Just as important is what the homes cost the people who live in them: rent is set at only 30 percent of a resident's income, and it includes utilities and internet. For someone transitioning out of homelessness — perhaps working a first job in years, perhaps living on social assistance — that formula makes the difference between a home that heals and a home that becomes another source of stress.
The homes are engineered for New Brunswick's punishing climate. Insulation, heating, and airtight construction matter enormously when winter temperatures can sit at minus 20 for weeks; a poorly built tiny home in Fredericton would be a liability, not a gift. The solar panels on each roof do quiet double duty: trimming utility bills for the community and signalling that these houses, small as they are, belong to the future rather than to the margins.
Residents are not hand-picked by the founder or his friends. Referrals come through the New Brunswick Housing waitlist and Fredericton's coordinated By-Name List — the same systems the rest of the city's housing programs use. The units themselves are subsidized through Social Development. In other words, 12 Neighbours functions less like a private enclave and more like a piece of the city's own housing system, tied to public intake and public accountability.
More than somewhere to sleep
If the houses are the body of 12 Neighbours, its beating heart is the enterprise centre: a $3-million hub at the middle of the village that houses Neighbourly Coffee (a café run by residents), a teaching kitchen, Neighbourly Print (a silk-screen printing business), retail space, workshops, and community gardens.
This is where LeBrun's vision moves beyond shelter. The social enterprises exist to do three things at once: give residents real jobs and real skills, generate revenue that supports the community, and — just as importantly — give the wider city a reason to visit. Part of the design philosophy is that 12 Neighbours should not feel sealed off from Fredericton. Residents of the city come for a cup of coffee or an affordable custom-printed shirt, and in doing so, they meet the neighbours.
Take Samantha Seymour, one of the village's early residents, who found work in the silk-printing business, producing printed text and graphics for shirts and tote bags. She has spoken about how the community's security gates — the village is gated, with controlled access — gave her something she had not felt in years: safety. "I live right behind the security gates," she said. "There were cars coming in all the time, at three o'clock in the morning, waking me up. The gates have set boundaries."
Her story captures the project's deeper logic. Many people arriving at 12 Neighbours carry what LeBrun openly calls "baggage, emotional and societal" — trauma, addiction, years of instability. The gates are not about keeping residents in; they are about keeping chaos out, so that recovery has a chance to take root.
The University of New Brunswick, LeBrun's alma mater, has followed the project closely. In a 2022 alumni profile updated in 2026, the university described how the organization has evolved "well beyond housing" into what it calls a pathway to independence — connecting stable housing with recovery supports, personal development, education, employment, and entrepreneurship. Initiatives like Neighbourly Coffee and Neighbourly Print, the university noted, reflect LeBrun's long-held belief that lasting change comes not only from shelter, but from purpose and belonging.
A day in the village
To understand what 12 Neighbours actually feels like, imagine an ordinary Tuesday. Morning light comes up over the little roofs. Someone walks to Neighbourly Coffee for a cup brewed by a neighbour who, a year ago, had not held a steady job in a decade. In the print shop, the day's orders are stacked up: tote bags for a local business, team shirts for a Fredericton sports club, each one printed by hands that are relearning what it means to be relied upon.
In the teaching kitchen, a small group learns to cook meals they can make in their own kitchens — a modest skill with an immodest effect, because nothing says "home" like feeding yourself in it. Out in the community gardens, residents tend plots through the short, intense New Brunswick summer, and some of what they grow ends up back in the café.
There are bad days, of course. Recovery is not linear, and the village does not pretend otherwise. But the structure of the place absorbs the bad days instead of punishing them. Miss a shift and you do not lose your home. Relapse and you do not lose your neighbours. That, more than any single building, is the innovation: a community designed around the assumption that people will stumble, and built to catch them when they do.
From a tent to a front porch
Among the village's early residents was a man who had previously been living in a tent. For him, the move into a 12 Neighbours home was not merely a change of address; it was the first stable ground he had stood on in longer than he cared to remember. With a locked door, a kitchen of his own, and a community around him, he was able to do something that had felt impossible from inside a tent: find employment through the project's own enterprises and begin rebuilding a life.