Barb Jinkerson

In the spring of 2011, a forty-one-year-old software engineer from Fredericton, New Brunswick, named Marcel LeBrun sold the company he had co-founded five years earlier to Salesforce of San Francisco for approximately three hundred and twenty-six million dollars in cash, plus another fifty million dollars in stock. The company was called Radian6. It had become, in five years, one of the largest social-media monitoring platforms in North America. The sale was, at the time, one of the largest acquisitions in the history of the Canadian Maritimes. LeBrun, who had grown up in the province and earned his electrical and computer engineering degree at the University of New Brunswick, did not move anywhere else. He stayed in Fredericton. He drove an exotic car for a while. He took some racing lessons. He worked for Salesforce for a few years, then for a venture firm, then for a small automotive software company. Then he looked around his own city. By the late twenty-tens, the Canadian housing crisis was no longer an abstraction in his hometown. Fredericton, population around sixty-five thousand, had begun to see a significant rise in the number of people sleeping in cars, in tents along the river, and in temporary shelter beds. Most of them were not addicts. Many of them had jobs. They could not, on those jobs, cover what rent now cost in the city. Marcel LeBrun was a wealthy man living in a community where his neighbors were sleeping outside in the New Brunswick winter. He decided that this was a problem with a solution. He and his wife Sheila, an occupational therapist, spent the next several years researching what worked. They visited social enterprises in American cities, in Calgary, in Winnipeg, and in Ghana. They concluded that what people coming out of homelessness needed first was not a bed in a shelter, but a door of their own that locked. In 2021, LeBrun bought a stretch of land on Fredericton's north side, near a Walmart parking lot. He converted a former building-supply warehouse into a small factory. He and Sheila put four and a half million dollars of their own money into a non-profit they called 12 Neighbours, and they began building tiny houses. Each finished house was two hundred and fifty square feet. Each had a small porch, a private bathroom, a compact kitchen, a sleeping area, solar panels on the roof, and walls of tongue-and-groove pine. Each was painted a different bright color. The factory could produce one of these houses, in completed and inspection-ready form, every four days. Each one cost approximately fifty-five thousand dollars to build. The current average cost of a new affordable housing unit in Canada, by LeBrun's own measurement, was around three hundred and fifty thousand. The first residents, a couple named Melissa and Payton Armstrong, moved into 12 Neighbours in February of 2022. They had been living in a tent on the same north side of Fredericton for the previous ten months. The community grew from one house to forty-five by the end of that year, and to ninety-six by April of 2024, when the last home was strapped to a custom hydraulic trailer at the warehouse and lifted onto its foundation a few kilometers away. Randy Burtch, a fifty-seven-year-old construction worker who had been living for about a year in his 2004 Chevy Impala because pandemic-era rents in Fredericton had outpaced what his odd jobs could cover, was among the first to move in. A month later, he was hired full-time as one of the carpenters building more tiny houses at the same factory that had built his. He told the Globe and Mail, when a reporter asked him what the difference had been, that if he wanted a shower he could have a shower, and if he wanted something to eat he could go cook it. In early 2023, the provincial and federal governments contributed thirteen million dollars in additional funding to the project. LeBrun had not asked for the money to start an idea. He had asked for it after he had already demonstrated, in his own backyard, that the idea worked. In April of 2025, with 12 Neighbours fully occupied, LeBrun launched a second non-profit. He called it Neighbourly Homes. Its product was a smaller and more rapidly deployable transitional housing unit, designed in courtyard clusters of fourteen, costing approximately seventy-five hundred dollars per unit to build and capable of being assembled at one a day. He intended to scale the model across the Maritimes. By January of 2026, the first Neighbourly Homes site, with twenty-seven units, was operating in Fredericton. Marcel LeBrun is fifty-six years old. He still shows up at the warehouse on the north side of Fredericton every day. He knows the residents of 12 Neighbours by name. When asked, in a Maclean's profile published in early 2024, how he understood his own role in the situation, he said he had won the parent lottery, the education lottery, and the country lottery, and that it would have been arrogant of him to claim that any of the rest of it had been entirely earned. If his story moved you, drop one word in the comments — Marcel, Fredericton, neighbours, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.