Predicting Yellowknife’s Population Growth Rate is a Mug’s Game

How many homes will Yellowknife need in the next 10 years in order to accommodate population growth?  Consultants for the City of Yellowknife recently pegged the number at 1,059.  The prediction was made as part of Urban Systems’ Housing Needs Assessment preliminary report to City Council on October 15th.  My worry is not so much that the numbers are wrong – which they almost certainly are – it is that if decision makers focus too closely on such predictions, it can lead to trouble.

To be fair, no-one could complete a housing needs assessment without taking a stab at predicting a city’s growth rate.  City planning requires analysis of current trends and funding agencies like CMHC require these projections in funding applications.  But these projections should be taken by the public at large, and especially by city councillors, with a massive grain of salt.  The lead consultant, Jake Papineau more or less said so starting at 33:25 of the October 15 GPC meeting webcast in his response to a question from new City Manager, Stephen Van Dine.  He said “I have never encountered a population projection that gets it right.”

Some reasons why the projections are often wrong?  One example Papineau provided at 33:55 was that a developer could come along and put 10,000 units on the market and all of a sudden people realize that Yellowknife is an affordable place to live.  Another example cited by Mayor Alty is overcrowding in homes (if you doubt this is a problem in YK, check out this CBC article – when people on new apartment waitlists resort to contacting the media, and the media deems it as newsworthy, you know you have a problem.) And then there are the small businesses who fly employees in on rotation from far flung locations because they can’t find suitable housing here, or retirees who move south because we don’t have the format of housing they are looking for.

Mr. Papineau put an even finer point on the problem by adding “I feel that Yellowknife is also in a unique situation, housing is such a constraint that it might actually be something that is limiting population growth.”

At 42:40 of the webcast, the City Manager introduced three words into the conversation that I think best encapsulate our problem, and also point to the reason we got in this situation in the first place – pent-up demand.  He said, “We do have a pent-up demand right now for a significant number of housing requirements.  That is, sort of, well understood, and I believe we would do well to get organized, and we are getting organized, around that demand.”

And why do we have so much pent-up demand?  Because of the last City Council’s chosen approach to land development.  In 2020, Council approved a Community Plan that very clearly set out a strategy of ceasing the development of “greenfield” land – meaning areas beyond the edge of existing neighbourhoods, areas that require the expansion of road, sewer and water infrastructure beyond the city’s current footprint.  Only “infill” projects within the perimeter of built-up Yellowknife were to be considered, and only after these were developed was Council to consider new neighbourhoods.  But not only did Council self-impose this challenging constraint on one of its core responsibilities, it then failed to bring even these few dozen infill lots to market.

Is the problem that we had especially shoddy population growth projections in 2019 that lead to a shoddy 2020 Community Plan?  Not at all.  In fact, the 2035 population projection used in 2020 was 22,814, and the one used by Urban Systems two weeks ago was lower, at 22,403.  The problem is that it was a bad plan.

What is all the point of re-hashing the past when Council now appears to be open to a new approach?  At the top of this article, I mentioned that I thought population projections are not only futile, but dangerous.  The reason I find them dangerous is that when Councillors take these projections too literally, and when they ignore huge unknowns like pent-up demand, it allows them to imagine a future where maybe we don’t need to expand Yellowknife in order to meet demand.  When councillors ask questions like whether or not population growth figures might be not too ambitious, or whether or not a particular development (the Bellanca Building) has been taken into account in these demand figures, it shows me they are trying to find a path to 1,059 new households without lifting the current freeze on greenfield development.

It’s not possible.  Council will not alleviate our housing crunch by incentivizing the construction of eight secondary suites per year for four years (part of the current Housing Accelerator Fund proposal before Council).

Yes, Yellowknife City Council has agreed to update the Community Plan in 2025, and that’s great news.  But the research that informed the 2020 Plan contained even higher growth rate projections than those now in front of us, so it’s not unreasonable to fear that when presented with clear evidence of demand, and of a current and potentially worsening housing crunch, the current Council could make an ideologically-driven decision instead of an evidence-based one, and choose the same constrained-growth approach that has landed us in our current situation.

I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen.

Postscript:

Rather that simply pointing out a problem, I should probably suggest a better approach.  Rather than relying on population projections and planning to bring to market the perfect amount of land to meet demand, the City should commit to always having developable land in its pipeline.  Set an inventory level and maintain it.  There is little danger in overestimating demand, because when sales are slow, a city can always slow down the timeline for marketing new phases of new subdivisions.  Speeding up the pipeline is much, much harder than slowing it down, as we are now seeing.