The Village That Hope Built: How a Canadian Millionaire Turned His Fortune Into 96 Tiny Homes for the Homeless
A neighbourhood like no other
From the air, it looks like a miniature suburb dropped into the rolling hills outside Fredericton, New Brunswick: neat rows of colourful little houses, each with its own tiny porch, each roof carrying a dark panel of solar glass. There are gardens. There is a café. There are people who wave at neighbours they know by name.
Nothing about the scene looks extraordinary — until you learn who lives here, and why the place exists at all.
This is 12 Neighbours, a village of 96 fully equipped tiny homes built not for profit, not for sale, but for people experiencing homelessness. Behind it stands an unlikely founder: Marcel LeBrun, a Canadian technology millionaire who, after selling his software company, decided that the most interesting problem he could solve next was not in code, but on the streets of his own community.
LeBrun invested approximately $4 million of his own money into the project, supplemented by government grants that brought total funding to roughly $12 million. The final home of the initial buildout was completed on April 18, 2024, transforming what had once been dismissed as an impossibly ambitious idea into a thriving, living community.
It is a story about housing. But as LeBrun himself insists, it was never only about housing.
The man behind the millions
Marcel LeBrun did not set out to become a philanthropist. He set out, as he puts it, to build things. A software engineer by training and a graduate of the University of New Brunswick, LeBrun co-founded Radian6, a social-media monitoring company that became one of Atlantic Canada's great startup success stories. When American giant Salesforce acquired Radian6 in 2011, LeBrun's share of the deal made him a multi-millionaire many times over.
He could have done what wealthy founders so often do: start another company, buy a bigger house, disappear into a comfortable life of investments and board seats. For a while, he stayed in the tech world, including a stint as a senior vice-president at Salesforce and later work in venture capital. Friends expected him to launch another startup. Instead, he started sketching floor plans.
Those who have watched LeBrun's career say the pivot was less abrupt than it looked. Even at Radian6, he was known as a builder of teams and cultures, not just products — someone who believed an organization's design determined its outcomes. 12 Neighbours is, in a real sense, the same instinct applied to a harder problem: if you design the environment correctly, he reasoned, people will do the rest themselves.
But the question of homelessness in his home province kept nagging at him. New Brunswick is not Toronto or Vancouver; its housing crisis wears a quieter face, but it is real. Around 1,600 people in the province experienced homelessness for at least one day in a single recent year, according to figures reported by CBC. In a small city like Fredericton, the problem is visible to anyone willing to look: tents in the woods, people sleeping rough within blocks of comfortable neighbourhoods.
LeBrun is strikingly candid about the role of luck in his own life. "I won the parent lottery, the education lottery, the country lottery," he told Maclean's magazine. "It would be arrogant to say every piece of my 'success' was earned, when so much of it was received."
That humility became the seed of everything that followed at 12 Neighbours. "I see myself as a community builder," LeBrun told CBC, "and really what we're doing here is not just building a little community, but we're building a community in a city — like, how do we help our city be better?"
Why Fredericton — and why now
It is worth pausing on the setting, because New Brunswick is not where most people picture a homelessness crisis. Fredericton is a postcard city: a provincial capital of about 60,000 people, all historic garrison buildings and tree-lined streets along the Saint John River. But beneath that postcard, the same forces reshaping housing across Canada have been at work — only with fewer cushions.
When LeBrun began the project, the city's shelters were routinely full. People camped in tents in wooded areas within sight of downtown, and every winter brought the same grim arithmetic: nighttime temperatures in Fredericton regularly plunge below minus 20 degrees Celsius, turning a night unsheltered into a medical emergency. Outreach workers spoke of a population that was not only growing but becoming more visible — and more vulnerable.
This is the context in which LeBrun's "housing first" conviction hardened into action. The debate in homelessness policy often gets abstract, but on the ground in a New Brunswick winter it is brutally concrete: a person cannot address addiction, trauma, or unemployment while spending every night trying not to freeze. Give them a locked door and heat first, LeBrun concluded, and everything else becomes a conversation instead of a crisis.
Searching for an answer
LeBrun did not rush into construction. Before founding his nonprofit, he travelled across the United States, Canada, and even Ghana, studying how different organisations tackled homelessness and poverty — looking, with an engineer's eye, for what actually worked.