Could Regina Help Solve the "Housing Crisis"?
Regina's affordable housing stock, plus remote work and some renovations could go a long way
Read any news site or major newspaper lately and you’ll hear all about Canada’s housing crisis, discussed at length in articles with hyperbolic titles like “The End of Homeownership”.
On one hand, renters in Canada face increasing rents and vanishing vacancies, and aspiring first-time homeowners face barriers from accelerating house prices, inflation-battered wages and, more recently, the highest mortgage interest rates in 20 years. Today we’ll focus on this latter issue.
Although they apparently wish to, Millennials and younger generations are having a hard time getting their foot on the housing ladder in high-priced major cities. Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism recently focused a whole series of lectures on “Millennials and the Housing Market”.
One can understand why, just by looking at the numbers. According to Statistics Canada, the median income for the young 25-34 age bracket was $46,900 in 2021 (in 2021 dollars),1 and for two-person households without children or other relatives, it was $102,100.2
The CREA National Price Map tells us that the average home price is $668,754, rising to $1,210,700 in Greater Vancouver and $1,161,200 in the Greater Toronto Area.
Using a quick rule-of-thumb — 4 times your income to qualify for a mortgage — the median young person would appear to qualify for a mortgage worth $187,600. The two-person median youngster household would be able to buy at $408,400 — which unfortunately is just over half of the nationwide average home price.
The City that Rhymes with Affordable
There is one place in Canada, at least, where this two-person household has a better chance of finding a home within their budget, and it happens to be a place I’m familiar with — Yes, it’s Regina.
Regina’s housing prices are far below the national average. In fact, WOWA.ca informs us in a recent report that in the Queen City, “home prices are down 8% year-over-year and down 5% monthly to $300,145.”3
Let’s assume that the $408,000 mortgage mentioned above is now worth $453,000 in this year’s inflated money. A casual search at Realtor.ca shows 945 listings for homes in Regina at $450,000 or less.
The latest report from the Saskatchewan Realtors Association gives a benchmark price of $319,200 in July 2023, though the SRA does note inventory challenges, stating “market conditions remain tight in the Queen City.”4 Unlike some cities in Canada, Regina’s housing prices have remained more or less stable in the past eight to ten years.
Moving On Out
With housing so affordable in Regina, surely people are rushing in from out-of-province to fulfill their dreams of buying property, right?
Not so fast.
Taking a look at interprovincial migration figures from Statistics Canada, we can see that 414 people moved from Toronto to Regina in the 2020/2021 reference period.5 But that same year, 710 moved the other direction, representing a net loss to Toronto of 296 people from Regina.
Other major cities show similar figures —
191 from Vancouver, 609 to Vancouver, net loss of 418
303 from Calgary, 843 to Calgary, net loss of 540
206 from Edmonton, 376 to Edmonton, net loss of 170
123 from Winnipeg, 141 to Winnipeg, net loss of 18
66 from Ottawa/Gatineau, 197 to Ottawa/Gatineau, net loss of 131
64 from Montreal, 74 to Montreal, net loss of 10
638 from Saskatoon, 725 to Saskatoon, net loss of 87
15 from Halifax, 52 to Halifax, net loss of 37
(This, of course doesn’t include migration to or from smaller areas in Canada — this additional information can be found on the Statistics Canada site.)
With such lop-sided out-migration to major cities, we have to consider the possibility that Regina’s housing is so affordable precisely because living in Regina is undesirable in some way — after all, we don’t offer temperate weather, seaside views, easy access to beautiful mountains, a booming tech sector, big city bustle, or convenient car-free living.
If this is the case, how can we make Regina more attractive as a place to live?
Amenities
One strategy the City of Regina could use to attract residents and overcome its disadvantages is to focus on improving urban amenities — in particular, the things that younger, more mobile households enjoy about these other major cities.
What kind of amenities are we talking about? On their page about “Community Amenities”, the folks at HealthyDesign.city summarize the idea —
Compact, diverse, mixed-use neighbourhoods allow residents to “live” within their local area. They include employment, recreation, education, retail, fresh and healthy food outlets all interwoven with cycling, walking and public transport access.
When community amenities are steps away from residents, it encourages them to engage in physical activity, community interaction and social connection.6
If you’ve been paying attention to these issues for very long you might vaguely remember Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class and his subsequent books touching on these issues.
The breakthrough of Richard Florida’s work was using various statistical measures to look at how certain qualities of cities — such as tolerance and innovation — correlated to economic success in the deindustrializing American knowledge economy of the 2000’s. He argued that talent located itself in places that were nice, tolerant of differences, and had amenities, and that firms looking to recruit top talent followed them, rather than attempting to lure them away to unappealing corporate headquarters elsewhere.
The idea prompted a cottage industry of academic critique from all sides of the political spectrum — not least of which from Richard Florida himself, who dedicated his later works to examining the disappointments and challenges of his upbeat Creative Class narrative in the era of Donald Trump.
Many city, regional, and subnational leaders in the 2000’s and afterwards took the premise and ran with it, adopting various “Creative City”-style strategies in an attempt to lure the top talent that would then attract innovation, investment, and growth — some more successful, and some more cringe-worthy than others. In fiscally-constrained cities recovering from the deficit hawkishness of the 1990s, much of the appeal came from the lower cost of some these policies — banners, logos, artwork and innovation contests (that is to say, “vibes”, in the lingo of today).
Some of the other creative city innovations could borrow from “tactical urbanism” as well — painting bike lanes or reserved transit lanes, developing more pedestrian-friendly streetscapes using low-cost temporary barriers, paint or planters. A city had to be seen to be trying, and the accumulation of many of these micro-policies could theoretically help change a city’s reputation and create some buzz.
More recently, as the Covid-19 pandemic started changing how we work and live, many cities, including in Canada, also took the opportunity to loosen up rules to promote streetside patio dining and create more pedestrianized and recreational outdoor spaces.
These trends seemed to take on a new life with the rise of remote work and the rise of so-called “Zoomtowns” that took the amenity script and pushed it into myriad smaller remote towns and rural areas, away from large metropolitan downtowns (with residents often lured by cash incentives). Together, these forces are helping to change places that can attract new residents —
Rumore bets there’s a good chance many Zoom towners will remain in their new homes, too, particularly as towns evolve alongside their latest residents.
“Once they reach this tipping point where they’re a pretty cool town with a nice coffee shop and cool bars and good restaurants – when they get over the hump and become a place – people want to stay,” she says. “So, what’s interesting about this flood of amenity migration is that it probably tipped a lot of these communities over that hump.”
Regina’s Experience
So with cities learning such important lessons in recent years, what has the City of Regina been doing?
Some recently-installed amenities in Regina that come to mind include —
new multi-use paths (i.e. shared bike lanes) on South Albert Street, Courtney Street, Pasqua Street and others
The new annual FROST event, something to liven up Regina’s long winter
Downtown streetscape improvements on Victoria Ave
Bumpouts on 13th Ave in Cathedral
The introduction of rental e-scooters
On the other hand, Regina — and in particular City Council — have been working at cross purposes. Not only was there no major pandemic push towards pedestrianizing streets, rethinking streetscapes, or encouraging patio dining, but a policy focus on walkable mixed-use main streets is lacking.
Instead, Regina’s decision-makers seem focused on the opposite strategy — voting to advance costly road widenings, approving new surface parking lots downtown, and very nearly increased parking minimums for affordable housing, etc.
All this while new plans for transit investment are delayed, and as the City moves toward dismantling downtown’s Scarth Street Mall, one of the only pedestrianized areas in Regina. Our downtown Farmer’s Market (recently described to me by a prominent local politician as “one of the best parts of downtown”) and our Folk Festival are set to disappear from downtown soon.
In addition, this year City Council rushed through a downtown sports arena mega-project package initially worth $490 million — the very growth strategy that Richard Florida pilloried back in 2003:
“At the local level, cities and communities need to stop subsidizing stadiums, convention centres, and other mega-projects that add little to their economies and stop encouraging bland, generic development.”
-Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class
More directly relevant to the discussion of housing, despite a growing consensus around the need to rethink its mid-20th century zoning and land use policies to enable denser, more sustainable housing options and to reduce construction costs, the City of Regina’s 2019 zoning reforms left exclusionary R1 zoning intact, and imposed onerous special standards on central neighbourhoods.
Meanwhile, Regina’s downtown and central neighbourhoods — precisely the place where walkable mixed-use neighbourhoods already exist or could be revived — are plagued by empty lots and disinvestment. Plans to upgrade infrastructure to remove toxic lead from the water supply in these areas were delayed under the current Mayor and Council, pushed back from five years, as was approved in 2019, to 15 years. Recently awareness has grown of issues with Regina’s extensive network of asbestos-cement pipe.
Could it get better?
The authors of the recent City of Regina Underutilized Land Study show that housing prices in central areas actually need to rise somewhat before developers will find it worth the time, risk and effort to construct the type of new infill housing structures that walkable, mixed-use communities need.
Walkable, mixed-used neighbourhoods, on top of being more environmentally sustainable, will also help improve the fiscal position of the city by taking advantage of nearby, existing utilities and services, rather than requiring expensive, far-flung infrastructure in greenfield sprawl.
Some recent incremental reforms from City Council show promise. In the 2019 zoning by-law reform, much of the city was standardized into residential zones (RU, RN) that allow duplexes as-of-right — although not triplexes. After nearly a decade of pilot projects, backyard suites were recently approved as-of-right and incentivized, though they are highly regulated compared to those in other cities.
One multi-unit rental infill project at 2107 Osler St by Extol Developments recently caught our eye, though this project was apparently nearly made impossible by the City of Regina’s infill-phobic policies such as parking minimums, which a growing number of cities, including prairie cities Calgary and Edmonton, are doing away with.
If the City of Regina is able to brush aside outdated planning dogma that is making rebuilding impossible, and can successfully leverage the advantages of its central neighbourhoods, developers may finally be able to pencil projects that will fill in the “missing teeth” of Regina’s streetscapes, and create more housing in the dense, walkable, amenity-rich neighborhoods that people increasingly want to, and can afford to, live in.
And although we must keep an eye out for the ills of gentrification, if more people want to live in Regina, it might contribute to helping solve one small part of Canada’s housing crisis.