Sarnia’s housing boom is solving the wrong shortage

Sarnia keeps smashing provincial housing targets, but the city’s own rental data show the deepest shortage is at the affordable end of the market. This opinion piece argues that subdivisions, condos and high-rent apartments should not be counted as progress on affordability when the cheapest rentals are nearly full and the most expensive have the highest vacancy.

Sarnia has become remarkably good at hitting housing targets. Last year, 654 new homes broke ground, more than six times the provincial target, earning the city another $400,000 from Ontario's Building Faster Fund. By the measure governments have chosen, this is an extraordinary success.

The problem is that housing starts measure development, not affordability.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's 2025 rental data show a city with dramatically different housing markets depending on what a tenant can afford. Only 1.7 per cent of apartments in the cheapest quarter of Sarnia's primary rental market were vacant. In the most expensive quarter, vacancy was 8.0 per cent.

The same divide appears when the market is broken down by rent. Apartments renting for $750 to $999 had a vacancy rate of just 1.2 per cent, while those between $1,000 and $1,249 were at 2.7 per cent. Vacancy rose to 6.4 per cent between $1,250 and $1,499 and reached 7.5 per cent once rents climbed above $1,500.

Those figures describe the housing shortage more precisely than the city's construction totals do. Sarnia is not experiencing the same shortage at every price point. Inexpensive apartments are extremely difficult to find, while considerably more housing sits available at the expensive end of the rental market.

That should matter when we decide what counts as progress on the housing crisis.

A new detached house in a subdivision counts as one housing start. So does a condominium, an $1,800 apartment, a $1,000 apartment and a rent-geared-to-income unit. Provincial targets count each new door the same way, even though those homes serve people in entirely different financial circumstances.

Sarnia's own housing research makes clear where the most serious need lies. Almost one-quarter of renter households were in core housing need in 2021, and more than 37 per cent were spending at least 30 per cent of their income on shelter. The City's Housing Needs Assessment found that people receiving Ontario Works or ODSP could not afford average market rents and that minimum-wage and other lower-income workers faced substantial affordability gaps. Nearly 1,000 households are also waiting for assisted housing through Lambton County.

At the same time, Sarnia has lost some of the affordable housing it already had. Between 2016 and 2021, 60 affordable rental units serving low- and very-low-income households were added while 125 were lost, leaving the city with a net reduction of 65 units. Average rents have meanwhile climbed sharply: a one-bedroom that averaged $753 in 2014 was $1,193 by 2024, while the average two-bedroom increased from $874 to $1,468.

Against that backdrop, celebrating every new housing start as progress on affordability becomes difficult to justify.

There is nothing inherently wrong with building new subdivisions, condominiums or higher-priced apartments. Sarnia needs a functioning housing market across income levels, and additional supply can create broader benefits. People who move into newly built housing leave other homes behind, increasing choice elsewhere in the market, and greater supply can restrain price growth over time.

But those indirect benefits should not be confused with actually producing affordable housing.

An $1,800 apartment may add useful supply. It may compete with other $1,800 apartments and eventually put downward pressure elsewhere in the market. It still cannot house someone who can afford $900 a month, and its construction does not immediately replace one of the inexpensive units Sarnia has already lost.

That distinction becomes particularly difficult to ignore when vacancy is already highest among Sarnia's most expensive rentals. The market is showing substantial unused capacity at the top while the cheapest apartments remain close to fully occupied. Continuing to concentrate public attention on total housing production without distinguishing what is being built risks directing our greatest enthusiasm toward the part of the market where the shortage is least severe.

Sarnia's planning documents already recognize this problem more clearly than our housing-target celebrations do. The Official Plan establishes a goal that 30 per cent of new dwelling units should be affordable, while the City has created an Affordable Housing Community Improvement Plan offering incentives intended specifically to encourage affordable development.

Those policies acknowledge that the composition of new housing matters.

If affordability is the objective, it should also be part of how success is measured. When Sarnia reports hundreds of new housing starts, the public should be told how many meet the City's affordability definition. When public land, grants, fee reductions or other incentives support housing development, the number of genuinely affordable homes produced should matter at least as much as the total number of units.

That would also force a clearer conversation about where public resources belong. Preserving existing inexpensive rentals, expanding rent-geared-to-income housing, supporting non-profit and co-operative development, creating smaller lower-cost units and requiring meaningful affordability from publicly supported projects all address the portion of the market where Sarnia's own data show the greatest shortage.

This is not an argument for stopping private housing construction. More housing can be useful, including housing at the upper end of the market. It is an argument for being considerably more precise about the problem that construction is supposed to solve.

Sarnia can be successful at encouraging development while still failing to produce enough affordable housing. In fact, the current numbers suggest that is exactly what has happened: the city has exceeded its construction targets by an enormous margin while inexpensive rentals remain extremely scarce, hundreds of households struggle with housing costs and the affordable stock has failed to keep pace.

We can keep approving subdivisions, celebrating condos and collecting provincial cheques for housing starts. But an expensive home does not become affordable because politicians counted it toward a target. Sarnia already has vacancies where housing costs the most. The crisis is where housing costs the least.