Canada’s Housing Crisis Needs a Map
How a National Zoning Atlas Can Unlock Smarter Housing Policy
Highlights
Canada’s zoning data is a mess, lacking a centralized database, which leaves policymakers without the ability to make informed decisions.
A National Zoning Atlas is the game-changer we need. This federally funded tool has the potential to revolutionize housing policy and development.
Municipal zoning is stuck working in outdated formats. Zoning by PDF and paper copies restricts access and prevents large-scale land-use analysis.
Canada is lagging its peers, including the United States. The American National Zoning Atlas is reshaping how cities and states think about housing regulations.
A Zoning Atlas isn’t just a smart idea; it’s an investment that would create an essential tool to unlock policy opportunities that drive housing affordability.
You can’t build housing in a black box
Housing policy in Canada suffers from a fundamental problem: a lack of reliable zoning data. Policymakers, researchers, homebuilders, housing advocates, and other members of the public are often left to navigate the complexities of zoning laws without a clear, centralized source of information.
The result? Poorly informed decisions, inefficient land use, and a general inability to address housing shortages effectively.
While government agencies collect and disseminate housing-related data on construction, finance, and demographics, a significant gap exists in urban planning. Without an organized and publicly accessible repository of zoning regulations, it is impossible to conduct critical land-use analyses, such as quantifying the impact of restrictive zoning policies on housing availability and affordability. It can lead policymakers to overestimate the impact of densification reforms, contributing to higher prices and reduced supply through the “Impossible Trinity of Housing”.
Fixing this gap is essential. The creation of a Canadian Zoning Atlas, a federally funded, comprehensive database of zoning regulations nationwide, could revolutionize urban planning, streamline development, and provide much-needed transparency. This type of tool already exists in other countries, providing policymakers with critical insights into land-use patterns and regulatory burdens. However, Canada lags behind its peers.
If this sounds like a niche issue, let me assure you it’s not. For years, I’ve been obsessed with understanding housing policy in Canada, and my journey through municipal zoning data has highlighted just how disorganized and inaccessible this critical information is.
An introduction to Alex, the planning nerd
Anyone who has met me knows that I am deeply passionate about urban planning, especially as it relates to housing. My wife even mentioned it in her wedding vows when we recently got married, calling it one of my more attractive qualities. Why she finds my obsessiveness endearing is beyond me, but she’s clearly the perfect person to spend my life with, not just because of all her incredible qualities.
Given how much I’ve thought about housing, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve spent years digging into the data. I don’t just mean analyzing spreadsheets, although I’ve done plenty of that. I mean exploring the entire universe of government datasets, searching for what exists, and more importantly, identifying what doesn’t.
The results of this database exploration are reflected in the hundreds of pages I’ve written about housing data, including three editions of the Municipal Benchmarking Studies1 and other works I completed before joining MMI. I encourage everyone to read my previous work, but I’ll give you an abbreviated summary of it all: the state of municipal and provincial housing data availability in Canada is, in a word, deplorable.
Calling the situation deplorable isn’t just my opinion alone. John Michael McGrath at TVO also shared similar frustration in one of his columns:
“…one of the particular pathologies of the Ontario housing crisis has been that there’s little in the way of government-collected (and thus reasonably neutral) data to tell us basic things like “this is what’s happening with housing in Ontario.” This has hobbled our response to any number of issues… The province has periodically gestured toward the idea of remedying this, suggesting it acknowledges that the state of the housing sector — the single biggest household expense for almost everybody — might be worth keeping a closer eye on. But progress has been limited.”
Throughout my career, I’ve highlighted numerous data issues in housing policy; however, today I want to focus on one critical gap: the lack of zoning data. The lack of publicly accessible zoning information affects the public’s understanding of the housing crisis and hinders policymakers' ability to make informed decisions. The solution for this is a federally funded and operated Canadian Zoning Atlas.
Zoning by PDF: Housing data is stuck in the 1990s
There is an old saying: “Ignorance of the law is not an excuse”. However, I’d also add that: “governments must make reviewing the law as reasonably easy as modern standards allow for”.
Zoning codes are laws that govern our most valuable property, land. Yet, many of Canada’s largest cities fail to provide adequate access to zoning information. The situation is bad across the country, but particularly dire in Ontario, which also happens to be ground zero for Canada’s housing crisis.
In the recent past, some municipalities did not even have zoning maps available online. To obtain zoning information, individuals had to request it on a case-by-case basis, often paying a fee and waiting several business days for a response. Some cities still require physical visits to government offices to retrieve specific zoning information. For example, Toronto requires someone to be physically present if they need to access a former municipal bylaw, which are still in effect for some properties even though the city was amalgamated 26 years ago.
Toronto isn’t the worst offender by a long shot. They’ve at least made their harmonized zoning bylaw available to be downloaded in a machine-readable format. Machine-readable means that a piece of information or a dataset can be analyzed by various kinds of computer programs, such as Geographic Information System (GIS) software, including ArcGIS or QGIS.
Most municipalities now provide at least digital PDF versions of their zoning maps online, but these can be cumbersome to use and are not machine-readable. Others provide interactive maps that are easier to use, but don’t allow for the information behind them to be downloaded, or this municipally curated map doesn’t always cover all properties, like in the case of Markham, Toronto, and Pickering.
This lack of machine-readable zoning data prevents anyone from performing analysis at scale. Want to know how much land is zoned for low-density housing in the Greater Toronto Area? No one can tell you. Want to compare the most restrictive and least restrictive zoning codes across Canada’s major cities? No one has the necessary data to compute that answer either, not even the provincial or federal government.
No government official can claim that we are treating the crisis like a crisis with this state of disorganization present.
America has a National Zoning Atlas. Why doesn’t Canada?
A Zoning Atlas is a straightforward concept: compile municipal zoning maps into a single digital database, allowing users to analyze zoning trends at various geographic levels and over time, whether within a neighbourhood, between cities, or even across provinces.
This idea isn’t new. The National Zoning Atlas began in the USA in 2020, with a dedicated team digitizing zoning regulations state by state. Canada has undertaken smaller-scale efforts, such as the University of British Columbia's zoning project for Metro Vancouver. But nothing has been done at a national level.
A Canadian Zoning Atlas would be best funded and operated by the federal government, which has the influence and resources to ensure provinces and municipalities collectively release their zoning data. There is a massive incentive for the federal government to get this done because it’s also flying blind on zoning regulations, which makes its housing policy efforts unnecessarily difficult.
Zoning reform starts with knowing the rules
The U.S. Zoning Atlas has already demonstrated its impact, helping to spur multifamily housing reforms in Montana, among other successes. More broadly, it enables researchers to quantify zoning restrictions through regulatory indices using the actual information from zoning codes, a tool that Canada currently lacks.
A regulatory index measures the degree of restriction imposed by zoning codes across jurisdictions. For example, a city that caps building heights at two stories will have a higher regulatory score (more restrictive) than a city that allows four-story buildings (less restrictive).
However, zoning regulations don’t just limit building heights; they include hundreds of factors: setbacks, floor space ratios, lot coverage, minimum lot sizes, bedroom counts, and more. Creating a comprehensive regulatory index for zoning is extremely difficult across multiple cities, but a well-organized atlas would make it possible.
Currently, Canada relies on outdated indexing methods, specifically the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index, which is based on surveys of homebuilders and municipal officials rather than examining the actual text of zoning codes. As urban planning expert Nolan Gray has pointed out:
…research has shown that Wharton respondents sometimes just copied their responses from one questionnaire to the next, failing to capture changes to the zoning code over time… Sometimes responses were just plain wrong, perhaps because the municipal planning departments kicked these questionnaires down to junior staffers.
Not the best option, just the one that might actually happen
A Zoning Atlas is not actually the pinnacle of planning data organization. Australia’s Victoria State Government has an integrated statewide planning management system that includes both mapping and development application tracking, another area where Canadian data is lacking.
Federal procurement challenges and the decentralized nature of zoning regulations between provinces and municipalities make it difficult, if not impossible, to implement a system as sophisticated as Victoria’s on a first try. Although still a daunting task to complete, a Zoning Atlas might not be a moonshot, but this fact is a feature, not a bug. Completion of the Atlas would provide the provinces with a platform that can be developed into a fully fledged planning management system.
A better map means better homes
There has been a lot of talk in Canada about red tape being an issue, and while we can sense the problem, we cannot grasp it without a literal map for it. A federally funded Canadian Zoning Atlas would cost a fraction of a single infrastructure megaproject but could dramatically improve land use planning nationwide. A relatively modest financial investment would yield massive social and economic benefits by enabling more informed development decisions.
This is a rare opportunity with relatively modest funding requirements that would enable Canada to take a significant step forward in modernizing its approach to zoning regulation, enhancing housing affordability, and aligning with international best practices. It’s time to act.
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Only the (3rd) 2024 and (2nd) 2022 National/GTA Municipal Benchmarking Studies are online; the (1st) 2020 is no longer available.