WHITEHORSE – In community Facebook groups, Sarah Newton keeps seeing the same kind of message: people urgently looking for a place to live.
The Whitehorse resident says the search has become an almost daily occurrence, involving both longtime locals and people hoping to move to the northern city. With housing availability so limited, however, finding a home has become difficult not only for those on lower incomes, but also for people with substantial budgets.
Whitehorse has been one of Canada’s fastest-growing cities for years. But Newton, board president of the Northern Community Land Trust, a non-profit organization that develops permanently affordable housing in Yukon, worries that the housing shortage is preventing the community from keeping pace with its own growth.
“It’s actually insane, the lack of housing for people,” Newton said.
The shortage is also making it harder to attract essential workers.
“We have a really high need for teachers, for education assistants, for health-care workers, for construction workers, and these are the types of people that we can’t bring into our territory right now because of the lack of housing.”
The problem extends well beyond Whitehorse. Housing shortages are widespread across Northern Canada, where building new homes comes with a combination of challenges that are less pronounced in the country’s southern urban centres – from environmental conditions to labour constraints and complex supply chains.
As governments and industry stakeholders push for more housing nationwide to improve affordability, experts familiar with the North argue that the territories cannot simply reproduce solutions developed elsewhere.
The region, they say, needs an approach “designed specifically for northern realities.”
A report released last month by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. found that housing in Canada’s three territories was less affordable in 2025 than it had been in 2021. The agency pointed to “critically low availability,” which has restricted both market-rate and subsidized housing options.
Housing starts per capita have also remained below the Canadian average. High construction costs, a shortage of serviced land, logistical difficulties and labour constraints continue to limit new supply.
“The places like Whitehorse, the broad outlines of the story are the same as in large urban areas in Canada, but if you look more broadly at the territories and particularly at Nunavut, the situation is different,” said Aled ab Iorwerth, deputy chief economist at the national housing agency.
“Yes, the cost of housing is high and the (lack of) affordability is there, but you also in Nunavut have issues related to building quality and to overcrowding.”
Across the North, market-priced housing is concentrated almost entirely in territorial capitals, ab Iorwerth said, a pattern that is likely connected to the high cost of construction.
The northern building season is short, with weather conditions limiting the period during which work can be carried out efficiently. At the same time, materials often have to travel long distances before reaching construction sites.
“The season for building when the weather is acceptable is obviously quite short. You have long transportation supply chains to get the materials to the North, so energy costs are important,” he said.
“It’s not a large market, so you have limited economies of scale. There’s probably limited access to a workforce that can build, so all of this is leading to significant challenges on construction costs.”
Building for affordability – and durability
Those conditions are increasing demand for models such as the one being developed by Newton’s organization.
The Northern Community Land Trust is approaching completion of its first major project: a 32-unit housing complex in Whitehorse. The development will allow local residents to purchase homes at a discounted price, made possible through donated land, federal and territorial funding, as well as an “efficient” design.
The project has been designed around local conditions, including the use of features such as fireproof siding.
Newton said the organization has deliberately placed environmental performance, energy efficiency and sustainability at the centre of the project.
“We have kept environmental, energy-efficient and sustainable designs at the top of our priority list because we believe that affordability is not about building cheap, it’s about building durable and it’s about building for the future,” she said.
But even when construction is underway, the North’s geography and climate can create complications.
Long and often severe winters restrict when construction can take place, while many building materials have to be shipped from larger southern cities. A missing component or an incorrect order can therefore create delays that would be far easier to resolve elsewhere.
“We’ve had to order kitchen cabinetry from down south … and that’s been really challenging because if anything was missing or mis-ordered, it’s not like you can just run over and pick the thing that you need up,” Newton said.
“There’s timeline delays on getting certain things in at specific times because of that.”
Prefabrication adapted to Arctic conditions
The CMHC report acknowledged the unique difficulties facing the North, but also identified what it called “opportunities for innovation.”
Among those opportunities are “more regionally responsive design and energy-efficient housing solutions that respond to Northern and Arctic conditions.”
The report highlighted the Kivalliq Long-Term Care Facility in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. The project incorporates building orientation, thermal performance strategies, natural light, as well as passive and mechanical heating systems to improve comfort in Arctic conditions.
In the Northwest Territories, Arcan Group, a general contractor and design company based in the North, has taken another approach.
For the past four years, the company has been building “ready-to-move” homes through a partnership with the Hay River Métis community.
Hughie Graham, Arcan’s director of partnerships and development, describes the approach as “hybrid modular construction.”
Rather than constructing every component directly on-site during the limited northern building season, parts of the homes are produced throughout the year inside a tented facility. They are then transported to individual communities and assembled on-site.
“We build homes there that are engineered for Arctic conditions,” Graham said, adding that the North “doesn’t need southern solutions for building.”
Prefabrication, he explained, provides greater quality control and reduces weather-related construction delays.
Although modular housing units have been shipped into the North from Southern Canada for years, Graham said some of those products are not necessarily designed to withstand northern conditions.
Arcan’s approach focuses on “highly energy-efficient structures with modern mechanical systems” designed for a longer lifespan. The homes use additional exterior insulation and avoid the board-and-batten approach sometimes used by southern builders, helping reduce concerns about drywall cracking during transportation.
Energy efficiency is particularly important in remote northern communities, where heating costs can be dramatically higher.
“The cost of heating a place in Ulukhaktok, for example, is three times what it is in Yellowknife, and Yellowknife is three times what it is out of Calgary,” Graham said.
“So if we can make an energy-efficient product, it’s less costly to provide utilities for.”
Labour remains the biggest obstacle
Graham estimates that Arcan has so far built homes in roughly half of the Northwest Territories’ 33 communities.
But despite these efforts, he believes builders collectively have not yet made a significant enough impact on the territory’s overall housing shortage.
The biggest obstacle, he said, is attracting workers.
As northern populations continue to grow and existing infrastructure gets older, Graham believes labour represents the area where the construction industry has its greatest opportunity to bring costs down.
The scale of the shortage remains enormous.
“We know that there’s such a shortage of housing that if you’re going to throw 500 homes into the Northwest Territories today, you have not scratched the surface of how much housing needs to be built in the North,” Graham said.
For him, public investment could play a decisive role, particularly by helping offset labour expenses.
“If we could get some federal and territorial investment … to offset the labour, that’s probably the largest component of the cost of construction. If we can offset that somehow, items start to become more affordable.”
For communities across the territories, the challenge is therefore not simply to build more homes. It is to develop housing that can withstand Arctic conditions, reduce long-term energy costs, overcome the realities of remote supply chains and be delivered despite a limited workforce.
The North’s housing shortage may be severe, but the builders working there are increasingly looking beyond southern construction models — and towards solutions designed for the realities of the territories themselves.
©2026 The Canadian Press
