Another year, another development record for city
Councillor says current pace, or better, is needed to meet housing demand
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The City of Fredericton once again hit a new record for development, with $267.7 million in building permits issued in 2023.
That tops last year’s previous record of $257.6 million by more than $10 million, and is well above the five-year annual average of $208 million.
Councillors at the city’s economic vitality committee meeting Thursday welcomed the news, with deputy mayor Greg Ericson saying he hopes to see that pace continue, or be exceeded, in the coming years if the city hopes to meet the demand for housing.
“I’d like to know what this did to the needle on our vacancy rate and what kind of numbers we need to see to make that needle twitch,” he said. “It may not be enough to say ‘let’s break the record again next year,’ but we may need to break it by 20 per cent or 50 per cent to move that needle.”
But the rapid growth seen in recent years also came with a word of warning from the mayor.
“It’s wonderful to see all of this growth … but there are also pressures on the city that cost us a lot of money,” Mayor Kate Rogers said. “With it comes growth in tax base, but it’s expensive for a municipality to see so much rapid growth, and we need to keep an eye on that.”
Most of the construction activity – 60 per cent – was residential, with $166.4 million in permits being issued. That’s a slight increase of $200,000 over 2022.
But the number of actual homes built in 2023 was actually down slightly.
A total of 86 single-unit homes were started in the city in 2023, down from 91 in 2022. That number doesn’t include tiny homes. Subdivision activity also fell from 167 lots in 2022 to 91 last year. Multi-unit starts decreased from 767 to 699 last year, and there were 839 total unit starts in 2023, down from 938.
The value of commercial construction in the city last year was $31.7 million, up from $31.1 million in 2022. Government and institutional construction totalled $69 million, with $42 million in permits handed out for government projects and $27 million for institutional.
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