Compared with Toronto, Edmonton is on a tear in building new homes.
The numbers speak for themselves.
Edmonton recorded 9,441 ownership starts by October, to the 8,730 posted by Toronto — a city four times larger than its Alberta cousin.
And in purpose-built rentals, a crucial element in the housing shortage, the gap is also wide.
Edmonton recorded 7,190 rental starts in the 12 months to last fall, compared with just 6,301 in Toronto.
Edmonton’s faster pace of increasing housing supply helps account for the city’s lower average seasonally adjusted house prices.
Last fall, that figure reached $1.13 million in the GTA, more than twice as high as Edmonton’s $437,237.
Edmonton is coping with the same factors suppressing housing starts as Toronto and other Canadian cities — high interest rates, an economic slump, costly raw materials, inflated land costs and skilled-labour shortages.
And like Toronto, the Alberta capital is growing rapidly.
Alberta’s booming energy sector has attracted workers from across the country. So has the greater affordability of housing in Edmonton compared with the GTA.
Rapid population growth is among the drivers of Edmonton’s innovations in accelerating housing development.
With an annual population growth rate of five per cent, the city of 1.15 million people is adding more than 50,000 new residents a year.
In one of its wisest planning decisions, Edmonton has redesigned its housing system for a future city of two million residents.
That probability creates an ambitious target for producing every type of housing as quickly as possible.
It helps that Edmonton got an early start, in the 2010s, on providing adequate housing. Even during the pandemic, the city was modifying its permitting processes to remove impediments to builders to boost its housing supply.
“For more than a decade, the city has been breaking down barriers to residential development to plan for this explosive growth,” says Kim Petrin, Edmonton’s deputy city manager for urban planning and economy.
Edmonton was early in permitting multi-unit housing in districts previously zoned exclusively for single-unit homes.
The city has opened inner-city main street corridors and suburbs alike to new housing development.
Edmonton’s streamlined zoning regime is geared to increasing supply of market, affordable and non-profit housing.
It encourages the full mix of housing types, including apartments, row houses, mixed-use houses, secondary suites and backyard houses.
Edmonton has eliminated the requirement of minimum parking spaces for new developments, overriding the usual NIMBY protests about traffic congestion that research shows to be an exaggerated concern.
The city’s “infill infrastructure fund” promotes densification that puts new housing close to public transit and reduces the city’s long-term per capita servicing costs.
Edmonton makes surplus city-owned land available to builders of non-profit housing.
The city’s Affordable Housing Investment Program funds accelerated provision of new affordable housing.
And Edmonton prioritizes building permit applications for affordable, or non-market, housing developments.
The sums with which the city assists developers financially are largely drawn from the $175 million in federal funding provided to Edmonton by the Housing Accelerator Fund operated by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC).
Edmonton qualifies for those housing-support funds if it meets a target of 35,443 new housing units between 2024 and 2026. At this writing, Edmonton has approved construction of 11,551 units, about 33 per cent of its 2026 target.
Edmonton has developed its own tools for increasing housing supply.
Among the most impressive is its same-day permitting, a first in Canada.
Builders can visit Edmonton’s Auto-Review self-service website to file permit applications. If the application meets the city’s requirements, a permit is quickly printed and the builder can start construction the same day.
Edmonton calculates that its Auto-Review service cuts permit approval times to one day from two weeks.
The city estimates that its permitting reforms save applicants about $5.3 million and 67,600 days a year.
“By saving applicants valuable time, more housing can be built, faster,” says Travis Pawlyk, an Edmonton manager of development services.
“Accelerating development also reduces carrying costs for homebuilders, helping keep housing prices down.”
Edmonton also financially supports three new residential buildings dedicated to housing those facing homelessness who frequently visit emergency wards. The pilot project will determine if ER wait times can thus be reduced for everyone, while helping the homeless rebuild their lives in a safe environment.
In a September report, the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), representing the GTA’s largest developers, found that it takes an average of 20.3 months to obtain approval of a development application in the GTA.
That’s only a slight improvement from the 22.7 months required in 2022.
The GTA would benefit from Edmonton’s regard for housing sufficiency as a spur to economic growth.
As Petrin explains it, Edmonton’s urban planning reforms “help retain our affordability advantage.”
A holistic GTA housing strategy for matching Edmonton’s progress might be branded “affordability advantage” to invest it with the greater clarity of purpose and urgency it now lacks.
