New Brunswick non-profit 12 Neighbours expanding micro-home venture

One recent Monday, a crew of carpenters strapped an architecturally designed tiny home onto a custom hydraulic trailer at a warehouse on the north side of Fredericton.

A few kilometres down the road, it was lifted atop a foundation in the 12 Neighbours community of tiny, crayon-coloured permanent homes near a Walmart parking lot in the New Brunswick capital.

This is the 96th house – the last in a project helmed by local software entrepreneur turned philanthropist Marcel LeBrun, whose unique model is now poised to redefine how communities and non-profits approach solutions to the national homelessness crisis.

Mr. LeBrun invested his own capital in the project and has been on site daily to oversee its progress, much like he did for Radian6, the social-media-monitoring company he co-founded and sold to Salesforce for $436.9-million more than a decade ago.

The federal government announced a spate of initiatives to address the housing shortage in the spring budget, and provinces and municipalities have been scrambling to improve zoning and permitting processes and provide more emergency shelters, temporary housing and dedicated encampments. Mr. LeBrun says some of these measures are simply Band-Aids that won’t help unhoused people find stability and get their lives on track.

Mr. LeBrun’s model offers some hope. He’s found that using fundraised capital, in this case donated by him and his wife, Sheila, to build first, instead of applying to government and waiting for the money to build rent-subsidized housing stock, is more efficient. And he’s figured out a blueprint to plow through government red tape to make it happen.

Two years ago, Randy Burtch was among the first to move into one of the 250-square-foot homes after living in his 2004 Chevy Impala for about a year. The odd jobs he worked in construction couldn’t cover the cost of rent, which skyrocketed for him during the pandemic.

“It’s turned my health around. If I want a shower, I can have a shower. If I want something to eat, I go cook it. It’s not like I have to run to Subway or KFC to get something to eat all the time.”

“Here, we have a solution to homelessness,” he said, adding that he hopes to buy his own property some day and no longer rent.

The homes are modest but with warm touches – tongue and groove pine walls, a veranda, and natural light flood the compact kitchen and private bathroom.

Each tiny home comes with a provincial subsidy that caps rent at one-third of a resident’s earnings. In order to qualify, the 57-year-old Mr. Burtch had to apply for social assistance. A month later, he began working full-time at one of the social enterprises connected to 12 Neighbours – building more tiny homes – a position he’s held for two years.

Residents have access to goal-setting programs and counselling for addictions and mental health, to help set them up to work for one of the social enterprises connected to the community, said Mr. Lebrun. Its café, Neighbourly Coffee, which has a bakery and a teaching kitchen, is set to open in June inside the non-profit’s sprawling sunlit community centre.

Mr. LeBrun and Sheila, an occupational therapist, put up $4.5-million to launch the project after spending several years researching and visiting social enterprises in major U.S. cities, Calgary, Winnipeg and Ghana.

Mr. LeBrun said he saw that providing housing where people also had a chance to develop a sense of purpose was a powerful game-changer.

“It’s investing in people as opposed to emergency relief,” he said during a recent interview with The Globe and Mail. “You take someone who was living outside, working full-time just to get food, and you put them in a house – they can finally start to deal with trauma.

“Giving people things to do, activities and a community is important. It’s more than just a house.”

The 12 Neighbours community is by no means perfect. Personal clashes have led to a few people being kicked out, Mr. LeBrun said. Following the rules, such as keeping your home tidy and registering guests, is still a struggle for some.

In a close-quarters community where many neighbours are visible from every window of the tiny home, Mr. LeBrun said the project experiences the same societal problems that plague other neighbourhoods – drugs, theft, property damage. It has led him to hire security guards to monitor surveillance cameras, to prevent unregistered guests and to install a security gate at the entrance to the village’s gravel driveway.

Myrna Nash of Wolastoqey Nation said what conflict there was is simmering down. She has lived at 12 Neighbours for about a year, after moving from the Gignoo Transition House, a shelter for Indigenous women in the city. Having support staff on-site if you need someone to talk to has been a good thing for her, she said, as she brushed orange paint onto a canvas – one of the community’s group activities.

“Right now, it’s a home,” Ms. Nash said. “I put some pictures up today of my family – my daughter and my nephew. I put my drum up. Because of this, I’ve also got painting supplies at home and I’ve done a few little pictures of my own.”

Recently, a steady stream of visitors from all over the country have been on site, including the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, other non-profits, politicians and organizations interested in replicating this model, which requires upfront capital independent of government, Mr. LeBrun said.

Already, a non-profit in Ontario is moving to create a like-minded village for vulnerable young people in the northern part of the province. And Niluka Johnson of Genesis Village of Hope said her charity is set to order 50 homes from Mr. LeBrun and plans to open its own tiny-house community in Miramichi, N.B., in 2025, with supports for residents and a hobby farm.

“Our goal is to prevent them from even entering into homelessness,” Ms. Johnson said from her home in Hamilton.

Now that Mr. LeBrun has mastered how to build the prototype of a permanent tiny home, cranking out a new one every four days at $55,000 a pop, he’s betting that demand will escalate.

He recently launched Neighbourly Homes, a tiny-home factory where 12 Neighbours residents such as Mr. Burtch can continue to work. These homes, which cost $65,000, are more architecturally modern and slightly larger, at 337 square feet.

“People can put one right in their own backyard – a tiny home for a student, a senior, for a rental,” Mr. LeBrun said.