While many cities across the country struggled with acute housing shortages, more than one in four of Canada’s urban neighbourhoods declined, according to a new study.
“As Canada struggles to close the gap between the number of homes needed and the number built, its communities are faced with two options to increase housing supply: spreading outward, by adding new neighbourhoods at the urban fringe, or becoming more dense, by allowing more homes to be built within existing neighbourhoods—a process called “intensification,” says the report.
“Large swaths of the urban landscape have seen little to no increase in the number of housing units, or worse, they’ve actually seen a decline,” explains Josef Filipowicz, a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and co-author of the study.
The study finds that from 2016 to 2021, more than half (54.2 percent) of Canada’s housing stock growth occurred in existing urban neighbourhoods instead of unused, undeveloped land. This suggests an unbalanced pattern of growth in housing stock.
“This highly uneven growth pattern holds across most major metropolitan areas,” says the report. It says that given the acute housing shortage, Canada needs new housing supply across all housing types, regions, and neighbourhoods.
Of the pre-existing neighbourhoods that had new housing units built, 50.9 percent were constructed in just 5 percent of urban neighbourhoods.
Half of all neighbourhoods in major Canadian cities had less than a 1 percent increase in the number of new housing units built, while 26.4 percent of those communities saw a drop in the number of housing units, representing a cumulative net loss of 33,723 dwellings.
“What growth we are seeing in new housing units across Canadian cities, it is largely happening in very small pockets,” said Steve Lafleur, Fraser Institute senior fellow and study co-author. “To more meaningfully tackle the housing shortage in Canada, policymakers will have to look at ways to create more housing units of all types across our urban areas, and not just in certain small pockets.”
The report indicated that recent analyses from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimate Canada’s housing deficit to be in the millions of housing units, even as low rental vacancy rates indicate there are also issues in the supply of rental units.
“For some municipalities, notably those that have already built over their entire geographical jurisdiction (for example, Vancouver, Victoria, Montréal) or that face geographical barriers to outward expansion (for example, West Vancouver), intensification is the only means by which they can add commercial and residential space,” said the report.
It also suggests that many provincial governments have implemented policies that specifically restrict outward expansion.
