Many Canadian cities need more housing, both now and in the near future. While urban sprawl consumes green spaces and strains resources, the conversion and expansion of existing buildings offer a more sustainable path forward. Research in Canada has shown that urban sprawl has far worse impacts on climate change than infill development. Moreover, maintaining existing building stock to help construct new units can reduce emissions related to procuring and transporting new building material.
There are a variety of building conversions: altering a single-family home to create additional dwelling units (a basement apartment for example); a duplex expanding into a triplex or fourplex; or converting a previously non-residential building into residential units.
On this page, we chart how different Canadian urban regions are doing in terms of creating new residential dwelling units from building conversions, over the five year period of 2019 to 2023.
The data are sourced from Statistics Canada's Building Permit Survey. This survey tracks attributes of building permits issued in Census Metropolitan Areas (CMA) on a monthly basis. The survey includes the number of new dwelling units to be created from building conversions, based on building permits issued in each month. The survey also has categories for three types of conversions (a. non-residential to residential, b. single dwelling to multiple dwellings, and c. multiple to multiple).
Overall across Canada there were 104,425 new dwelling units being created via conversions based on building permits issued in the five-year period from 01/2019 to 12/2023. This accounts for 7.9% of all new residential dwelling units. Below we chart how this varies by CMA, trends over time, as well as different types of building conversions.
Total and percent of new dwellings from building conversions
(based on issued building permits)