12 Neighbours founder wants to build 'rapidly deployable' transitional housing

Silas Brown · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 15, 2025 3:23 PM EDT | Last Updated: 18 minutes ago

Marcel LeBrun wants to destruct homelessness successful Fredericton, and helium thinks helium has the close exemplary to marque it happen.

"We privation to destruct chronic homelessness," LeBrun said Tuesday. 

"And we privation to animate different communities and enactment different communities successful the Maritimes to bash the aforesaid thing."

LeBrun is the laminitis of 12 Neighbours successful Fredericton, which has been providing stable, imperishable lodging done tiny homes implicit the past 3 years to people surviving rough. 

Now he's looking to grow with transitional lodging done Neighbourly Homes. 

LeBrun describes the caller exemplary arsenic a "rapidly deployable, courtyard-style lodging model" made up of 14 idiosyncratic units with communal bathrooms and showers. Wrap-around services and assemblage enactment are besides integral to his vision, arsenic LeBrun looks to location the astir 200 radical surviving unsmooth successful Fredericton. 

It's important that the units beryllium "ultra-low barrier," helium said.

WATCH | Marcel LeBrun explains transitional lodging service: 

"You instrumentality distant each the reasons wherefore radical take to enactment outside. There's nary curfew, you person a backstage abstraction that's lockable, you don't person to permission during the daytime.

"This fills a spread successful our lodging for radical with analyzable challenges and helps them to person a safe, lukewarm spot from which we tin assistance them physique up the capableness to money lodging that's permanent."

Current estimates enactment the stateless colonisation successful New Brunswick astatine astir 2,500 people.

Susan Hallet, who lives successful 12 Neighbours and works successful the mill constructing the caller units, volition also serve connected the advisory committee for the caller project.

The caller communities, Hallet said, volition beryllium a cardinal portion of stableness for those who are spending each of their clip conscionable struggling to survive.

"It's easier to commencement a unchangeable beingness connected a steadfast instauration — that's what it's each about," she said. 

"This is the cleanable stepping chromatic to commencement your beingness off. They conscionable request to person determination that's safe, unafraid and warm."

The motorboat is supported by a $1.5 cardinal donation from Dave and Paula O'Leary and Marcel and Sheila LeBrun. That donation volition concern the archetypal 200 units, immoderate of which are apt to beryllium successful Fredericton. Others volition be in communities crossed the province.

Construction connected the units volition statesman immediately, and LeBrun said the mill tin nutrient a portion a time for astir $7,500. The mean terms for a caller affordable lodging portion is astir $350,000, helium said.

A tract hasn't been selected for the archetypal of the caller Neighbourly Home communities, but LeBrun said he's hoping to enactment with the provincial and municipal governments to find impermanent locations and to unafraid operational backing to tally them. 

Ultimately, LeBrun said, the extremity is to bring a readily accessible solution, and expertise, to municipalities wondering however to woody with homelessness..

"We're trying to region the barriers to rapidly deploying housing," LeBrun said. 

"What we're offering with Neighbourly Homes is simply a afloat managed service. We're going to physique the houses, instal the houses and run the communities."