By Avery Mullen
There may be a spark of good news on the horizon about Halifax’s ever-worsening housing crunch.
Last month, the annualized rate of housing starts was down by nearly half compared to June, but was still the fourth-highest since record-keeping began in 1990. That is according to data aggregated by Statistics Canada and highlighted by Nova Scotia director of economics and statistics Thomas Storring in a note.
Nova Scotia’s population is still growing much faster than its housing supply, but for the first time, the rate of change is greater for housing. In other words, new residential construction is still lagging behind demand, but is now the faster accelerating of the two metrics.
“In unadjusted results for Halifax in July 2024, there were 329 housing starts and 476 completions,” writes Storring. “With completions outpacing starts, the stock of units under construction declined to 10,970 units in Halifax, though this was still up 45.3 per cent from units under construction in the same month last year.”
That increase in construction activity of nearly half is mirrored across most metrics. This July saw an annualized housing start total for the province of 6,593, seasonally adjusted. While that figure is down from the prior month’s high of 12,089, it nonetheless represents a dramatic increase compared to an annualized total of 5,781 for July 2023.
By comparison, population growth has been nearly constant. Statistics Canada data indicates that between the summer of 2021 and 2022, the province grew by 28,608 people. From 2022 to 2023, it grew by 33,249 people, and from July of last year until January of this year, the most recent month for which data is available, the population increased by just a shade over 10,000 people.
Housing completion figures for Halifax, where the largest proportion of Nova Scotians live, tell a similar tale. They fluctuate over the course of the year, generally with a spike around January and a lull in the summer, but the overall trend has also been upwards for the past several years. Compared to a low of 38 housing completions in July 2017, there were 476 last month.
The number of units of housing under construction in Halifax has also been trending steadily upwards, accelerating since last summer. There are currently about 10,970 new units under construction, compared to 7,548 a year ago or 5,859 in July of 2021.
The rental vacancy rate in the city has remained stubbornly below one per cent since 2021, with the average monthly rent in the city now topping $1,538 last year, up more than $600 since 2014, according to the Halifax Partnership economic development group. Even so, the growth in provincial construction activity has been disproportionately concentrated in Halifax, which has seen an 83.7 per cent increase in the seasonally adjusted annualized housing starts. The rest of the province has actually seen a 1.4 per cent decline.
“Over the first seven months of 2024, Nova Scotia’s housing starts were up 48.4 per cent compared with the same period in 2023,” Storring writes. “Across Canada, year-to-date housing starts were up 6.7 per cent with gains in six provinces. Newfoundland and Labrador reported the fastest percentage increase in year-to-date housing starts while Ontario reported the steepest decline.”
