Dieppe, N.B., has record year for housing permits

The City of Dieppe, N.B., had a record year for housing permits, according to new data from 2024.

Following a housing needs assessment, council adopted its first ever housing strategy in 2024.

“The housing strategy will have four principal goals that will seek to form partnerships, to look at increasing incentive programs for non-market housing, also looking at reviewing some of our bylaws to see if they’re currently up to date and to see if there’s anything that could be done to accelerate the development in one form or another,” said planning and development director Alexandre Girard. “Another is to increase capacity for the municipality to sit down with developers and see if there’s opportunities for financing at the federal and provincial level.”

Girard says just under 1,200 new housing units were approved for construction in 2024. He says the city is on track to meet the projected need for the growing population.

“Within the housing needs assessment, it also had identified that within the next 10 years the municipality would need to build between 3,500-4,500 new units, and so with that and knowing that we currently have a very low vacancy rate in Dieppe, we really needed to take action,” he says. “There are currently close to 1,000 units under construction right now, so the momentum is there.”

Girard says the current lack of non-market housing will be a big focus in 2025.

“Non-market housing is essentially not-for-profit housing and so one of the actions that we will be focusing on in 2025 is really kind of trying to form some partnerships, external partnerships, with not-for-profit organizations to see if we can develop that network or ecosystem of non-market housing,” he said.

Girard says he suspects 2025 to be comparable to 2024 in terms of how many new housing permits the city issues. 

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