Apartments under construction in Prince Albert. (file photo/paNOW Staff)

By Susan McNeil

Housing

Report shows Prince Albert needs over 1,000 housing units in the next 10 years

Mar 18, 2025 | 9:07 AM

The City of Prince Albert council was presented Monday night with a detailed look at what is needed to satisfy housing demand in the city.

The numbers are large and a mismatch exists between supply and demand when it comes to both renting and owning. To help fix it, between 87 to 160 units are needed per year until 2036.

“Prince Albert has lagged the rest of the province in construction,” Brenda Wallace of Wallace Insights, the company hired to conduct the study, told council.

Ideally, to meet future demand, the city would need to produce around 130 units annually in a mix of affordable and market housing. Right now, it’s producing 87 units annually. Those 87 units are the result of new developments like three 60-unit apartment complexes in the West Hill but before that, construction lagged for two decades.

Aggravating the situation is the fact that existing housing stock is aging with the majority of city homes built before 1981.

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The number of people owning a home has stayed fairly static since 2021 but rents have shot up, rising over 10 per cent to more than $1,000/month when for a significant number of renters, the most they can afford is about $950.

One area of demand is for one and two-bedroom rental units for young working families or singles who do not want to rent four-bedroom houses of which there is a larger supply.

“Prince Albert has a high rate of transience and economic instability, particularly among young adults and low-income families. This instability is affecting the economy as the labour participation rate shrinks despite increases in the working age population,” the report said.

An average of 22 per cent of Prince Albert residents move within a year, which is four per cent more than the next highest Saskatchewan city, Saskatoon.

A healthy moving range is between 10 and 15 per cent.

Not all of the movers are leaving the city and slightly more than half stay in town. Because they are also connected to local services agencies, some of the movers are being evicted while others are moving because the quality of their living situation is bad.

Migration is also high between Prince Albert and communities further north.

At the same time, the volume of international immigrants has increased. In 2016, 2,675 people were immigrants and five years later, that number was almost 3,500 – a 30 per cent change. A larger than normal amount of these people do not stay in the city.

In the 2016 to 2021 span between census counts, Prince Albert grew by 5.1 per cent. Slightly less than one-half were Indigenous (2.2 per cent) but local organizations said that they do not believe the census numbers around Indigenous people are accurate.

A significant amount of residents were not counted, a number Wallace estimates to be around 10,000.

Structural market failures

The local housing market has more than one structural failure which has led to the affordability and availability issue.

Builders are not constructing new homes or rental units at the same pace as the rest of Saskatchewan and there are fewer homes built between 2016 and 2021.

This led to a lack of housing priced between $360,000 and $440,000, a market for about 1,800 households.

Over 60 per cent of households are between one and two people but well over 30 per cent of homes have four or more bedrooms. People don’t want to pay for more house than they need.

The focus has been on custom, high-end housing or non-profit projects and that situation has gone on for the last 20 years.

What Prince Albert does have an abundance of is unregulated secondary suits which total almost 60 per cent of all rentals. Because they are unregulated, the city does not know what condition they are in. Low quality housing causes people to move around more.

What can the city do?

The report is very detailed and holds a lot of numbers. Councillors said they need to digest it but, at the same time, the amount of building that needs to happen is high so there is some urgency to start now.

“There’s a lot to unpack,” said Coun. Blake Edwards. “It would be beneficial to have a summary.”

Director of Community Development Craig Guidinger was asked by council what needs to happen next. One of the reasons to get the report was it is required for municipalities to have one in order to apply for federal Housing Accelerator Funding (HAF).

Normally, HAF agreements provide the municipality with funding to build roads, water and sewer infrastructure and in exchange, the city must loosen zoning restrictions with a key change to allow automatic approval of fourplexes in the same zoning area as single family homes.

More immediately, Guidinger said his department will bring forward some ideas to stimulate building. That could be reduced prices on city lots and working with other groups like the Prince Albert Grand Council and the Métis Nation—Saskatchewan. MN-S already has a proposal in front of council for a neighbourhood of affordable housing that would be rent-to-own near their new office building in the West Hill.

Guidinger said that council will review some ideas within the next few months and more will likely come later.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com

On BlueSky: @susanmcneil.bsky.social