Canada's mid-size cities are growing like big ones — and running into the same fights

[MolsonExport]

Canada's mid-size cities are growing like big ones — and running into the same fights



The view of downtown London, Ont., from Scenic View Park in the city's west-end. The city's skyline has changed quickly, growing from a handful towers to many more in the last 15 years. (Colin Butler/CBC News)

For generations, growth in many Canadian cities meant the same thing: new subdivisions at the edge of town, detached homes, longer roads and outward expansion. Now, rising land costs, changing affordability pressures, population growth and public policies have pushed builders to add more multi-unit housing, not just newer subdivisions at the edges of cities. CBC News examined 15 years of Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) data for seven mid-size cities: Ontario's London and Kitchener-Waterloo, Halifax, and B.C.'s Abbotsford, Nanaimo, Kelowna and Victoria to capture how growth patterns are changing outside Canada's largest centres.

In each community, apartments, row housing and other multi-unit forms now make up a growing share of new construction, representing nine out of every 10 homes built in Victoria, Abbotsford and Kitchener-Waterloo. In Nanaimo, multi-unit starts were only a tenth of its total construction in 2010, but by 2025, they accounted for two-thirds of the market, while London and Kelowna saw their multi-unit shares jump by 50 per cent, flipping their development profiles from single-family-centric to high-density-centric in just 15 years.

It means that mid-size cities across Canada — long seen as communities that are still urban, but where people sought more space — are adding multi-unit residencies at a pace not seen in decades. The shift is exposing a deep divide: not over whether more housing is needed, but over what kind and who that housing is actually for.

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Other points raised in the article:
-Building boom didn't bring lower rents
-Math often supports density
-'Missing middle' faces big hurdles
-Neighbours pushing back
-Density shift may not hold