are ready, the services were in, and then the next day the house started arriving on that foundation. I'm kind of getting animated and excited by this. It was really cool experience. Two hours later, it was already up, and by the end of the day, they had the roofs on. After that, it's about five weeks finishing, but that's the first house arriving. So we sequenced the first subdivision. And we did the next one, next one there's four of them in total, so we were able to accomplish that within a year.
Amy Villis
Wanted to talk to you about the concept and the idea of trees to keys and a terminology that's been floating around a little bit lately and how Indigenous communities are really able to access this concept with their timber rights from a way to look at culturally sensitive builds within materials that are locally found. If you're familiar with the trees to keys theme, if you could speak to that, that would be great.
Robin Billy
I'd first like to start out by acknowledging that a of BC is on unextinguished Aboriginal title lands, including my nation here. We've never signed a treaty. You know, in a lot of respects, we're still, unfortunately, fighting the courts to get title to our land. We feel like the trees are still ours, you know, the fir, the cedar, all these wonderful species and resources out there are still ours, but we're still fighting for those. Flinderaugh, which is the natural resource arm of British Columbia, they have negotiated revenue sharing agreements with First Nations. So think about 175 of the 203 First Nations in British Columbia have timber licenses from negotiating with the province of BC. So my concept for the bands is to take that tenure that they do negotiate with the province and maybe some of the money they have to buy more tenure. So the more tenure we have, the more access to timber we have, we have to get into value added processing. Unfortunately, a lot of the bands don't have the capacity to do anything besides sell those logs. We're just selling our licenses to those bigger companies. And you know, it's all about getting revenue for our communities, right? But there's no value added processing. How do you do some value added processing and turn those trees into homes? And that's kind of the crux of the argument is we have lost that knowledge or else haven't caught up with the manufacturing enough to turn those trees into homes. And not a lot of people have that either technology or expertise, how to transform that rough cut log into something usable for a home.
So that's what I've been really focusing on is that step in the process is kiln drying. know, researching a lot of different methodologies and different housing manufacturers that specialize in that. So First Nations can partner with these more experienced timber framers and actually turn their trees into homes. To me, it's almost ridiculous. We're surrounded by trees and we can't convert those into homes. Meanwhile, our people are not benefiting from, you know, what we're being surrounded by, which is all our own natural resources. We have to learn how to transform that tree into a completed home.
Amy Villis
So for yourself, as you look at this, some capacity building, knowledge sharing, where can we take and understand where we sit in an Indigenous led housing framework?
Robin Billy
I think First Nations really have to get their land prepped for housing, you know, and in order to do that, there's a lot of things that have to fall into place. I think a lot of times we get stuck at the funding portion of it, which is a big challenge. A lot of First Nations don't have their own source revenue. They rely on government funding for housing, but you have to think outside the box. What I always tell people is that there's enough money out there. You don't really have to do that. And it's title and rights, you know, I always talk about my mentors. Don Ryan and Satsan, they're the two counterparts that brought Delgamukh to the Supreme Court, one on behalf of the Gitsan, the other on behalf of the Watsuit. They've had a lot of battles in the forest for the trees, but they were also the ones who paved the duty to consult in BC. So any major project running through our territory, whether it's a government or industry, they have to sit down and talk to us. And now First Nations are starting to accumulate wealth and some money based on these negotiations.
You know, sometimes it's two million here, you four million here, and some bands are really negotiating some large impact benefit agreements. So what First Nations, I think, have to do is start putting some of that money aside, target some of it for your housing needs, and that way you're not going to be reliant on the government to provide you with dollars for housing. You have to be driven to pay for it yourself. And that goes for individual homeownership too, and I'm just going to backtrack to our last question in terms of tenure. There's also a little known way for an individual to get tenure, called a free use permit for any the Indigenous listeners out there. First Nations are eligible to get up to 50 cubic metres for traditional or cultural activity. That's what I want to utilise for my future home. And my natural resource guys, the who taught me about this, and it's based on previous court cases and a lot of different things. We could, as an individual, can go out and access trees to our lands. It's important for First Nations to identify how they're going to pay for housing first of all, know, before they can get busy. But then they have to do all the steps necessary to get the land ready for development. Conducting a survey, conducting an environmental assessment, identifying your land use plan, like lot of steps to get your land ready for development. But you're never going get your housing built and obviously a big part of that as well as infrastructure, you know. You don't have water and sewage and a lot of other different things planned out as well and how that's going to be paid for. Government getting out of the way, so we have to take a lot of the barriers out of housing developments. First Nations have to be a little more assertive in terms of not only their funding arrangements with government but how they develop land on their own reserve and I've always taken an approach that I'm just going to do it. Give me the cheque, I'll do it, stay out of the way. One thing I've particularly been kind of interested in is how we can use AI to do a lot of this as well. We talked about a general tool for maybe land use planning or whatever, you know, there's a lot of tools out there now that could speed up these processes. Get them all up on the same page when it comes to planning for the housing is gonna be huge because it's still a big shortage and probably the ones that need help the most are probably gonna get the least amount of help. You know, they're gonna stay stuck in that process or not even gonna be able to build houses because they're struggling maybe with social issues or lack of capacity at the band level. Those are the ones that need the most help, like the bigger, more sophisticated bands. Probably not gonna need all the tools that are needed to help everybody also.
Amy Villis
If you had a call to action for those that are listening, whether it's government, industry, or community who want to champion real change for modern method of construction or technology, what would it be?
Robin Billy
I kind of see that with housing manufacturing. A lot of people investing in AI, automation. think they'll take care of how to quickly deliver homes, but it's government that has to catch up and have land prepared for development. If developers are slowed down, if permits and approvals are gonna be taking a long time, then things will get bogged down. And there's so many different jurisdictions, so many different zoning requirements. There has to be a more effective tool that I'd like to see happen is things being done, moving back towards a regionalized approach to housing. So if, know, say the Shishawab Nation is going to look at housing, the housing has to match the environment. I'm really going to emphasize climate change. I drive around the territory or else I go out on the lake and I'm going through these hillside areas and people keep building the same type of home on wooded hillsides. It's a recipe for disaster. I think we really have to invest in companies that are regional, but also have a focus on what type of home is you going to build and how do you match that house to a particular environment. Putting like 1.5 meter setbacks around your house, hardy board siding, tin roofs, irrigated lawns. Now you're going to build a new subdivision, plan for fires right away. There has to be an investment into ideas in terms of building regionally. Making sure that those houses match the environment and do a lot of thinking around that. think that that's gonna be a big need, a big investment for sure.
Amy Villis
I love that.
And while Robin's work shows what's possible when communities lead with local decision making and rapid recovery, Neil brings the same spirit of resiliency through design and technology. Neil Parkesh is an architect in the principle of Parkesh architecture based in Vancouver. With over 20 years of experience, Neil brings deep design and technical expertise to his work. Today, he's helping First Nation communities across BC from Vancouver to Fort St. James, create scalable housing models that blend mass timber, offsite manufacturing and digital workflows.
His approach to climate resilient design and local workforce development shows how community-led stewardship and modern construction can build lasting skills, opportunity and authority in Indigenous housing across Canada. So we've had the honour of working alongside you and the team. I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how the project began, why its resourcefulness is so central to this Indigenous-led housing solution.
Neil Parkesh (18:36.962)
Yeah, so actually this project began with a different project, to be honest. We were working on a project for the Nicasaly First Nations. I was working on it with another firm called Wood Evans, and it was an administration building that they wanted to build. And we were standing on site and it was kind of interesting to see basically a lot of logging trucks rolling through town. So basically they were harvesting timbers and they were rolling out of town to another location, maybe they're going down south being shipped out or maybe they're going to mills outside of the region. And I had made a comment at that time, wouldn't it be great if we saw these trucks leaving with actual finished products as opposed to just raw lumber? So in that project, we had decided to actually do the floors out of nail laminated timber so that we could leverage an existing facility that was on reserve, which was the Tullow facility and have the opportunity to potentially build those panels in community, sort of capturing that sentiment of creating a little bit of a secondary industry that could be directly utilized within that building. And unfortunately, that project was put on hold by the chief and council. And part of the reason why that project was put on hold is I think the community felt that there were other priorities that needed to be served at that time. And one of those priorities was housing putting on our thinking caps at that time was, well, we had this idea of doing NLT panels. What if we were to pivot towards housing solutions and start to develop basically a prefabricated housing kit that could be built out of the facility and provide much needed housing on reserves.
Amy Villis
What makes a mass timber housing kit different from a conventional housing delivery in remote communities? What are the benefits there?
Neil Parkesh (20:18.242)
So there are quite a few benefits. mean, the nice thing about mass timber, it's been around for a long time, so it's tried and tested. You don't see a lot of it in Northern BC, which I think is part of the issue, that there isn't a lot of capacity in the North for building mass timber, but it is becoming a very popular product, let's say in the Lower Mainland and other places in Canada and the United States. And the reason for that is it's very versatile, it carbon sequesters, and it's a beautiful product and a beautiful material to use and work with.
We decided to test that out for Northern Housing and primarily we decided to do that for its resilience, both in terms of being resistant to fire, but also being very robust structurally. There's a concept in the Nicasaly community where decisions are kind of considered with this sort of seven generation mindset. We want to do things that have a long impact within the community and so building out of mass timber is definitely something that would contribute to the longevity of the housing in that region. And so that's what we decided to leverage for these houses. One other thing I'll just add is it also allows us to prefabricate the houses in offsite in a controlled environmental setting, which allows our sort of production window to be extended to, you know, very cold seasons and then have housing installed once ground thaws and we can do the foundations and that sort of thing. So we're also trying to align the production of these houses with the different climate implications that are happening, whether it's too hot or whether it's too cold. So that's another advantage to use it. So what technical and supply chain innovations have become very central and important to this project?
From a technical side, one of the things that we tried to do was integrate the architectural design process with the structural design process and the fabrication and production process. So what that means for us is that we're working in building integrated management, BIM software, like most other firms are these days. That's integrated with our structural engineer who's working in CADWORKS, which is a Canadian developed software for the production industry. And that allows us to basically produce drawings right down to the individual piece that goes into the wall and floor assemblies.
Amy Villis
Why is indigenous stewardship of timber and value-added production so critical?
Neil Parkesh
A lot of the timber in this area is coming from Indigenous traditional territories and having the opportunity to acknowledge that First Nations are going to play an incredible role in the future of Canada, not just in terms of governance and leadership, but also in terms of, you know, applying traditional knowledge to how we kind of live with the natural environment and how we utilize the resources that are available to us. And that means working with community and that means working with industry and governance and seeing how we can align priorities when it comes to utilizing and developing systems to solve certain issues like the housing crisis.
Amy Villis (23:24.812)
That's leaning into the trees to keys scenario, I feel like, here, where really this project is an example of how we're able to potentially use lumber from the area with the title rights that the Indigenous communities should have and should have access to, and robustly so, in order to build homes for their own communities. And the other piece for this that's really important is how the project is supporting local economy and workforce development.
With the scalability of this project, what do you see the impact on the economy and the workforce?
Neil Parkesh
So we had carpenters who normally do stick frame who are assembling panels. And then we had the Nikosli Construction Company who basically assembled the panels and installed them all. The kind of proof was in the pudding when we installed those panels within five days for the house and everything fit together. So the accuracy, attention and care that was brought to building the panels translated into when they were installed. I think everybody at that point could see the value of what we were doing. It was quite exciting.
Amy Villis
From your perspective, what ensures indigenous communities benefit and have lasting authority?
Neil Parkesh
The Nicaslea Development Corporation will be the majority stakeholder in this business. So they'll own the IP for the project and the partnership that they formed is with companies, Prakash Architecture, Deadwood and Associates, and Gelhoff Engineering. And those partnerships are minor stakeholders in the enterprise, but they're there to provide the sort of the resources and the knowledge that isn't currently available in community. And so I think that's the main thing here is that this is a First Nations led project and it's for solving problems related to housing within the community. And it's something that can be scalable for their own community, for surrounding communities, and it's a model that can be reapplied to other First Nations within that part of BC and maybe a little bit further on.
Amy Villis
What role should government and industry play when helping indigenous communities?
Neil Parkesh
One of the main things is to first understand what is the capacity, the current capacity of an individual nation and where do they need partnership in order to provide the additional resources that are needed to make something like what we're doing feasible. Trying to figure out ways to pair up industry partners to support First Nations and being able to build their own capacity in the areas where they're lacking it so that housing can be provided.
And so funding equipment, funding training, funding support programs to help people get the necessary training that they need is all important. And I think also some flexibility perhaps for our project, we're doing a housing kit. And so the traditional way of building requiring the inspections in the field is slightly different than what we might need in order to get approvals for our housing. And so an understanding of that and some flexibility in the codes would probably
helped quite a bit. One other thing I'll add though is that, you know, it takes a little bit of time to do something new. And so I think some flexibility in the schedule and, you know, in the budget around developing a new product and bringing it to market is really important because, you know, to take a new idea and say that, it needs to be competitive against existing markets or existing suppliers that are already out the gate, like from day one is a really difficult thing probably for anybody to do, let alone First Nations communities who are also dealing with other issues that perhaps put them at a bit of a disadvantage.
Amy Villis
Looking ahead, the Mass Timber Housing Kit for the Nicosle Nation, what I see on this concept of the trees to keys where we're using local material, looking at designs, looking at the manufacturing for a panelized offsite process, to really expedite, make something affordable and land to the needs of the communities. Maybe if you could speak a little bit about where you see this going. Obviously you're working heavily on the design side in order to make all of those pieces happen and then talk about that a little bit.
Neil Parkesh
Yeah, I think like from a starting point, we engage with the community to see what they would like to see in the house and what was needed in the house, what their priorities were. One of the things that came out of that was the sort of climate resilience piece around housing and making sure that their house was able to withstand changes in climate and be responsive and comfortable. And to solve the housing crisis, Canada needs to leverage their existing resources and think outside of the box and work together.
Amy Villis (28:11.555)
Thanks so much to Robin and Neil for sharing their insights on how Indigenous-led stewardship, smart partnership and digital innovation are reshaping what housing resiliency really means in Canada. In our next episode, we'll dive into DASH, digitally accelerated standardized housing platform, a holistic digital framework that ties together everything we've talked about so far. From unified standards to modular designs and faster permitting, we'll explore how these elements work in sync to shape a more scalable, affordable and inclusive housing future for Canada.
This podcast is powered by Digital's Housing Growth Innovation Program with support from the Province of British Columbia and the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs.