The Challenge
The DAM Solution
Canada’s housing crisis is and has been intensifying for decades. Federal, provincial, and municipal governments are all prioritizing new housing supply, with billions in funding expected to flow over the coming decades. Much of the focus to date has been on new builds, yet; a significant portion of the urban housing stock remains “stuck” in mid to high density neighborhoods dominated by detattached and detached plexes (duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes). In Montreal alone, roughly one-third of all dwelling units are in plexes. These buildings cannot simply be demolished and replaced with higher-density projects due to sustainability concerns and the displacement of existing tenants—outcomes that would undermine the very goals of the housing crisis response and sustainability goals.
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The DAM Housing Initiative proposes a scalable strategy to densify plex neighborhoods through prefabricated, panelized unit additions to existing roofs. Prefab construction dramatically reduces on-site disruption, making it viable in occupied and tenant-sensitive buildings. While single-project prefab can be expensive, our approach leverages economies of repetition: plexes within a given city share nearly identical designs, lot sizes, and construction techniques, as they were built en masse by the same developers during the same historical eras. This means one engineered solution can be replicated across dozens or even hundreds of buildings, turning what is traditionally a custom renovation into a repeatable product.
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By clustering plexes into “typology sets,” we can design, permit, and fabricate one solution and deploy it at scale. This creates a new asset class in urban housing supply: replicable densification packages. Unlike conventional development, which relies on piecemeal infill, demolition of existing buildings and disruptive new builds, Dam Housing offers a middle-density growth pathway that respects neighborhood fabric, protects tenants, and drastically accelerates the speed at which new units can come online.