Here's how each Ontario city is doing on hitting provincial targets for building new homes

Nearly all cities in Ontario must dramatically pick up the pace if they hope to hit the targets set by Premier Doug Ford's government, the latest housing construction figures show.

A year and half ago, Ford's Progressive Conservatives set the goal of 1.5 million new homes to be built in Ontario over the course of a decade, and laid down specific housing targets for 29 of the province's largest and fastest-growing municipalities to hit by 2031. 

Now trends are emerging, with some cities faring far better than others at being on track to achieve their benchmarks for getting new homes built.

Comparing Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) statistics on new home construction starts from January 2022 to June 2023 against the province's 10-year targets for each city provides a measure of how close each city is to its needed pace. 

Among Ontario's largest cities, Toronto leads the way, with new home starts since January 2022 running at about 90 per cent of the pace needed to reach the goal of 285,000 new homes in 10 years. Vaughan has the next best score among big cities, at 84 per cent. 

Most other large cities — including Ottawa, Hamilton, London, Kitchener and Markham — are proceeding at roughly 50 to 65 per cent of the target pace. 

You can find the full list of 29 cities with a provincially-set housing target and their housing start figures found at the bottom of this article.  

By contrast, Mississauga and Brampton, at 29 per cent and 23 per cent respectively, are so far behind that the two Peel Region cities will need to roughly quadruple the rate of new construction to get on track.

At the very bottom of the list: Burlington, which has seen just 208 housing starts in the past year and a half, roughly five per cent of what would be needed to hit its target of 2,900 new homes per year 

Among smaller cities, Brantford, Pickering and Barrie are at the top of the list for housing starts relative to their provincial targets.

Economist Mike Moffatt of the Smart Prosperity Institute, a think tank based at the University of Ottawa, is tracking the pace of home building in Ontario. While Moffatt says municipalities' willingness to allow new construction has an impact, he also believes other factors — such as higher interest rates and shortages of construction labour — are restraining the number of new housing starts.

"I think all three orders of government along with the [housing development] sector need to start doing some deep dives, figuring out why these buildings aren't getting built, making the necessary changes and getting some shovels in the ground," Moffatt said in an interview. 

CMHC figures show 44,002 new housing starts in Ontario from January to June of this year, an increase of nearly 10 per cent over the same period in 2022. There were 96,080 new housing units started in all of 2022, the first year of the Ford government's 10-year time frame for its home construction target. .   

To have any realistic hope of achieving the goal, Moffatt says Ontario needs to ramp up to an annual pace of 150,000 new housing units roughly by year four of the plan, which would be 2025.