How can we expand the supply of housing on public land in Canada?

HART releases Report on Expanding the Supply of Housing on Public Land

In our “More Housing Here” report on potential housing yield on public land, we identified that over one million people could reasonably be housed on public land in just 12 communities across Canada (and possibly millions more across the entire country). With so much potential within grasp, why haven’t more homes been built? The “Workshops to Expand the Supply of Housing on Public Land in Canada” report aims to answer that question.

The “Workshops to Expand Housing Supply on Public Land in Canada” project is one of the largest qualitative research projects of senior housing stakeholders in the country. The work encompasses over engagements including nearly 50 research interviews and four workshops with senior housing stakeholders across four Canadian cities to understand the barriers to building on public land, and how communities could overcome those barriers. This research captures diverse perspectives from municipal staff, elected officials, provincial and territorial staff, non-profit housing providers, private developers, consultants, lawyers, architects, Indigenous-led organizations, and advocacy organizations. While these workshops focused on specific challenges in four communities, the findings in the report cross municipal and provincial boundaries and are applicable to the challenges and needed solutions that the housing sector faces across the country.

Based on the common themes and key solutions identified in the interviews and workshops, there are four broad recommendations for necessary actions to increase access to public land for housing development in Canada:

1. Decrease risk for developers to curb an increasingly volatile development market and encourage housing development.
2. Prioritize streamlining of the municipal approvals process for housing development across departments.
3. Increase capacity and support for the non-market sector.
4. Create incentives to stimulate construction and disincentives to limit land speculation to overcome high cost and global supply chain challenges.

Our Solutions Report provides a more concise overview of these themes and strategies to enact them.

The full Project Report encompasses our solutions report, as well as a more detailed breakdown of the specific challenges, solutions, and key takeaways for the four cities where workshops were conducted and detailed transcription of participant solutions.

If you have any questions about this report, or any other HART project, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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HART works with population data, housing data, and land data across Canada to help communities, non-profits, and the public to better understand the housing realities for people across the country, and make better decisions to improve those realities. If you want to work with HART, or if you’d like to learn more about our work, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.