This city’s experience is a rare housing success story in the global affordability crisis

Auckland's infill housing construction projects demonstrate how increasing density can effectively boost supply. Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images

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While cities worldwide struggle with housing affordability (with little to no success), Auckland, New Zealand, has implemented a supply-centric approach that increased housing availability, raised density and lowered prices. Can Canada learn from Auckland’s experience?

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The city’s residents, like those living in similarly desirable metropolises, faced steep price increases as many competed for the limited supply of homes available to buy or rent. Yet housing affordability improved after a municipal policy shift allowed the conversion of single-family homes into multiplexes — a housing type often termed the “missing middle” — delivering thousands of new homes and helping moderate prices.

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New Zealand’s housing challenges stemmed from an accelerated rise in population, which, according to a recent Financial Times report, grew from 1.3 million in 2010 to 1.8 million in 2025, due to an earlier influx of new immigrants and repatriated wealthy citizens from Australia and elsewhere. The country’s largest city could not build housing in time to keep up with the growth.

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A paper in Policy Quarterly last year by Jones, Greenway-McGrevy and Crow proposed a new method to develop timely estimates of urban housing stock. In the course of their research, they looked at the impact of the Auckland Unitary Plan (or AUP, the municipal land-use plan), which allowed rezoning of 75 per cent of the city’s residential land from single-family homes to multiplexes and townhouses. From the time of the AUP’s inception in August 2016 until August 2024, housing stock grew by 91,000 units — an increase of 18 per cent. Interestingly, housing construction was dominated by townhouses or multiplexes built on the sites of former single detached homes.

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A comparison with data from the period before the AUP reveals a noticeable increase in housing stock growth, starting in 2018, when AUP-facilitated homes completed construction and entered the market. The authors estimate that, on average, nine new dwellings were added for each demolished one.

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Establishing causality here is hard. The increase in housing supply could have started before the policy change. The decline in average housing prices could have been the result of both increased supply and reduced demand, as high-income earners have been leaving New Zealand in large numbers. Case in point: New Zealand’s former prime minister recently house-hunted in Australia.

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Introducing gentle density through missing-middle initiatives has captured significant attention in Canada. In the past few years, city governments have allowed for blanket rezoning to replace single detached homes with multiplexes. However, the planning initiatives have not necessarily delivered sufficient new housing in areas previously zoned for low-density housing.

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A 2025 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) report examined missing-middle housing construction in Canada’s six most populous cities: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton. The rezoning initiatives had moderate success from 2018 to 2023 before a huge uptake between 2023 and 2024, when missing-middle housing starts jumped 44 per cent. Surprisingly, the uptake was not particularly strong in Canada’s three largest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Instead, Calgary and Edmonton led the surge.