Saugeen Shores issued a record number of building permits in 2023, and the town’s Mayor is looking to ramp up housing construction even more this year.
A staff report to council’s committee of the whole Monday evening says construction value was at $315 million, which is an all-time high, more than doubling the previous record of $154 million.
621 permits were issued, and staff say that included 481 multi-family residential units (Apartments, condos).
Staff say the 621 residential units created in 2023 is 59 per cent more than the previous five-year average of 390.
The number of permits issued for multi-family residential units jumped by 1200 per cent from 40 in 2022 to 481 in 2023.
Mayor Luke Charbonneau celebrated the news Monday night, remarking on the 1200 per cent jump in multi-family residential units, saying, “I challenge any other municipality to come up with a number this impressive.”
The value of those multi-residential permits was $174 million; a 900 per cent increase over the 2022 value of $19 million.
The Town says in a statement it influenced the development of the multi-unit residences through the planning process and site plan control.
Charbonneau also says it’s no accident, explaining, “I believe (it’s) a direct result of at least, to a great extent, the work of this council and this municipality in encouraging the construction of purpose built rental and higher density development with the sole purpose of improving housing affordability in the town of Saugeen Shores.”
He credited the building community adding, “The way that we bend the curve to use an old COVID term– start building more high-density development so that we can get more of that housing stock on the market and hopefully start to impact the cost of housing.”
Charbonneau adds, “Those purpose built rentals give us something to subsidize. Our rent subsidy is growing. We implemented it last year, started to grow it this year, but the rent subsidy isn’t very useful if there aren’t units to subsidize, and so the more units we build, more opportunity we have to do that as well.”
The mayor also noted the Town is looking for housing accelerator funding from the federal government, saying, “It’s been on the minister’s desk for months and months and months now and he’s been making other announcements. It’s time he made one in the Town of Saugeen Shores so that we can get our community permit planning system off the ground, so we can build housing even faster and maybe even do better than this in years to come.”
Charbonneau adds, “If the minister is looking to fund municipalities that know how to increase the rate of which housing is built, like I say, find me another one that’s had a 1200 per cent increase year over year, last year in a pretty tough building year.”