N.B. finished last in Maritimes in 2023 housing starts, despite cancelling rent caps

Efforts among the Maritime provinces to have more housing built quickly show Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia are having more success than New Brunswick, despite the New Brunswick government's loosening of tenant rent protections last year in an effort to  boost development.

According to data compiled by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, New Brunswick saw construction begin on 4,547 new housing units from January through December 2023, including houses, townhouses, apartments and condominiums.  

That was 2.8 per cent fewer units beginning construction than in 2022.  

The 2023 total represents 545 new housing starts in New Brunswick per 100,000 people, based on July 1 population numbers.  

That was below the national average for the year and well behind numbers over the same period posted by both P.E.I., which had 655 housing starts per 100,000, and Nova Scotia, which had 676 per 100,000.

"That's disappointing. I hadn't heard that before," said Warren Maddox, the executive director of Fredericton Homeless Shelters Inc.

Maddox has been advocating for a quicker response by government to New Brunswick's housing shortage but said even he didn't realize other provinces were doing that much better getting new housing started.

"There's a lot of talk. Everyone knows what needs to happen," said Maddox.  

"We can talk about it all we want. We need to get some housing built."

All three Maritime provinces have made new housing a priority to cope with surges in their populations. 

At the end of 2023, 2.1 million people were living in the region according to estimates by Statistics Canada — 152,000 more than three years earlier.    

That growth has outstripped the supply of housing in each province and triggered escalations in real estate prices and upward pressure on the cost of rent. It's also driven hundreds of vulnerable residents into homelessness.

Last June, the New Brunswick government estimated the province needs 6,000 new housing units per year to deal with the shortage and said it would be relying heavily on private developers to make that happen by "creating conditions" that incentivize building.

One of those incentives implemented at the end of 2022 was to cancel a policy that capped the size of rent increases New Brunswick tenants can be charged each year.