Statistics Canada Reports II

[craner]

^ Great summary - thanks for consolidating those numbers.

[jc_yyc_ca]

Originally Posted by Changing City

Montreal doesn’t have the ‘lowest unemployment rate of the big 3’. Vancouver is 6.7%, Montreal is 6.8%, Calgary is 7.0% and Toronto is 7.3%. And in terms of employment, so far this year that’s up by 65,900 in Calgary, 57,900 in Toronto, 11,900 in Vancouver, and down by 16,400 in Montreal.

Thanks for that overall summarization and also for posting this blurb. The unemployment rate in Calgary and Alberta gets a lot of media mentions, but it's rare the job creation numbers get mentioned. It's hard to get the unemployment rate down when the labour force/population is growing rapidly.

[jc_yyc_ca]

For those interested in housing starts. Here are the June numbers as well as the first half numbers for 2026. I'm too lazy to add and format all the numbers, so I'll use a screenshot.

[zoomer]

Using the same CMHC June report, but focused on the annual rate and added a bunch more cities. I then did a separate calculation to show the percentage of single detached and sorted them in order by starts per 1,000 residents.



CMHC June 2026 Housing Starts Report by JohnnyJayEh, on Flickr

[Martin Mtl]

I like that Montreal is building so few single detached houses. Good sign.

[SFUVancouver]

An unsung story is all this is the historically suburban sprawling Kelowna now regularly being within a point or two of the Vancouver CMA with respect of the percentage of housing starts for which single detached account.

[ssiguy]

Originally Posted by Martin Mtl

I like that Montreal is building so few single detached houses. Good sign.

I completely disagree.

The fewer the SFH are built, the more scarce and hence expensive they become. A city must be for everyone regardless of family size or income. All people should be able to enjoy the city they live in and not just the ultra wealthy or people who have no kids. People shouldn't be forced out of their city because they only make an average wage or they have the complete audacity of wanting a child or, God forbid, 2. Cities must strive to have a healthy balance of all housing options in size, location, and prices if it wants to thrive not only economically but also socially.

Vancouver has built almost nothing but condos for the last 30 years and it has crushed the city's affordability, equity, and social cohesion. The Vancouver model is the very last form of housing policy Montreal should want to copy.

[BlackDog204]

Originally Posted by Martin Mtl

I like that Montreal is building so few single detached houses. Good sign.

I.noriced that too. Montreal is a much better city than Toronto. This will only widen the gap.

[jc_yyc_ca]

Originally Posted by Martin Mtl

I like that Montreal is building so few single detached houses. Good sign.

TBH, I wouldn't call it a good sign. We all like having more density and apartments help add density, but IMO, it's preferable to have more diversity in housing starts with a mix of SFH, semi-detached, rowhomes and apartments.

For example Montreal has very few missing middle type housing starts with only 4%, and 4.6% for SFH, and 91% apartments. Two thirds of Canadians prefer a SFH as their choice of housing. At 91% apartments, it means most of your population isn't getting the housing they want, but rather they the housing they have to take.

I might be biased being in Calgary, but for me Calgary's housing starts are well balanced with 25% SFH and 28% missing middle and the rest apartments. There's something for everyone.

[kwoldtimer]

Originally Posted by Martin Mtl

I like that Montreal is building so few single detached houses. Good sign.

More an indication of the reality of affordability than a "good sign", istm.

[DavidK93]

Originally Posted by Martin Mtl

I like that Montreal is building so few single detached houses. Good sign.

There are density related benefits from apartment builds but when I look at cities like Vancouver or Montreal, where over 90% of new builds are apartment units, I don’t think of that as a good sign, so much as it’s a sign that people can’t afford anything else.

[theman23]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

More an indication of the reality of affordability than a "good sign", istm.

Not surprisingly, its near the bottom of the barrel for housing starts in a country that doesn't build enough housing. Most definitely not a "good sign" if affordability is a concern.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by jc_yyc_ca

TBH, I wouldn't call it a good sign. We all like having more density and apartments help add density, but IMO, it's preferable to have more diversity in housing starts with a mix of SFH, semi-detached, rowhomes and apartments.

But outside Montreal, adding mainly apartments is creating more diversity because the country has long been dominated by SFHs. When you have a deficit in a particular area, you resolve that by adding a disproportionate amount of the thing you lack.

Originally Posted by jc_yyc_ca

For example Montreal has very few missing middle type housing starts with only 4%, and 4.6% for SFH, and 91% apartments. Two thirds of Canadians prefer a SFH as their choice of housing. At 91% apartments, it means most of your population isn't getting the housing they want, but rather they the housing they have to take.

I might be biased being in Calgary, but for me Calgary's housing starts are well balanced with 25% SFH and 28% missing middle and the rest apartments. There's something for everyone.

I'm not sure I follow this part. Much of missing middle housing is apartments yet you seem to be counting missing middle and apartments as separate things. Yes missing middle includes townhouses and rowhouses, but it also includes lowrise and midrise multi-unit buildings. Montreal has long been the major city with most missing middle housing in Canada and most is in the form of lowrise multi-unit which includes the classic external staircase plexes.

Regarding surveys, obviously it's true that the majority of people tends to say they prefer the more expensive or premium option they're presented with. That's not really a big revelation. They'll also say they prefer low taxes, short commutes, prime locations, and low cost of living and those things are all in conflict with unsustainable development patterns. The conflict was much lower when the population was smaller overall and particularly when a smaller percentage of people lived in major centers. But as that changes, so do the trade-offs.

I should also point out that population growth in Canada is driven by immigration to larger centres, and new arrivals often aren't going to have the cultural memory of detaches houses or the expectation that they'll be plentiful in major cities.

[Innsertnamehere]

Demand isn't there for singles.

Anecdotally I've heard that demand for low-rise product is returning in Ontario to a proportion closer to what we have heard before, especially in market-rate housing. The Feds are subsidizing a tonne of non-market rate housing right now as well which is overwhelmingly in the form of apartments which is muting this in the wider data set though.

Why it's happened is a variety of factors from bad planning systems to also just straight demographics.. Millennials / Gen Z are forming families at slower rates (later to marry, later for kids, etc.) even when accounting for income and housing costs (though housing costs also impact that!), over the last decade the number of new immigrants who have limited budgets (look at the TFW numbers!) has skyrocketed, and our population is also getting older and seeing ever larger numbers of 1-2 person households.

Combine these all and the growth of 3+ person households has actually been remarkably slow. And you see this in housing demand, with households generally preferring smaller houses for that demograhpic.

Part of it is of course also the cost of low-rise housing, which has shot through the roof in most major centres to make it unaffordable for most as well. Cities which have better controlled this are still seeing larger demand for low-rise product, albeit even then the demand is dropping. Calgary is at 25% SFD still, but a decade or two ago that was closer to 50-60%.

[zoomer]

I made that table above for context as the raw housing number themselves are quite meaningless. Why CMHC doesn't do this extra analysis on a regular basis is beyond me.

More context is going beyond new housing starts and looking at the current status of everything that exists. Well, only as current as the 2021 census and I'm sure the % of existing detached homes has declined right across the country, significantly in many cases.

Stats Canada % of single detached by CMA (starting with lowest):

Bottom 5

Vancouver: 27.7%
Montreal: 31.8%
Victoria 38.1%
Toronto: 39%
Quebec: 40.4%

Most other cities are in the 50 and 60% range, check the link as Stats Canada has sorted them from east to west as they often do. Strange as people read left to right..

I tend to agree that having a new detached housing rate less than 10% is not ideal for choice/families and is what's driving up a lot of internal migration to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. On the other hand the five cities listed above are known for their walkability and vibrant city centres (as are a few others not listed such as Halifax). Yes, there's a lot more to it than just detached vs. non ratio.. As we're likely headed for less than 50% single detached nation wide we need to ensure the non-detached are liveable and desirable, not micro investments units. How we do that is a whole other massive discussion.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by zoomer

I made that table above for context as the raw housing number themselves are quite meaningless. Why CMHC doesn't do this extra analysis on a regular basis is beyond me.

More context is going beyond new housing starts and looking at the current status of everything that exists. Well, only as current as the 2021 census and I'm sure the % of existing detached homes has declined right across the country, significantly in many cases.

Stats Canada % of single detached by CMA (starting with lowest):

Bottom 5

Vancouver: 27.7%
Montreal: 31.8%
Victoria 38.1%
Toronto: 39%
Quebec: 40.4%

Most other cities are in the 50 and 60% range, check the link as Stats Canada has sorted them from east to west as they often do. Strange as people read left to right..

I tend to agree that having a new detached housing rate less than 10% is not ideal for choice/families and is what's driving up a lot of internal migration to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. On the other hand the five cities listed above are known for their walkability and vibrant city centres (as are a few others not listed such as Halifax). Yes, there's a lot more to it than just detached vs. non ratio.. As we're likely headed for less than 50% single detached nation wide we need to ensure the non-detached are liveable and desirable, not micro investments units. How we do that is a whole other massive discussion.

Just looking at single family houses gives a misleading picture of the housing stock in 2021, because in some places it's common to have a suite (and in some cases two) in a family home. A house with a suite is classified as a duplex, and if it has two suites it becomes an apartment under five storeys. While the suite might be a smaller rental, the main house is a family home.

Adding SFH to duplexes puts the bottom five as

Montreal 40%
Toronto 43%
Vancouver 43.8%
Quebec City 46.3%
Ottawa 47.8%

If you add in semi-detached (either side-by-side or front and back), and rowhomes, you'll see that the sequence changes again, and only Montreal has less than 50% ground-oriented housing (and it's probably over 50% because of the homes that end up being counted as apartments).

Montreal 48.2%
Quebec 54.5%
Vancouver 56.1%
Sherbrooke 56.7%
Toronto 59.6%

[zoomer]

Stats Canada definitions are here for those interested.

The lens of proportion of single detached was used as I was commenting on CMHC's report of housing starts which used that framework and is probably the most used and easily understood metric for most people. Also people more easily understand a single detached home and what that represents and as goal/desire versus living in a shared building, whatever that looks like. Getting into the breakdown of the nine different housing types will provide a fuller picture but is rarely used, especially for public consumption. I'm not sure if negating homes with two or more suites provides a very good picture either - I'd prefer the single detached analysis or the full breakdown of all housing types.

As you know homes with one or more suites (mortgage helper) are very common in Victoria and Vancouver and to lump them into the same category as a detached home is misleading if you're trying to determine effective land use of an area. Most people observing the Victoria neighbourhood of Fairfield using Google street view/Earth would say large chunks of it are nearly entirely single detached. Yet CensusMapper's (using Stats Canada 2016 data which is really outdated and under represents the changes that have occurred) shows 40% ~ single detached in these areas. Even the old mansion area of Rockland around Government House was 43.48% single detached in 2016 as so many of those historic buildings have been apartment buildings for decades. Walking through and around Fairfield for example, it's a much busier and vibrant neighbourhood than a simple visual scan of what the houses look like would indicate. I would love to see a full visual breakdown of all housing types for each CMA by map but I don't think it exists because of the complexity, although it could be done for a CMA overall without the map.

Census Mapper Victoria Single Detached Proportion by DA
Vancouver
Toronto
Montreal

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by zoomer

The lens of proportion of single detached was used as I was commenting on CMHC's report of housing starts which used that framework and is probably the most used and easily understood metric for most people. Also people more easily understand a single detached home and what that represents and as goal/desire versus living in a shared building, whatever that looks like.

Looking at at data on SFH development and understanding it can be complicated, and looking at it over time is even more fraught as definitions of housing types have changed, so aren't necessarily comparable from one census to the next.

With that caveat, the housing starts data doesn't give much of an idea of the changing housing stock unless you know the nature of the building that's taking place. You can observe several hundred new single family homes built in the City of Vancouver every year for the past decade, but if you look at the tenure, you'll see they're almost all rental. That's because they're almost all detached laneway houses, being added at the back of either a new, or an existing home. So you're getting a significant net increase in the stock of detached houses, but if the focus is on ownership, they don't add new opportunities.

Similarly, older single family homes are being torn down and replaced, so they may show up as new homes, but they aren't a net gain to the housing stock. In practice, very few single family homes are replaced with a new single family home, they much more often add a suite 'mortgage helper', but whether the new owners then choose to rent the suite, or use it themselves isn't captured in any data that I'm aware of. No housing data is perfect.

[kwoldtimer]

Caveat

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by kwoldtimer

Caveat

Thanks. It's early, and there's no spell check!