Housing challenges, mid-sized cities and the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article examines key housing challenges in mid-sized cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two questions guide our critical reflection: understanding to what extent the pandemic represents new challenges and what planners can do to respond to them? We use the example of the Region of Waterloo, situated 100km west of Toronto and one of Canada’s fastest growing urban areas. Waterloo has many similar characteristics to other mid-sized cities within commuting distance of large urban regions. In this article, we focus on two of the biggest (and inter-related) housing issues: inward migration from the Toronto Region and growing unaffordability. Both these challenges long-predate the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are early indicators that they are accelerating because of it. By rooting the challenges of the pandemic within longer trends and trajectories, our critical reflection suggests that many solutions that have long been understood to address housing inequalities are still important during the pandemic. Rather than devising new solutions, we argue that the pandemic requires implementing ideas called upon for years by researchers and advocates and more proactive planning to address market deficiencies.

Why Did the “Missing Middle” Miss the Train? An Actors-In-Systems Exploration of Barriers to Intensified Family Housing in Waterloo Region, Canada

“…Mirroring national trends, the RoW experienced a steep increase in single-family home prices from 2016 to 2018, driven mainly by migrating Toronto-area buyers [3]. The pandemic strengthened these trends, with year-over-year single-family home gains of 33% [4,5], the second highest in Canada [6], representing loan-to-income levels similar to those of London, U.K. The Kitchener-Waterloo Community Foundation also reports increasing rents, growing scarcity of affordable rentals, and housing supply lagging population growth [6].…”

Navigating the housing crisis: A comparison of international students and other newcomers in a mid‐sized Canadian city

“…In Canada, the notion of housing justice is enshrined in the law: the 2019 National Housing Strategy recognized housing as a human right and established that Canada's housing policy is to “further the progressive realization of the right to adequate housing as recognized in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights” (Government of Canada, 2019, p. 2). Despite this commitment, Canada's affordability crisis continues to deepen, playing out unevenly across the country, and taking varying forms across mid‐sized cities (CMHC, 2023b; Smith & Kopec, 2023; van der Merwe & Doucet, 2021).…”

“…Recent research by Vaswani et al (2023), while not examining housing, suggests that discrimination may be more pronounced in Canadian SMCs where host communities are predominantly white and have less experience with immigration. The COVID‐19 pandemic may have amplified these challenges as SMCs experienced an intensification of their housing landscapes due to in‐migration from larger markets and the deepening mismatch between housing supply and housing demand (CMHC, 2023b; van der Merwe & Doucet, 2021).…”

Are medium-sized cities strong nodes in the settlement system? Demographic trends of Italian provincial capitals from 2000 to the Covid-19 pandemic

“…However, some countries have experienced a drift from big cities to less densely populated areas due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Fielding & Ishikawa, 2021;Ramani & Bloom, 2021;Whitaker, 2021). MSCs could benefit from this movement (Song et al, 2020;van der Merwe & Doucet, 2021), thanks to a density that is not too high and a size that ensures fast access to all essential services (MSCs resemble the '15-minute city', a model that is attracting great interest). However, MSCs might also lose inhabitants in the future: they are still 'big' and densely populated compared to small surrounding municipalities or remote areas.…”