{"id":1095,"date":"2022-03-04T10:38:50","date_gmt":"2022-03-04T17:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/?p=1095"},"modified":"2022-03-04T11:13:25","modified_gmt":"2022-03-04T18:13:25","slug":"does-yellowknife-need-a-new-neighbourhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/2022\/03\/does-yellowknife-need-a-new-neighbourhood\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Yellowknife Need a New Neighbourhood?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my experience, when you ask Yellowknifers if they think our population is growing, shrinking, or staying the same, the majority of them believe it\u2019s either staying the same or shrinking.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure why this is.\u00a0 It may have something to do with media reporting on the territory-wide population, which has been shrinking in recent years.\u00a0 Or it may be due to a lack of obvious sources of population growth, with diamond mines winding down and the pandemic hampering our tourism industry. \u00a0But while the source of our population\u2019s growth may be a bit of a mystery, we are in fact growing.<\/p>\n

According to the NWT Bureau of Statistics, in 2021 Yellowknife\u2019s population reached 21,775 people, which represents growth of 1.35% over 2020.\u00a0 While this is not exactly frenzied, Whitehorse-level<\/a> growth, it is consistent and is enough to make a difference when it comes to demand for Yellowknife housing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the last 20 years, our city has grown by an average of 1.03% per year, and there were only two years when it declined – 2006 and 2009.\u00a0 Statistics Canada tells us that we had 7,758 private dwellings in 2016.\u00a0 This means that our growth justifies the construction of 80 private dwellings per year.<\/p>\n

So, what happens if we don\u2019t hit this number in a given year?\u00a0 What if there is no land for sale in our city upon which new houses and apartment buildings can be built?\u00a0 Or what if the type of dwellings that are being built are not what the market is looking to buy?\u00a0 Well, in the next few years we are going to find out.<\/p>\n

As I write this, there are only about a dozen lots for sale in Yellowknife – ten through the City of Yellowknife in the Hordal\/Bagon neighbourhood and a couple others available privately or through Realtors.\u00a0 By the end of this year, it is likely that number will be down to zero. \u00a0To be sure, not all the vacant lots that sold recently have houses on them yet, there are still quite a few larger homes to be built at Grace Lake South, but once these Grace Lake and Hordal\/Bagon lots are built, that\u2019s it \u2013 there are no new lots slated to come to market in the next four years (according to the 2020 Community Plan<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

What will come to market in the next four years is apartment units, and potentially a whole lot of them.\u00a0 There are several lots around town that are being prepared to accommodate the construction of apartment buildings, and we should see some of these projects get underway as soon as the snow melts.\u00a0 All told, we could see somewhere in the neighbourhood of 400 to 500 apartment units being built in the next four years.<\/p>\n

But while this technically exceeds the 80-unit-per-year demand I mentioned earlier, what if the people who are looking for new homes are not looking for apartment units?<\/p>\n

For people looking for larger formats of housing there are only so many options available.\u00a0 Some might purchase older homes, tear them down and build new ones.\u00a0 But this is a very expensive proposition.\u00a0 A downtown or near-downtown lot with an older home on it, and which is large enough to accommodate a 3-4 bedroom \u201cstick-built\u201d home with garage, plus room for a proper back yard sells for anywhere between $200,000 and $300,000.\u00a0 And then there are demolition costs to consider. \u00a0This option simply isn\u2019t realistic for most people, especially young families who haven\u2019t yet built up the large amount of equity such a project requires.\u00a0 Yes, the option might exist to reduce costs by building two or more homes on a single lot, but that\u2019s not what most people are looking for.\u00a0 They want single-family detached homes.<\/p>\n

Some other folks will simply increase the amount they are willing to pay for a home that suits them and outcompete the many others looking for that same format of housing.\u00a0 That\u2019s fine, but there can only be one winning family per house, which leaves a lot of other people with one other option – to stay in homes that don\u2019t meet their needs as long as they can bear to, and then to move to a city or town with housing that better suits their needs.<\/p>\n

What is unlikely to happen in my opinion, and what some folks reading this might be hoping for, is that folks who want a certain size and type of housing will simply change their minds and learn to love a smaller home, with no back yard or garage, in a more densely populated part of town.\u00a0 This type of social shift requires a lot of other factors that don\u2019t exist North of 60.\u00a0 I\u2019m not saying it never happens, but it\u2019s pretty rare and should not be counted on as the solution to this problem.\u00a0 Sometimes you have to give people want they want, or you lose those people.\u00a0 And this is especially true in today’s world where workers are becoming more and more mobile.<\/p>\n

When people leave Yellowknife in search of more suitable housing, many of them are quickly replaced by newcomers, because they leave job vacancies behind.\u00a0 While that\u2019s fine for maintaining population levels, it\u2019s obviously not good for community cohesiveness.\u00a0 People who commit to communities long term invest in those communities.\u00a0 They create businesses and jobs, they support causes, they give back in many other ways.\u00a0 And in the case of retirees, they provide all of these benefits plus they grow the net population and the tax base, bringing more dollars into territorial and municipal government coffers.<\/p>\n

With each passing year there are more and more retirees looking to stay here, partly because of the sheer size of the baby boom demographic, but also because real estate prices in popular Canadian retirement destinations are skyrocketing relative to ours.\u00a0 The \u201csnowbird\u201d lifestyle is becoming a more attractive option, but without suitable housing, it is a difficult path to take.\u00a0 I have this conversation with retirees on a regular basis.\u00a0 Our current housing stock simply does not meet their needs.<\/p>\n

All of this is a pretty long-winded way to make my point that Yellowknife needs to develop a new neighbourhood. \u00a0In other cities this is something that could happen quickly, because increased demand would spur agricultural landowners at the outskirts of town to convert their lands to new residential lots.\u00a0 In those places it would be almost unheard of for the inventory of vacant lots to reach zero.\u00a0 But there is no such thing as \u201cagricultural landowners at the outskirts of town\u201d in the North.\u00a0 In Yellowknife, the City has to go hat in hand to the GNWT Department of Municipal and Community Affairs seeking bits and pieces of land for new development.\u00a0 Fortunately, City Council has taken a different approach this time \u2013 the hat is much bigger.\u00a0 They have asked for all lands within the municipal boundary and it seems that the folks at MACA have agreed. That\u2019s great news, but it will take time.\u00a0 Even if lands are transferred within two years, it could take another two to bring them to market.\u00a0 And it will take even longer if this issue is not seen as a priority by future Councils and future Legislative Assemblies.<\/p>\n

It’s difficult to quantify the missed opportunities that result from a mismatch between housing demand and housing supply, but it\u2019s certainly something we should try to do.\u00a0 And if we keep the pressure up, perhaps we can nudge supply and demand into closer alignment in the not-too-distant future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my experience, when you ask Yellowknifers if they think our population is growing, shrinking, or staying the same, the majority of them believe it\u2019s either staying the same or shrinking.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure why …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":38,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education-and-advocacy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1095"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1108,"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions\/1108"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.century21yk.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}