There's a recurring argument in Canadian urban planning that goes something like this: building more housing near transit is good, building more housing in the suburbs is wasteful sprawl, and anyone who defends the latter is either a NIMBY or doesn't understand density. It's a tidy narrative. It's also incomplete.

A recent analysis by Murtaza Haider and Stephen Moranis, drawing on data from the Canadian Urban Institute, makes a case that deserves more airtime: Canada doesn't have to pick one development mode over the other. The country needs both. And failing to recognize that will leave a significant portion of housing demand unmet, no matter how many transit-adjacent condos get built.

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What the Transit-Proximity Data Actually Shows

The case for building near transit is genuinely strong. According to CUI data cited in the analysis, cities with rail-based transit have only about six percent of their total land area within 800 metres of a transit station. Yet that six percent holds 25 percent of the urban population with rail access and 29 percent of the dwellings. The concentration of employment is even more pronounced: 47 percent of the 7.9 million jobs in Canadian cities with rail transit are located within that same 800-metre radius.

Those numbers tell you that transit-adjacent land is already doing extraordinary work. And the opportunity cost of leaving it underbuilt is real. When nearly half of city jobs cluster near rail stations but only a fraction of housing does, you get workers commuting long distances by car to reach employment that was designed to be walkable. You burn money on infrastructure twice: once on the transit nobody fully uses, once on the roads everyone has to use instead.

The CUI analysis also suggests there's room to add 4.4 million more dwellings near existing transit stations across Canadian cities with rail access. That's not a small number. It's a serious argument for aggressive infill and densification policy, and it's why most professional planners, housing economists, and federal housing policy now points toward transit-oriented development as a cornerstone of the supply solution.

But here's where the analysis gets more interesting.

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Who Actually Lives Near Transit, and Who Doesn't

Decades of research on transit-oriented communities reveal a consistent demographic pattern. People who choose to live near transit stations tend to be younger, more likely to rent, more likely to be university-educated, and more likely to live alone. The CUI data puts numbers on it: residents near transit stations are 38 percent more likely to be under 35, 30 percent more likely to be university-educated, and 63 percent more likely to live alone compared to residents in areas farther from rail.

The housing stock in those areas reflects those residents. Two-thirds of dwellings near transit stations are multi-family units, compared to about one-third in more distant areas. More than half of transit-proximate residents rent, versus less than a third elsewhere.

This is not a flaw in transit-oriented development. It's exactly what you'd expect from self-selection. People who value density and walkability choose dense, walkable places. The question isn't whether that's good or bad. The question is whether those demographics represent all of the housing demand Canada needs to serve, and the answer is clearly no.

Families with children, in particular, behave differently. They tend to want more space, owned rather than rented, in neighbourhoods with other families at similar life stages. The children's schools matter. So do the parks, the hockey arenas, the soccer fields. The commute, once you're driving two kids to three different activities, looks different than it does for a 29-year-old renting a one-bedroom. Suburban housing tends to be cheaper per square foot than urban infill, which for a family that needs 1,400 square feet instead of 700, makes the math decisively different.

Planners sometimes treat the suburban preference as cultural backwardness or a failure of urban imagination. But it holds up even when you control for the variables. The analysis notes that when transportation spending is adjusted for household size and income, the gap between suburban and transit-proximate households in the Greater Toronto Area essentially disappears. Suburban families spend more on transportation in absolute terms because they have higher incomes and larger households, not because they're making irrational choices.

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The Real Policy Failure

The genuine problem in Canada isn't that suburbs exist. It's that the policy debate keeps treating this as a binary, when the actual challenge is building enough of both.

Canada needs significantly more housing than standard projections have called for. CMHC has consistently estimated that Canada needs to build 3.5 million additional homes above trend by 2030 to restore affordability to 2004 levels. No single development strategy closes that gap. Transit-oriented infill can absorb a meaningful share, particularly in cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Calgary where rail networks are expanding and underbuilt station areas represent genuine opportunity. But the math doesn't work if you exclude the suburban and semi-urban markets where families with children are actually trying to buy.

BC has moved aggressively on both fronts. The province's transit-oriented development legislation, passed in late 2023, requires municipalities to allow significantly higher density within 200 to 800 metres of frequent transit stations, removing the local veto that had stalled countless projects. That's a real shift. At the same time, suburban communities around the Lower Mainland and in the Okanagan continue to absorb significant demand from households that want ground-oriented homes with yards, even at the cost of longer commutes.

Both of those trends are rational responses to real demand. The families driving from Langley to Vancouver aren't failing to grasp the virtues of density. They're making housing decisions with the options available to them, weighted against what their households actually need. More transit-adjacent supply would give some of them alternatives. But many of them would still choose the suburb, and that's fine.

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What This Means Practically

If you're buying in Canada right now, one takeaway from this analysis is that the infill-versus-suburb debate is mostly noise at the policy level. What matters for your situation is whether the housing type you need, at the price point you can access, exists where you want to live.

In the Okanagan, that calculus looks a bit different than in Vancouver or Toronto. Kelowna doesn't have a rail transit network, which means the transit-proximate premium and the ToD policy lever don't apply the same way here. What the city does have is an active infill program, a growing missing-middle stock, and a surrounding region with lower-cost suburban and semi-rural options for families wanting more space. The supply-building challenge is real here too, just through different mechanisms.

What both Canada's national data and local conditions point toward is the same conclusion: the housing shortage is broad enough that no single approach resolves it. Infill near transit serves renters, young households, and workers who want proximity to employment. Suburban development serves families who need space, schools, and community roots. Treating one as virtuous and the other as regrettable is a policy stance that costs real people real options.

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If you're trying to figure out what the right move is for your situation, in your price range, in this market, our team can walk through the actual numbers with you. The debate about what Canada should build is worth having. But it shouldn't get in the way of decisions you can make right now.