Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
The other thing for Halifax is that so much of it is urban infill. It might even be majority urban apartments with some highrises up to 40 floors. Plus there's other major construction like a new hospital (with $4.5B construction costs; it's a major project). Who knows how long it will go on for, but the city is really changing.
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According to the CMHC's very detailed data
information portal, only 690 of the Halifax starts were single-family detached. Of the remaining 5,200, about 2,200 were on the peninsula, downtown Dartmouth and Fairview (a mid-century suburb adjacent to the central city that's increasingly an extension of it).
I'm a little surprised that more of it wasn't central, but there's lots throughout the inner and outer suburbs. There is also a big chunk (1,900) in effectively exurban areas. That's a bit different from the past several years, when growth was REALLY concentrated on the core, but it's still an overall urbanizing trend.
Interesting shift in Calgary too, with more multi-unit and less single-family. About 25 percent of starts so far this year were detached houses, which is a change from the 50-50 single/multi ratio of recent years. The starts in Calgary are still a lot more spread out, mostly in new-build communities at the periphery. There were about 2,300 in total across the ring of walkable inner-city areas: downtown, the Beltline/Inglewood/Mission, and what CMHC calls "North Hill" which is basically the western edge of Kensington, or a bit beyond, all the way to Bridgeland. Still, some of those new-build communities have more multi-unit and overall denser configurations.
Anyway, it's been a surprisingly long-running building boom here in Halifax, and the pace of approvals, permits and groundbreakings has not really slowed. It definitely
has to at some point, particularly given reduced population growth. But even if it stopped right now, with what's currently U/C, the past ten years and especially the past five have really transformed the whole central part of the city and injected a good deal of everyday vitality and liveliness through a broad area. The downside has been fast-rising housing prices, so I'm at least hopeful that the continued high pace of construction, during a period of much-slower growth, can help mitigate that and flatten out rental price growth.
The one thing I hope we avoid, of course, is a crash. A decline in construction is inevitable, but I hope it's a slowdown, not a grinding halt.
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