It takes 72 hours, not 72 days, to build.
As the crane operator lowers a prefabricated wall panel — delicately sliding the multi-ton behemoth into position only inches from the neighbouring house — a tangle of worker arms reaches out and quickly secures it before a crowd of onlookers.
Not typically fans of living beside construction for months while a house is torn down and rebuilt, the neighbours in this case were not only curious, they were excited.
The crane showed up on Monday morning and, by Wednesday afternoon, a three-storey house had been erected.
“That was fast,” said one woman, who paused briefly to check out the new build while walking her dog.
Prefabricated construction, where large panels are built in a factory, trucked to the site and snapped into place like an oversized Lego set, has long been touted as a solution to the housing crisis because the speed and repeatability of the process keeps costs down.