Mass Densification Is The Wrong Solution To Canada’s Housing Crisis

In cities and towns across Canada, housing activists are pushing to densify single-family neighbourhoods by overhauling zoning codes. This is fuelling tension as battles over community character flare, while at the same time failing to address the fundamental cause of Canada’s housing crisis: unsustainable immigration-driven population growth.

In Saanich, a municipality on the southern end of Vancouver Island, the local government is attempting to pass a densification project known as the Quadra McKenzie Plan. The October 2024 draft plan said that 12- to 18-storey towers would be allowed in major intersections, and six-storey buildings greenlit on side streets that currently consist of single-family homes. 

The public backlash was swift. A petition to stop the densification plan quickly racked up more than 4,000 signatures. A citizen group calling itself Save Our Saanich (SOS) formed to oppose the plan, which it warns will “alter Saanich, unrecognizably, forever”. The group supports “careful, thoughtful, well-planned” rezoning, but argues that uncontrolled densification will result in “the wholesale destruction of our homes, our neighbourhoods, and ecologically-important areas”.

In April of last year, hundreds of Calgarians attended an emotionally charged meeting about a “blanket rezoning” bill that effectively ended single-family zoning in the city by allowing duplexes and fourplexes on single-family lots. The issue remains unsettled, as a group of 300 Calgarians continue to wage a legal battle against the move.

Few Canadian cities and towns are free from zoning battles. In almost every case, bills to dramatically rezone suburban areas bring acrimony and dissension in their wake – and both sides of the argument bring valid points.

Densification advocates right point out that demand and supply of housing is evidently out of sync – who could disagree with them about that? On the other hand, many residents of quiet, leafy single-family streets feel a deep sense of attachment to their neighbourhoods. In zoning hearings, they express a desire to age in place in the neighbourhood they love, and maybe pass on their home to their children. They are understandably scared that pedal-to-the-metal zoning deregulation could turn cherished communities into investment opportunities for developers and speculators.

It turns out that housing is one of those rare policy problems in which we can eat our cake and have it too. We can solve Canada’s housing crisis without significant zoning deregulation – pleasing housing advocates and single-family homeowners alike – by reversing the deregulation of our immigration system.

Population growth drives the need to build housing. In countries where growth is fuelled by high birth rates, the only recourse is to invest in expanding the housing stock. But in Canada, 97.6% of our growth came from immigration in 2023. We therefore have the luxury of being able to raise or lower our growth with a stroke from the immigration minister’s pen.

The federal government is already taking this approach to an extent, by slashing temporary and permanent resident levels. But Ottawa’s immigration cut was portrayed as a measure to “pause population growth in the short term” before returning to more growth in the long term. In other words, after we have built enough housing to accommodate the massive population growth of the last few years, we will embark on another significant growth cycle – ad infinitum.

Some cities simply can’t expand outward – Vancouver is bordered by towering mountains and specially zoned prime agricultural land, while Toronto is surrounded by the famous legally protected greenbelt. Even Calgary – surrounded by endless acres of space – is being forced to densify; they can’t build suburbs fast enough to accommodate sky-high growth. Continuing our approach of rapidly expanding our population will mean a mass densification of much of Canada’s suburban landscape.

This is a choice that we must make. Do we want a single-family home with a backyard to be an option for future generations? Then we have to reverse our policy of using immigration to dramatically grow the population.

This issue matters, because the type of housing we build now determines the character of our communities in the future. Do we want children born today to be able to realistically aspire to own a single-family home thirty or forty years from now? Let’s have this debate.