The hidden crisis: How fragmented zoning data is strangling Canada’s housing supply
RESCON Newsletter: Residential Builder
October 1st, 2025 | Page 46
Canada’s housing shortage is being quietly constrained by a less visible but deeply structural problem: fragmented zoning data. Across Ontario and the rest of the country, zoning and property information is scattered across incompatible municipal systems, buried in PDFs, static maps, and siloed databases. This makes basic land-use analysis slow, expensive, and inconsistent, adding months to development timelines and driving up housing costs. The issue isn’t just outdated formats, it’s that Canada’s land data is fundamentally not AI-ready. Without standardized, machine-readable zoning information, governments, developers, and lenders lack a clear, comparable view of where housing can actually be built, turning zoning into a hidden bottleneck in meeting national housing targets.
Solving this requires more than digitization; it demands a new, AI-ready property data infrastructure. By transforming fragmented municipal bylaws into standardized, interoperable data, Canada can unlock instant zoning analysis, reduce development risk, and enable smarter capital allocation. Data-as-a-Service platforms are emerging to serve as the connective fabric of this intelligence, allowing planners, developers, and policymakers to query zoning rules in seconds rather than weeks. The impact is direct and systemic: faster approvals, lower upfront costs, better policy evaluation, and greater confidence for investment. Addressing zoning data fragmentation removes a critical structural barrier and lays the foundation needed to accelerate housing delivery at scale.
