Mike Moffatt housing researcher extraordinaire (and two time Council Conversations guest – here and here) had an interesting thread on Twitter breaking down housing across Canada. This got me thinking how does the unit breakdown look in Windsor-Essex.

Unfortunately the data is only available at a 2021 CMA level (Essex County) but at the time of the Census there were approximate 415,000 people, living in 165,000 units.

Single family homes dominate the currently occupied dwellings in the Windsor Essex Region. When we break it down by occupied dwellings and average people per dwelling unit we find a couple of interesting things.

First the fact that 2.1 adults per single detached home indicates that young people are remaining housed with their parents into adulthood, this number isn’t out of line with the national numbers Mike Moffatt shared. To get ourselves to the national rate of adults in Row houses as an example (1.96) approximately 3,000 more people would have to move into the existing row house stock or we would need to add about 5,000 more people if we built an additional 800 row housing units.

As for kids who are largely dependent on the adults. Compared to the national numbers we have 0.08 more kids per single detached and 0.06 in semi-detached units. For every other type of housing except apartments in duplexes we have fewer kids in other dwellings than national averages. This connects with the traditional Windsor-Essex mythology of – move out, get a place, then have kids and move to the county/suburbs.

Conclusion

Single family living isn’t going away in Windsor-Essex. The challenge will be, are we building the appropriate ratio of other types of units in our region. As I have talked about in the CMHC data in previous months, for every apartment in Windsor, in many cases there is an single family home going up in the County (and in a lot of cases an apartment as well).

As Mike Moffat pointed out, we aren’t building apartments etc. that are designed for families in many cases because they are less economical to build and face zoning challenges so if you hope to build density through tall buildings you face big hurdles in our region.