Housing experts from the Smart Prosperity Institute present a report to Hamilton City Council highlighting the city’s struggle with housing affordability, citing a need for more diverse housing options to retain young families and talent.”
Hamilton City Council recently heard a delegation from housing experts that the city is losing young families due to the high cost of housing.
The delegates were from the Smart Prosperity Institute, a national research network and policy think tank based at the University of Ottawa which is led by Dr. Mike Moffatt.
Moffatt himself gave a presentation to Council and answered questions from Councillors in what ended up being a discussion that lasted well over an hour.
Moffatt co-authored a 55-page housing report entitled “Who Will Swing The Hammer?,” about Hamilton housing affordability with fellow researchers Jesse Helmer and Maryam Hosseini.
The report was made possible by funding from the West End Builders’ Association and the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce and was released over the summer.
The report posits that metropolitan Hamilton, which includes the City of Hamilton, Burlington, and Grimsby, is struggling to attract and retain young workers, especially if they want to have children” due to the high costs of housing in the region.
At the time, Moffatt said that the situation in Hamilton is so bad that “the high cost of housing is like a payroll tax for Hamilton area employers. If they wish to retain their workforce, there will be significant upward pressure on wages.”
In order to provide more information to Council and answer questions, Moffatt delegated to Hamilton Council a few weeks ago along with Helmer and West End Home Builders’ Association representative Michelle Diplock.
Moffatt began his presentation by noting that Canada in general has a lot of new people to house.
He showed Statistics Canada numbers which indicate that Canada’s net population growth from international migration was an increase of 3,780,021 people in just the past eight years (2015-2023).
The previous eight year period (2007-2015) only saw an increase of 1,736,437 people, while earlier time periods like 1975-1983 only saw an increase of 799,308 people.
Those numbers take into account immigration, emigration, and non-permanent residents.
He says that the net increase in population is “in a lot of ways a really positive thing in that Ontario’s workforce is aging and we need a new generation of workers to take over as carpenters and electricians and nurses retire, but Hamilton is falling behind, on net, in attracting and retaining new residents, particularly families with kids.”
He notes that Hamilton is good at attracting talent, “but they often don’t stay once they have children.”
“Why are they moving? Largely for attainable housing that meets their needs. That need for attainable housing comes down to a lack of supply” he continued.
He says that family-sized homes in Hamilton are more expensive than surrounding communities like Thorold, Brantford, London, or Woodstock, so people are leaving the city and “it’s a real loss of talent for Hamilton.”
“At first, they might move to Thorold or Brantford but continue working for their Hamilton-based employer either in-person or virtually.”
“But for a lot of these individuals, particularly in sectors like healthcare, they come to realize, ‘Well, wait a second, Brantford needs nurses too. Why am I spending so much time driving on the 403 when I could just get a job closer to home,’” Moffatt told Council.
He adds that “the risk for Hamilton is that it essentially becomes a farm team for talent for the rest of Southwestern Ontario” where other cities essentially get their pick of Hamilton’s top job candidates.
Helmer then took over the rest of the planned portion of the presentation and noted that Hamilton housing starts have been lagging behind the provincial target of 4,700 per year.
But even if housing starts increase, the 55-page report that Helmer co-authored notes that the city’s housing stock is shifting towards building smaller, less child-friendly units.
Thus, Hamilton not only has a housing shortage, but a shortage of family-friendly housing in particular.
Helmer notes that there is also a big need in Hamilton for more senior-friendly housing, particularly for “super seniors who are 85 and up.”
Creating more housing for the elderly would free up some of the existing housing stock for younger generations, the document concludes.
Ultimately, the report and the presentation to Council both emphasize one thing: supply.
The researchers at the Smart Prosperity Institute conclude that Hamilton needs more homes of all types in order to keep families in the city, retain talent, and make housing more affordable.
Based in Hamilton, he reaches hundreds of thousands of people monthly on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. He has been published in The Hamilton Spectator, Stoney Creek News, and Bay Observer. He has also been a segment host with Cable 14 Hamilton. In 2017, he received the Chancellor Full Tuition Scholarship from the University of Ottawa (BA, 2022). He has also received the Governor General’s Academic Medal. He formerly worked in a non-partisan role on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
