News

It's been three years since the city of Brampton's planning czars fired a loud salvo across the bow of the low-rise housing developers that have plowed thousands of acres of farmland into suburban cul-de-sacs across the Peel Region.

Egged on by council members feeling the heat from citizens fed up with lagging infrastructure, health and education services, Brampton capped new housing developments to 5,500 low-rise dwellings in 2005 and has extended the cap every year since.

The cap came as a shock to builders who'd grown accustomed to adding phase after phase of detached and semi-detached tract housing onto what seemed like a limitless supply of land.

There was also no shortage of buyers eager to snap them up. Brampton was a popular entry point for young families, especially new arrivals to Canada, with a plentiful supply of affordable, if unimaginative, new homes with fairly accessible routes and commuter transit into Toronto.

Brampton has led every municipality in the Greater Toronto Area in detached and semi-detached sales for more than a decade - in both new housing and resale - because of a high volume of properties on the market keeping prices in check.

In fact, in 2004, there was more new low-rise dwelling built there than anywhere else in Canada.

Developers and their industry lobbyists warned that the Brampton housing cap would change all that, pushing the supply down and prices up, out of reach of the first- or second-time buyers who made up the bulk of Brampton's market.

There were exceptions to the cap. Developers of high-rise or multiresidential housing have been encouraged to launch projects of all shapes, sizes and concepts, particularly in the city's central heritage core, conveniently located near a GO Train rail station. Higher-density housing is emerging - though not in great volume - and demand continues to be strong.

So has the cap boosted prices and shellacked sales, as predicted? Not much, as it turns out. With the exception of Milton, Brampton remains the most affordable new low-rise market in the western GTA.

The average price for a new single-family detached house in Brampton was $427,321 for the January-to-May period of this year, up 11.7 per cent from $382,466 in the same period last year, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. That's still almost $50,000 less than the average new detached price for all of Peel Region, which stands at $472,700.

Sales of new low-rise homes, however, slowed down in the first five months of 2008. For the period, 1,049 new low-rise sales were reported (which includes detached, semis and freehold townhouses). That's a huge drop from 1,898 for the same period in 2007, but Brampton is still one of the GTA's hottest markets. The only municipality with a greater number of new low-rise sales in the first five months of 2008 is Vaughan with 1,144, according to data compiled by RealNet Canada Inc.

Brampton is unique to many of the other GTA suburbs in that it is more than a bedroom community, having a significant number of manufacturing operations, including automobile plants. It's likely that the city will feel the pinch of a slowdown in the manufacturing and export economy more than some of its neighbours such as Mississauga or Vaughan.

Last November's announcement that Chrysler Canada would be cutting 1,100 assembly line jobs at its Brampton plant will definitely have an adverse affect on the demand for new housing. It's something that the city could not predict when it implemented its low-rise development cap.