Kamloops and Kelowna housing starts lagged behind rest of BC in 2023

Housing starts in BC were up 11% last year but they were flat in Kamloops and down 12% in Kelowna.

The latest data from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released today, Jan. 16, shows a drop in national housing starts of 7% for the year to 223,513.

This comes at a time when there is a crucial housing shortage across the country, but it’s not all bad news.

“Following record and near-record highs in 2021 and 2022, housing starts dipped in 2023, but still significantly outperformed expectations for the year,” CMHC’s chief economist Bob Dugan said in a news release.

“The decline was driven mainly by a sharp drop-off in single-detached starts and tighter economic conditions affecting multi-unit starts in the year’s final quarter.

"The recent monthly multi-unit volatility is not surprising as we’re now starting to see 2023’s challenging borrowing conditions and labour shortages in the housing starts numbers and we expect to see continued downward pressure in the coming months.”

BC had 47,894 housing starts last year. The Kelowna metropolitan area had 2,970 and the Kamloops area came in at 522.

Given the decline in housing starts, CMHC has revised the number of new homes it expects to be built in Canada by 2030 to 18.2 million from 18.6 million.

“Materials have gotten more expensive, labour is in short supply and it’s hard to get financing for construction,” CMHC said on its Housing Number Projections page. “While there’s a large reduction in the level of supply in Ontario, it’s proportionately smaller than in other large provinces."

That leaves a projected shortfall by 2030 of 3.45 million homes nationally and 610,000 in BC.

“We recognize that policies regarding housing supply have started to change in some provinces, particularly Ontario,” the projections report said. “We haven’t included the potential impacts of these policies in our analysis, because we don’t yet know how they’ll change the path of housing supply.”

READ MORE: No public hearing needed for infill housing in Okanagan, Kamloops

The report doesn’t mention that major changes are underway in BC with the provincial government requiring cities with more than 5,000 residents to change their zoning policies.

The changes include the requirement to allow up to four units on most single-family lots and the elimination of most public hearings if new housing conforms to official community plans.