Housing Needs Assessments

On this page

• Overview
• What is a Housing Needs Assessment?
• Benefits of a federal Housing Needs Assessment
  • Municipal and Territorial spotlights New!
• Completed Housing Needs Assessments
• Housing Accelerator Fund - Round 2
• Download the federal Housing Needs Assessment template
• Request a pre-populated Housing Needs Assessment template

Overview

Housing Needs Assessments (HNAs) provide data to support evidence-based decision making at the local and community level. Having this data helps all levels of government make informed decisions about their infrastructure and housing investments in order to build the most suitable housing for their communities. An assessment helps governments gather critical housing data to guide decisions on the type and location of housing to build, as well as the infrastructure needed to support community growth.

The federal government is taking an integrated approach to housing and infrastructure. Municipalities with a population of 30,000 or greater are required to complete an HNA to be eligible for federal funding under infrastructure programs. Municipalities of all sizes with agreements to receive funding through the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) also need to complete HNAs.

What is a Housing Needs Assessment?

An HNA is a report informed by data and research that describes the current and future housing needs of a municipality. It includes both:

• Quantitative research such as economic data, population and household forecasts; and,
• Qualitative research such as interviews, policy analysis and stakeholder engagement.

Benefits of a standardized federal Housing Needs Assessment

The federal government has developed a standard HNA template. The federal approach has been inspired by what provinces and municipalities are already doing with respect to HNAs and included consultation with provinces, territories and other stakeholders, including housing experts and academics. A federal standard for HNAs has many benefits, including:

• Providing the necessary evidence to inform local housing policies, investments and planning practices, grounded in the current and projected needs of a community;
• Fostering the widespread development and adoption of a recognized best practice;
• Ensuring an evidence-based, equity-focused and long-term planning approach to determining the housing needs of Canadians;
• Encouraging integrated, systems thinking by linking HNAs to federal infrastructure programs and planning for future population growth;
• Allowing for comparability across jurisdictions and facilitating roll-up of data to ensure an informed, evidence-based, long-term planning story at the municipal, regional and ultimately national level;
• Supporting governments in fulfilling the HNA requirement for federal infrastructure funding; and,
• Ensuring governments have a tool that they can leverage for their own evidence-based long-term planning needs.

Municipality and Territorial spotlights New!

Municipalities and Territories across the country are completing HNAs to better understand their housing needs and plan for the future. Explore stories from municipalities and Territories who have completed their HNAs and see how they are turning data-driven insights into action.

Explore municipal and territorial spotlights

Completed Housing Needs Assessments

HNAs completed and published by municipalities with a population of 30,000 or greater and the Territories are available.

View the list of municipalities

Housing Accelerator Fund - Round 2

For those that need to complete or update their HNA for the Housing Accelerator Fund, resources are available on the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) website. Municipalities with a population of 30,000 or greater who are completing a new HNA must use the federal template published on the Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada's website.

Download the federal Housing Needs Assessment template

The following links allow you to download a blank Microsoft Word version of the federal HNA template:

Federal HNA template for communities with populations over 30K+

• Housing Needs Assessment template (Microsoft Word Version) (128.30 KB)

Federal HNA template for Territories

• Territorial Housing Needs Assessment template (Microsoft Word Version) (129.33 KB)

Federal HNA template for communities with populations under 30K+

• Under 30,000 Housing Needs Assessment template (Microsoft Word Version) (132.55 KB)

These documents are provided as templates for your use and have been prepared to meet accessibility requirements. If you require these documents in an alternative format, please email us at hna.secretariat-secretariat.ebml@infc.gc.ca.

Request a pre-populated Housing Needs Assessment template

HNAs are a core component of the delivery of federal housing and infrastructure programming, including the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF), the Canada Public Transit Fund (CPTF), and the Building Communities Strong Fund – Community Stream (BCSF-CS). Completing an HNA is required for all municipalities with HAF agreements, and for municipalities with a population of 30,000 or greater to fulfill their commitments under the CPTF and BCSF-CS.

Municipalities with a population of under 30,000 may also complete HNAs and use them to support their infrastructure funding applications. To better assist these municipalities, HICC has developed a specialized HNA template tailored to their needs.

To reduce the administrative burden on municipalities, a pre-populated HNA template is available for all municipalities with a population of at least 1,000. It includes pre-filled public data, such as CMHC and Statistics Canada data. Municipalities must input the remainder of the information within the template.

It is important that municipalities email hna.secretariat-secretariat.ebml@infc.gc.ca to request their pre-populated HNA template, in either official language, in order to complete their assessment for the purposes of fulfilling program requirements.