The Suburb of the Strait
The Island’s patchy land use rules are a recipe for sprawl
I have written before about the economic and ecological shortcomings of Prince Edward Island’s policy (or lack thereof) on land use. PEI tends to build out rather than up because it lacks island-wide land use planning, protections for agriculturally and environmentally sensitive lands in rural communities, and safeguards against third-party appeals from NIMBYs in urban centres. Although the province is in the early stages of developing an island-wide plan, the absence of interim rules on development means that apartments continue to get blocked in population centres while greenfield builds get provincial approval on unserviced land. As a result, we should not be surprised when stories about developments in places like Point Deroche and Greenwich Beach inevitably make the news.
None of this is ideal, but it has been difficult to quantify just how much this is happening across the Island. Fortunately, a dataset from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) is beginning to make it easier to identify where and how PEI’s housing is being built.
In general, housing data for PEI are mediocre at best. Because the province only has two official urban areas (i.e., the Charlottetown and Summerside census agglomerations), it is difficult to get insights into what is happening in the rapidly growing communities of Kings and West Prince. Even within the Charlottetown urban area, housing data have been historically limited to larger municipalities, often hastily grouped by whether a start occurred in the capital city, one of its two neighbouring towns (Cornwall and Stratford), or the peripheral area which accounts for the remaining quarter of the region’s population.
But somewhere over the past few months, there have been some improvements to the disaggregation of data within these urban areas — so much so that housing starts are now published on a quarterly basis for almost every census subdivision (CSD) which surrounds the province’s two major cities.
For context, CSDs are basically what Statistics Canada uses to describe a municipality or equivalent local government area. On the Island, this means that every city, town, and rural/resort municipality is accounted for, as well as fire districts (which are unincorporated areas) and Indigenous reserves. CMHC now tracks housing starts by dwelling and market type within all CSDs in the Charlottetown and Summerside areas, except for if they happen on lands held by the Abegweit First Nation (there are two reserves near Charlottetown with a combined population of under 300 residents).
Some of the CSD data are available on a monthly basis, but you get the best picture of every municipality and fire district’s development by looking at things from one quarter to the next. After coding CSDs based on whether they are municipalities with full, partial, or no planning authority (see this map), it is possible to understand the extent of PEI’s preference for sprawl. Over the past four years, more than 10% of the Island’s housing development happened in unincorporated communities and municipalities without planning authority.
At first glance, this seems like it ought to be a dream scenario for my fellow YIMBYs — fewer opportunities for naysayers to get in the way of building as much housing as humanly possible on a single lot.
But the issue here is that generally speaking, homebuilding in unplanned areas rarely translates into denser and more efficient development. When dwellings get built outside of areas with official plans, they favour more space- and resource-intensive dwelling types, like single-detached homes, at the expense of more compact multifamily alternatives. Even municipalities with codified residential zoning rules are better at building multifamily housing than communities without planning authority. So much so that non-planning communities saw only around 1% of urban-area apartment unit starts, but over 37% of urban-area single-detached housing starts.
There are some apartment and row housing developments taking place beyond the Charlottetown and Summerside areas (likely in smaller towns with official plans like Three Rivers and Tignish), but even this activity does not offset the Island’s current preference for sprawl. Nor does it address the need for more rental housing, where acute shortages have led PEI to become the province with the lowest vacancy rate.
This pattern of development also increases the carbon footprint of individual households by baking in car-dependent commutes and increasing the life cycle emissions of every additional unit of housing. This directly contradicts the province’s plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.
A lack of planning is also associated with underinvestment in core public infrastructure to ensure that land is fully serviced. This means that the residents of unincorporated areas generally rely on private septic and well assets in place of more efficient and better-regulated municipal water systems. The lots earmarked for subdivision outside of planning municipalities are generally agricultural or wooded areas (many of which abut coasts and the national park), meaning that these developments are costly in terms of materials, land, and the long-term viability of PEI’s agricultural sector. Between 2016 and 2021, the Island lost almost 40 acres of farmland a day. In the absence of a province-wide land use plan, that trend is likely to continue.
In a sense, PEI is seeing the worst of both worlds from the over- and under-regulation of land use. On the one hand, stringent zoning rules in the Island’s major population centres keep dwellings from being built, and archaic consultation practices make it politically impossible to liberalize housing. But the lack of provincial oversight means that housing which is blocked in the places people want to live ends up instead getting built on rural farmland — and often in a less sustainable pattern of development. In the context of PEI’s climate and housing crises, it is hard to think of a more mismatched policy response.
To make matters worse, the province keeps its non-commercial property tax rate flat — regardless of whether a dwelling is situated within or outside of a municipal boundary. Not only does this incentivize development outside of population centres, but it also creates a financial barrier to land use reform. Residents of unincorporated communities are justifiably opposed to joining or forming a municipality when they can enjoy the economic benefits of a neighbouring town at a 30% property tax discount. The province also makes it difficult to start a new municipality from scratch, pointing to population and property value thresholds that even most current municipalities are not able to meet. Unless the province’s new land use plan does not include Island-wide municipalization and local government consolidation, it will be hard to see how the updated strategy will have any teeth.
During the election campaign, the Premier talked a good game about the need to build up rather than out — but the trend of housing starts from the last four years shows the opposite. If this keeps up, major economic drivers like agriculture and tourism will take a hit. If the government fails to protect the Garden of the Gulf, Islanders will find themselves living in the Suburb of the Northumberland Strait.
