In 2011, He Sold His Tech Company for $326 Million. Then He Went Home and Started Watching.
Fredericton, New Brunswick. Population 65,000.
Not exactly where you’d expect a revolution to start.
Marcel LeBrun grew up here. Went to university here. Built a social media software company called Radian6 here, starting with a small team and a specific idea and the particular stubbornness of someone who does not know yet what is supposed to be impossible.
In May 2011, Salesforce acquired Radian6 for $326 million in cash and $50 million in stock. It was the largest venture-backed technology exit in Canadian history. Marcel was forty years old. He stayed on at Salesforce as a senior vice president for a few years, then left in 2015, returned to New Brunswick, and stood in the middle of the life he had built.
He looked at what was around him.
And then he really looked.
Tents on grassy patches in the city center. Families sleeping in their cars in parking lots, moving from one side of a lot to another before anyone noticed. People huddled in doorways as the Canadian winter arrived without compromise. A waitlist for subsidized housing in New Brunswick stretching to six thousand names.
Most people with the kind of money Marcel had made would have felt sad about that. Maybe written a check. Attended a gala. Funded a study. Filed it under problems bigger than one person and let the guilt settle into the background of an otherwise comfortable life.
Marcel looked at it the way a software engineer looks at a broken system.
This is a problem. Problems have solutions. What are we actually trying to build here?
He told Maclean’s magazine: “I won the parent lottery, the education lottery, the country lottery. It would be arrogant to say every piece of my success was earned, when so much of it was received.”
Then he got to work figuring out how to spend it.
For years, he and his wife Sheila — a retired occupational therapist who understood, in the specific and practical language of her profession, what people actually need to rebuild a functioning life — traveled. They visited nonprofits and social enterprises across Canada, the United States, and as far as Ghana, looking for models that worked. Not models that provided emergency relief. Models that created permanent transformation.
What Marcel kept finding, again and again, was the same gap.
Emergency relief, he observed, gets done reasonably well. The safety net catches people. But the support disappears the moment someone starts improving — which is precisely the moment it is most needed. The system, as designed, was accidentally optimised to keep people stuck.
He thought about that for a long time.
Then he came back to Fredericton and started staking out a piece of land.
He did it literally. He walked a 65-acre plot on Fredericton’s north side — land previously used for harvesting trees — with wooden stakes and a measuring tape, laying out the shape of a community he hadn’t built yet. He adjusted distances until they felt right. He stood in the middle of it and tried to imagine what 99 homes could do for 99 people who had nowhere to go.
A local church group donated an 8,000-square-foot warehouse space. Marcel converted it into a manufacturing facility — not for software, not for algorithms, but for homes. He staffed it with workers paid a living wage, and the factory began producing fully designed, architecturally built tiny homes at a rate of one every four days, at a cost of $55,000 each. When conventional construction was failing to deliver affordable housing at $200,000 a unit, Marcel was doing it for less than a quarter of the price.
He applied to the federal government for funding in July 2021. By the time the approval came through seventeen months later, he had already built thirty-five homes with his own money.
He didn’t wait for permission. He showed them what the idea looked like when it was already running.
The community is called 12 Neighbours.
Walk in off the gravel driveway and what you find is not what the address prepares you for. Ninety-nine small homes — painted in warm, distinct colours — lining quiet paths. Each one roughly 250 square feet. Small, yes. But private. Lockable. Solar-panelled. With a full kitchen, a bathroom, a small deck out front, and a door that belongs entirely to the person on the other side of it.
A community center anchors the village — housing Neighbourly Coffee, a café and teaching kitchen run by residents themselves, a silk-screen printing workshop, community gardens. Goal-setting programs. Mental health counseling. Addiction support. Not beds. Jobs. Not charity. Purpose.
Rent is set at 30 percent of whatever the resident earns. The maximum — including all utilities and internet — is $200 a month.
Marcel’s quote about the difference between philanthropy and what he was actually doing stayed with him through the whole build: “The word philanthropy is often interpreted as someone who gives money. But the Greek roots of the word mean to love humans. What I have discovered is that spending money is the easy thing. Spending yourself is the hard thing.”
He spent himself.
Randy Burtch had been sleeping in his 2004 Chevy Impala for about a year.
He had work — construction jobs, here and there — but pandemic-era rents in Fredericton had climbed far beyond what those jobs could cover. No kitchen. No shower. No address. No place that was his.
When he moved into 12 Neighbours, someone asked him what it meant to have a working kitchen again.
He said: “If I want a shower, I can have one. If I want something to eat, I can cook it.”
That is what $55,000 buys. Not luxury. The specific, irreplaceable dignity of a door with a lock and a kitchen that is yours.
The first couple to move into the community had spent ten months living in a tent, taking sponge baths in the woods behind a lumber yard. They walked into their new home and closed the door behind them.
In early 2023, the provincial and federal governments added $13 million in funding. Not to launch an idea — to scale one that had already proven itself.
Marcel is not finished.
He has launched a second initiative — Neighbourly Homes — a rapidly deployable housing model designed to scale across the Maritimes. Other nonprofits are already ordering homes from his factory. A community for vulnerable youth is being planned in Ontario. A second 12 Neighbours community is taking shape in Miramichi, New Brunswick.
He still shows up on-site every day. He knows residents by name. He attends community events. He treats the whole thing the way he treated every startup he ever built: as a problem with barriers, none of them actually impossible, all of them worth solving if you are willing to stay long enough to solve them.
There are still thousands of people on the housing waitlist in New Brunswick.
There are 99 homes at 12 Neighbours, with more being built.
The math doesn’t balance yet.
But it is more balanced than it was three years ago. And Marcel LeBrun is still in the factory.
Because that is what happens when someone with resources, a specific idea, and the specific personality type that cannot live comfortably with an unsolved problem decides that homelessness is not too complicated.
It is just unsolved.
And he is not the kind of person who can leave it that way.