09/08/2026
The first one went up in his back garden.
Marcel LeBrun built a tiny home behind his own house in Fredericton to see whether the idea worked at all. He had sold his software company, Radian6, to Salesforce. He had money and no particular plan for it beyond having said, repeatedly, that somebody should do something about the number of people sleeping rough in his city.
Before building anything he travelled through Canada, the United States and Ghana looking at what other people had tried and which parts of it actually worked.
What he landed on was a village.
Since September 2021, a warehouse on Fredericton's north side has been producing a small, crayon-coloured house roughly every four business days. Each one has a kitchen, a three piece bathroom, solar panels on the roof and a porch. They get trucked down the road and craned onto foundations.
The last of them, number 96, went in during April 2024.
Residents are not required to be sober to live there. Substance counselling is available on site. There is a social enterprise centre with a café, retail units and workshops, and residents work in them, and in the factory that builds the houses.
LeBrun put in around four million dollars of his own. Provincial and federal government added roughly thirteen million more.
His own summary of it is that he won the parent lottery, the education lottery and the country lottery, and that it would be arrogant to claim he earned all of what he received 💛
