Housing starts hold their own

With the summer building season approaching, Lethbridge housing starts remain ahead of last year — barely — while the pace has slowed in some similarsized Alberta cities.

Through the year’s first five months, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. reports 194 homes were started in Lethbridge, one more than a year ago.

In Red Deer, by comparison, the number has dropped from 96 to 63; in Grande Prairie, it’s down from 62 to 40. Edmonton also recorded a loss, while Calgary saw a healthy increase.

But home construction starts fell in satellite communities near Lethbridge, the latest CMHC report shows. Fivemonth totals for the full Lethbridge “census metropolitan area” slipped from 245 starts to 226, reflecting slower growth in Coaldale, Coalhurst and smaller Lethbridge County communities.

The city tally includes 123 single-family homes along with 71 multi-family units.

As usual, that’s opposite to reports from Calgary. After five months, that city’s 2,977 multi-family starts were better than double the 1,159 single-family units begun. Of the 4,912 housing units launched in the metro Calgary area, 4,172 of them were inside city limits.

In metro Edmonton meanwhile, an increase in single-family starts — 1,976 of them over five months — could not compensate for a decline in multi-family accommodation, with the combined total dropping to 3,985.

But there was good news for Medicine Hat this time. After slower growth in 2017, a busy May brought yearto-date counts to 24 single and 25 multiples, putting the city 15 units ahead of last year’s pace.

With massive rebuilding still underway, Fort McMurray saw 408 new housing units begun so far, just one-quarter of them recorded as single-family projects. But that’s down from 680 by the end of May in 2017 — one year after so much of the city was lost to wildfire.