Findings & Insights

Throughout the project, we encountered datasets that could meaningfully improve local housing analysis but were kept confidential, published only at scales too broad to be useful, or otherwise proved inaccessible. Anonymized community-level shelter-use data from HIFIS is restricted behind arduous Research Data Centre protocols and only published as aggregated national figures, rental information collected through the Labour Force Survey is omitted in public microdata files, and consistent access to the rich property-related datasets behind the mass appraisal analyses that produce assessments for property taxation purposes would unlock numerous modelling opportunities. Much of the barrier to valuable, granular analysis is about access and collection practices, not new data development.

The core elements of HNAs continue to be quantitative analyses driven by secondary data, but engagement of the community and stakeholders is an important part of producing a robust assessment. However, engagement programs are often a significant expense, especially as resources like the HNA Blueprint make other elements of the process more efficient. Consideration of how to get the most benefit out of an engagement budget is important, especially for municipalities with limited resources.

For communities new to conducting HNAs or discussing housing issues, broad engagement of the public and elected officials serves an important educational role; building a common understanding of the facts, buy-in for the assessment itself, and a shared understanding of the need for implementing responses. However, as the practice of updating HNAs becomes familiar over time, the focus can shift to put greater emphasis on the forms of engagement that can yield high-value insights for an HNA itself. Broad public engagement can scale back, the data and information generated is typically not statistically representative or detailed enough meaningfully to inform conclusions and recommendations. Outreach to key vulnerable and underrepresented populations, and stakeholders in the housing ecosystem, particularly in the non-market sector, should receive even greater focus and investment. Secondary data sources often fail to provide complete information on these important niches, leaving a gap of awareness to be filled. In particular, comprehensive and standardised data on non-market housing supply is usually lacking, fragmented across sources and silos. The HNA Blueprint developed a Non-market Housing Inventory framework for collecting primary data on this housing supply, to support the creation and maintenance of a consolidated dataset so communities can better understand and track this incredibly important part of the housing system.

We went into our project assuming that flashy dashboards, online platforms, and sophisticated infographics would help communities get more out of an updated and refreshed HNA methodology. While they appeal to some, the reality for many communities is that staff capacity is a limiting factor. Good information and resources, provided in familiar formats that fit into existing practices and common technical proficiencies, is more practically useful than new platforms and one-off processes that need to be learned and won’t be used frequently. The HNA Blueprint was ultimately developed as a package of boring old PDF, Word, and Excel files to maximise their accessibility. Advanced users can check our GitHub for some more advanced resources as a bonus, but to use the Blueprint, you really don’t need much and it should integrate easily into existing files and processes you work with every day.

The broadening implementation of Housing Needs Assessments, and advancing methods in completing them are helpful, but will only get us so far. Knowledge has limited value without intent, means, and authority to act on it. Across many conversations, we heard again and again that . This isn’t something the HNA Blueprint can solve, but serves to highlight a reality for senior government; in responding to Canada’s housing challenges, knowing what the problems are is increasingly not a barrier. Translating that knowledge into a strategic response, and having the expertise and resources to meaningfully implement it, is where communities are hitting the wall.

To try and close gaps around homelessness figures in smaller communities, we attempted to develop estimation models to put a reasonable number on things where resources prevent more labour-intensive enumeration methods (like Point-In-Time counts) or where the community context rendered those methods ineffective. Ultimately, we encountered access barriers for local-level data which prevented us from achieving this goal, but using the available national-level data we were still able to generate a proof-of-concept model, and spun off related research into the factors that influence homelessness rates, and the life consequences for individuals from an experience of homelessness. You can find more information in the Research section of our resources page, but the findings only further emphasise what is common knowledge within the sector in our experience; homelessness is principally the outcome of socio-economic systems rather than individual characteristics, and the experience is utterly corrosive, leading to permanent long-term impairments on life outcomes, and robbing us all of a healthier, more productive, and happier society. It is imperative that Canada continues to pursue a society in which experiences of homelessness are vanishingly rare and quickly resolved.

One priority for our project was to better serve small and rural municipalities. Making HNAs more efficient to prepare goes a long way, but capacity isn’t the only challenge facing these communities. For various reasons, these areas of the country have less data readily available for them, and one of the most impactful and long-standing data gaps has been information on market rents in areas not covered by the CMHC Rental Market Survey.

We developed a series of econometric models to estimate rents in these areas across different regions of Canada. With the pivot from market rent to household income as the basis for calculating affordable rent thresholds in federal housing programs, the importance of our modelling efforts was reduced. The HNA Blueprint now provides community-level affordable rent calculations following the Build Canada Homes formula, but our rent models and insights from the effort of developing them, are provided as a companion report in the Research section of our resources page. Modeling confirmed a strong, positive spatial correlation between rural rents and nearest urban market rents across Atlantic, Central, and Western Canada. Urban rent elasticity ranged from 0.27% to 0.50%, demonstrating that tightening urban rental markets exert direct, quantifiable upward price pressure on adjacent rural communities. This empirical relationship establishes that where primary rural rental market data is unavailable, urban proximity metrics and spatial econometrics can serve as reliable proxy indicators to estimate baseline rural market rents for local HNAs.

Aside from market rent in small communities, we set our sights on closing a variety of other knowledge gaps. This includes other issues more pertinent to housing in rural contexts, topics of emerging importance that are broadly applicable but not well addressed by long-standing HNA practices, as well as other needs expressed by stakeholders and potential end-users.

While we’ve moved the needle forward on some, many gaps remain. Here are areas we still see unmet needs:

• Post-secondary Student Housing Demand – methods to better estimate the demand from college and university students exist, but we’re missing student-specific headship rate data to unlock them. A recent study published by Statistics Canada shows this information can be generated, and even provides it for a few select CMAs, but we’re far short of comprehensive coverage.

• Work from Home – the proliferation of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic also upended housing markets as employment became increasingly detached from geography and housing demand could more easily flow into more affordable markets. Research is still just emerging to help understand the scale and factors at play, and the situation remains dynamic so confidence in what represents a stable long-term trend presents challenges. However, it is clear that this break in previous geographic relationships between employment and housing demand has permanently restructured housing markets to some degree, with impacts especially for small and rural communities. We look forward to continuing research, and the availability of 2026 Census data in particular, to help enable better understanding of remote work influences on housing demand at the community level.

• Temporary Workforce & Employer-Controlled Housing – Communities experiencing significant variations in labour activity (e.g. tourism destinations, seasonal industry hubs, megaproject locations) often have shadow conditions not easily understood through typical data sources. For example, employers in the agricultural industry may purchase existing housing stock in a community to guarantee shelter for a large seasonal workforce, which doesn’t change the community’s top-line housing supply, but in practice will make it unavailable for full-time occupation by residents. While related data is becoming more available as efforts like the Canadian Housing Statistics Program continue to mature, quantifying the effects of shadow demand additions and supply removal largely requires estimation through study-specific data gathering and modelling, not descriptive analysis of standardised national datasets.

• Industry Capacity – The capacity of the housing industry to deliver new supply is a significant facet of Canada’s housing challenges. At the local level, small and rural communities experience this issue differently. Rather than questions about total supply output and how quickly it can scale, in these areas it is often first a question of whether development and construction firms are active, their level of sophistication, and what can be done to attract more of the industry capacity focused on larger markets.
Regardless of scale, the current and near-term ability of the private sector to deliver housing supply can be difficult to understand at the local level. Industry stakeholder engagement largely identifies regulatory barriers, and may flag challenges like labour scarcity, but cannot quantify those details.

• Local Credit Availability – Financial borrowing constraints and population creditworthiness are under analyzed in HNA methodologies. Credit-related factors (such as average credit scores and delinquency rates) are disproportionately important in small/rural communities that heavily rely on owner-occupied tenureship, yet data is restricted to CMA or provincial scales.