A Hatter walks past the recently renovated an rebranded FreshCo grocery store at the Medicine Hat Mall, which is set to open this week. Commercial construction has kept building permit values in 2023 on par with last year despite a steep drop in housing investment. - NEWS PHOTO COLLIN GALLANT
cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant
The city planning department says that it is prioritizing finding more land suitable for multi-family housing developments as a way to smoothly bolster activity in residential development.
This week the News reported that figures show an historically slow year is developing for new detached home construction along with new duplex, row housing and apartment or condo projects.
That’s as house prices continue to rise and rental affordability is a major topic of conversation.
Amanda Young, the city’s manager of planning services, told the News on Tuesday that she agrees with industry observers that new home buyers are likely sitting on the sidelines until interest rates and construction inflation calm down.
“We’ve certainly seen a residential slowdown, but it’s not permanent, more likely just what we’re seeing right now,” said Young. “Some of the reduction in multi-family is more a result of constriction of available land for those sorts of developments, and I expect that to change.
“We’re working pretty hard to facilitate more land coming on for multi-family sites, so that could recover more quickly.”
At the end of July, the city planning department had approved only 11 building permit applications for new single-family dwellings, compared to 28 through the first seven months of 2022.
Four new duplex permits last month were the first of this year, when between 10 and 25 were approved on average in the past five years. Likewise, after adding 41 apartment units in 2022, this year has so far been a shutout.
In total at July 31, a total of 363 permits had been approved, valued at an estimated $54.6 million, slightly above $53.8 million at the same point last year.
That is mainly due to $20.6 million in new institutional spending making up for $14.4 million less in residential construction.
Commercial and industrial renovations are also up slightly.
“We’ve seen and uptick on the non-residential side, which is very important when the population is not growing dramatically,” said Young, adding multi-family projects can follow commercial and industrial growth.
“Those (housing) projects require more time in planning stages and require certain locations. We’re hoping that will change in the short term.”
Spending on garages in 2023 is so far half of last year’s totals at 16 projects worth $440,000. Apartment alterations are also up in value, while home alterations were steady.
