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Brampton has led Greater Toronto in new home sales and subdivision launches since the late 1990s. But in 2005, Brampton's city council shook the home building industry by placing a cap on new-home development throughout most of the municipality.

The timing wasn't great for builders, coinciding with the provincial government's initiative to freeze urban boundaries and build a substantial greenbelt around southern Ontario, thus taking a large block of land off the table for future growth.

But the province also identified Brampton as a growth centre in Greater Toronto. Needless to say, developers had felt as if they'd been caught in a Catch 22: The province directed them to concentrate on Brampton, then Brampton pulled the carpet out by capping new-home permits at 5,500.

Everyone else involved -- politicians, planners and residents -- agreed that a cap was the only way that the city could catch its breath and let infrastructure catch up with the exponential growth. Anybody who has bought a new home in Brampton recently can tell you that traffic congestion is a fact of life on arterial roads. And if they moved in to an early phase of a subdivision, new residents could expect to live with the dust and noise of late-phase construction for years to come. Furthermore, commercial and school developments are way behind schedule in new subdivisions.

Brampton issued 2,616 residential building permits in 2005, a little more than a quarter of the 9,574 approved the year before.

In March, Brampton council resisted intense industry pressure to loosen the cap, and approved 5,500 homes to be included in the 2006 growth plan.

Council did offer an olive branch by adding 2,600 new-dwelling approvals to the growth plan that had been under consideration before the cap was brought in last year. It also agreed to report on the effectiveness of the cap in a mid-year report and revisit the 5,500-home ceiling.

Of course, developers face no caps if they wish to build higher density housing in designated areas, such as around downtown Brampton's GO Station, the central Queen Street East corridor, and the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood straddling Highway 7, all areas where the city and Peel Region want to encourage transit-oriented development. The jury is still out on whether Brampton is mature enough to absorb a condominium market beyond the niche of empty nesters looking to downsize.

The question hovering over the cap issue has always been: Will it eat into Brampton's legendary affordability as developers predicted?

The answer this winter, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, has been not really.

Brampton reported an average price of $390,167 for the first two months of 2006 for single detached homes, up a modest 6.5 per cent over the $366,278 average price for January to February, 2005. This makes Brampton one of only three Greater Toronto municipalities with average new-home prices under $400,000, along with Ajax and Pickering.

When it comes to starts, reading a trend in the first two months of the year is a tricky proposition, considering that the weather is always going to play a factor. But in January to February, 2006, single detached starts in Brampton were cut in half from the same period in 2005, down from 340 to 167.

Interestingly, however, multiple-dwelling starts were steady, though at 87, were still dwarfed by detached construction.

Market facts - Brampton

As at Feb. 28, 2006 (Detached, Link, Semis and Towns)

Top Three Sites (by February sales)