A new Fraser Institute study showed that in over a quarter of urban neighbourhoods in Canada, the number of housing units decreased from 2016 to 2021. This is happening even though many cities in the country are experiencing a housing shortage..“Policymakers across the board acknowledge there is a lack of new housing in Canada’s cities, and yet, 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,” said Josef Filipowicz, a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and co-author of Making Room for Growth: Housing Intensification in Canada’s Cities, 2016-2021. . Fraser Institue Making Room for Growth Housing .According to the study, 54.2% of Canada's housing stock growth between 2016 and 2021 took place in established urban neighbourhoods rather than on unused or undeveloped land. .That type of growth, known as intensification, means existing neighbourhoods are being used to accommodate the increasing demand for housing..Out of the new housing units built in pre-existing urban neighbourhoods (referred to as census tracts by Statistics Canada), 50.9% were built in only 5% of those neighbourhoods. That means a small number of neighbourhoods were responsible for a large proportion of the new housing development..In Canadian cities, approximately half of all neighbourhoods experienced an increase of less than 1% in the number of housing units. This shows the growth in housing units was minimal in a significant portion of the neighbourhoods across the country..During the same time period, around 26.4% of urban neighbourhoods in Canada actually observed a decrease in the total number of housing units. This means that in more than a quarter of the neighbourhoods, the overall housing availability decreased instead of increasing..“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 Fraser Institute is a Canadian non-partisan public policy think-tank.
