Modular housing was a hit in Sweden but a bust in the U.S. How will Canada do?

Like Sweden, Japan and the U.S. before it, Canada will start experimenting with scaled-up factory-built housing next year — and it has plenty of lessons to learn from countries where the industry has already matured.

Build Canada Homes, the federal government's newly launched homebuilding agency, aims to fund the construction of 4,000 modular homes on federal land across the country starting next year. The public-private project — currently limited to six cities — could eventually scale to build 45,000 homes, according to Ottawa's announcement.

That's only a sliver of the 4.8 million homes that Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation says will need to be built by 2030 to restore housing affordability in this country, but the federal government hopes prefabricated homes will play a cr