The housing fight Lunenburg keeps losing

Lunenburg, the town I grew up in, doesn't have enough housing.

It's like a lot of small towns that way. But Lunenburg is unique: it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a busy tourist town, one of the most beautiful towns in North America, with some of the nicest ocean and coastline anywhere. It has everything going for it. Except people don't want it to change.

The most recent example is a proposed 50-unit housing development on the waterfront: the Solterre proposal at Brook and Falkland Streets. It's a test Lunenburg keeps failing.

Not because every concern lacks merit. Parking matters. So do waterfront design, the working waterfront, and the UNESCO designation. If there's anywhere in Nova Scotia where people should care about what gets built, it's probably Lunenburg.

Solterre proposed a stepped 3- and 6-storey building with roughly 48 to 52 apartments, including 16 designated affordable units. Council had earlier received a revised proposal and voted 4-3 to send it to the Planning Advisory Committee.

Residents wrote in on both sides, and a lot of them. The town's own staff report tallied 49 residents who wrote in: 16 supported the rezoning, 28 opposed it, and 5 offered conditional or mixed views. A public meeting that October drew more than 70 people and about a dozen speakers, split roughly evenly between support and opposition. Opponents focused on the building's height and scale, parking and traffic, and whether the project fit the Municipal Planning Strategy. Supporters pointed to the housing shortage and the project's fit with the town's own housing goals.

The disagreement didn't end at the town level. At the appeal hearing, two more residents spoke and landed on opposite sides: an architect who has lived in Lunenburg for 21 years argued that a zoning conflict meant a much stricter height limit should actually apply, while another resident, who holds a master's degree in heritage conservation, argued the project posed no real threat to the UNESCO designation.

A staff report recommended approval anyway. On November 25, 2025, council unanimously rejected the rezoning application and gave no reason at the time. Only after Solterre asked in writing did the town send a letter, weeks later, saying the request "did not satisfy the applicable evaluation criteria" of the Municipal Planning Strategy, without saying which criteria.

Solterre appealed. In a July 13, 2026 decision, the Nova Scotia Regulatory and Appeals Board allowed the appeal and directed council to approve the application. The Board's reasoning was not subtle: council's one-line refusal never specified which planning criteria the project failed, and the Board found the refusal did not reasonably carry out the intent of the MPS.

The decision made a key point: a building of comparable height and massing could already be built on the properties as-of-right, without council approval or public input. The rezoning mainly allowed more ground-floor residential space, different setbacks, and a version of the project that Solterre said would be financially viable and eligible for CMHC funding.

So the fight was never really about whether a big building could appear where only small buildings were allowed. The choice was between a version with more accessible housing and a less useful as-of-right alternative that needed no approval at all.

The details still matter, and I don't want to pretend a local planning file can be settled from a distance. But the bigger question isn't whether this one building was perfect. It's what Lunenburg is trying to become.

Because if the standard is that every meaningful project has to be affordable, beautiful, low, dense, uncrowded, heritage-compatible, parking-neutral, tax-positive, climate-resilient, neighbour-approved, and somehow not change the town very much, then the practical answer is simple: Lunenburg won't build enough housing.

And if Lunenburg doesn't build enough housing, the town will still change. It will just change in the direction of fewer local workers, fewer young families, more vacant seasonal homes, more pressure on older residents, higher prices, and a tax base that has to carry more heritage and infrastructure costs with too few shoulders.

Saying no is not neutral.

Lunenburg already knows it has a housing problem

The town's own housing needs report is blunt.

As of the end of 2022, Lunenburg had a housing gap of about 65 units. To keep up with population growth, it needs 120 new units by 2027 and 170 by 2032. Based on recent construction trends, the report estimates the town will add only about 10 units per year over the next five years, leaving a gap of about 70 units by 2027.

A shortage of 65 homes sounds trivial if you live in a city. In a town of roughly 2,400 people, it's structural.

The same report says Lunenburg had 1,242 private dwellings in 2021, but only 87% were occupied by usual residents. Nearly 4% of the housing inventory may have been used as short-term commercial rentals in 2021, meaning up to 52 units may have been removed from the long-term market in 2022. The housing stock is still heavily tilted toward detached houses: 70% single-detached, 22% apartments under five storeys, and no apartment buildings over five storeys.

The price signal is even clearer. Median home prices in Lunenburg rose 105% from 2019 to 2022, after rising 22% from 2016 to 2019. This isn't a normal market quietly working itself out. Lunenburg is a small, attractive, constrained town being discovered by people with more money than the local wage base can support.

And the diagnosis isn't new. In the 2017 South Shore Housing Action Coalition profile, 95% of renter respondents said there was poor availability of affordable rental housing, and 76% of all respondents felt Lunenburg had a housing affordability problem. That report recommended more modest-sized, affordable and accessible housing, a new greenfield neighbourhood, and zoning for multi-unit buildings.

The problem is that diagnosing a housing shortage is easier than approving housing near actual neighbours.

The uncomfortable evidence: more homes usually means lower pressure

My instinct here is pretty simple: if more people want to live somewhere than there are homes available, prices rise. If you build more homes, the pressure falls. That can sound too simple, so it's worth checking. The evidence isn't perfect, but it points strongly in one direction.

Pew's 2026 analysis of Austin is the cleanest recent example. From 2015 to 2024, Austin added 120,000 homes, increasing its housing stock by 30%. The U.S. overall grew its housing stock by 9% over the same period. Austin's median rent went from $1,546 in December 2021 to $1,296 in January 2026, even while the city kept growing. In larger apartment buildings, rents fell 7% from 2023 to 2024. In older, lower-cost Class C buildings, rents fell about 11%.

That last point matters because one common objection is: "New apartments are expensive, so they do nothing for affordability."

New market-rate apartments are often expensive. A new waterfront apartment in Lunenburg is not going to be affordable to the server, carpenter, nurse, teacher, daycare worker, or young family trying to stay in town. Pretending otherwise is how housing arguments lose trust.

But new expensive homes can still reduce pressure on older, cheaper homes.

Pew's 2025 analysis looked at 1,654 U.S. ZIP codes and found that every 10% increase in a metro area's housing supply from 2017 to 2023 correlated with rents growing 5% less from 2017 to 2024. A 10% increase in a ZIP code's own housing supply correlated with 1.4% less rent growth. The regional effect was about four times stronger than the local-neighbourhood effect. And in high-supply metros, the biggest rent declines were in older, less-expensive Class C apartments, not the fanciest buildings.

The reason? When new homes open, people move. Someone takes the new apartment, their old place opens up, someone else moves into that one, and the chain keeps going. These moving chains reach down the income ladder faster than people assume. Pew summarizes research by economist Evan Mast this way: for every 100 new market-rate homes built in high-income neighbourhoods, moving chains can free as many as 70 homes in below-average-income communities.

The "but these units are expensive" argument ignores the home they leave behind, and the home after that.

But the pro-housing argument can be overstated

"Build more" is directionally right, but it can become lazy if it turns into "anything anywhere at any price is good." There are at least four limits that matter in Lunenburg.

First, filtering isn't magic. The National Low Income Housing Coalition summarized research by Jonathan Spader, and the caveat is important: housing filtering can stall or reverse when markets are tight. In some high-appreciation markets, older housing doesn't reliably become cheaper with age. It gets bid up by higher-income households instead. That matters for Lunenburg, which is scenic, scarce, historic, and increasingly attractive to people who don't depend on local wages. If demand keeps rising and supply stays constrained, older homes may not filter down. They may filter up.

Second, market housing won't solve very-low-income housing by itself. Even if market-rate construction lowers pressure, it won't house everyone. People on fixed incomes, very low wages, disability supports, or public assistance usually need direct subsidy, non-market housing, rent supplements, co-ops, land trusts, or deeply affordable units. Lunenburg's public-housing inventory was 30 units as of January 2023, all for seniors.

Third, location matters. A waterfront or water-view apartment is almost never going to be the cheapest unit in town. It may still help through moving chains, downsizing, and tax base growth, but if the goal is genuinely more affordable homes, Lunenburg also needs housing in less premium locations: missing-middle homes, small apartments, seniors' apartments, accessory units, townhouses, and modest condos where land costs are lower and views don't contribute to half the price.

Fourth, design and infrastructure are real constraints. Parking, traffic, water, wastewater, stormwater, heritage massing, archaeology, Mi'kmaq consultation, and the working waterfront shouldn't be waved away. The appeal decision separated conditions to solve from excuses to stop. Sidewalk placement, detailed floodproofing, drainage design, and other infrastructure details still have to be dealt with at later permit stages. But the Board found they were not supported reasons to refuse the rezoning itself. On parking it was even clearer. Lunenburg's own MPS chose not to establish minimum automobile parking requirements, so rejecting the application over parking concerns didn't carry out the plan.

A serious town says: here are the height limits, design rules, infrastructure charges, parking strategy, view corridors, affordability terms, and waterfront-use protections. If the project can meet them, it can proceed.

An unserious town says: we need housing, just not this housing, not here, not now, not like this.

Lunenburg's heritage argument should cut both ways

The easiest anti-development argument in Lunenburg is heritage. It's also the most important one to handle carefully, because Lunenburg really is different. UNESCO describes Old Town Lunenburg as the best surviving example of a planned British colonial settlement in North America. It has the original grid, wooden architecture, working waterfront, and a town form that people travel to see.

It's worth protecting. But heritage can't only mean preserving buildings as objects. UNESCO's own page describes Lunenburg as an urban community and culture based on the offshore Atlantic fishery, "undergoing irreversible change and evolving in a form that cannot yet be fully defined." It also says sustaining the town's outstanding universal value means managing pressures from rising property values, maintenance costs, climate change, and tourism.

A town can lose its heritage by building badly. It can also lose it by becoming too expensive for normal life. Venice is the extreme version: the buildings are still there, but the city became a stage set for visitors and capital. Lunenburg is nowhere near Venice, but the direction of travel isn't hard to imagine: more seasonal homes, more tourism pressure, more high-end ownership, fewer workers living close to work, fewer young families, more older homeowners trapped in houses they can't maintain. That is slow museumification.

Someone has to pay to maintain heritage towns. The town has already made this fiscal argument in its own Blockhouse Hill materials: conserving what makes Lunenburg unique costs money, and there is no ongoing Parks Canada or UNESCO funding to maintain streets, structures, or services.

The town's options are basically to raise taxes, cut services, or create new revenue streams.

Selling land can create short-term revenue. But new residents growing the tax base matters more, because it isn't short-term. If the town doesn't add enough homes and taxpayers, it's implicitly choosing higher taxes, lower services, deferred maintenance, or dependence on outside money.

Bridgewater is not Lunenburg, but the comparison is useful

Bridgewater isn't a perfect comparison. It has more land, no UNESCO constraint, no water-view premium, and it plays a different role as a regional service centre. But that's exactly why it's useful.

Bridgewater's 2023 housing needs report estimated a much larger shortage: 245 units at the end of 2022, with a need for 450 by 2027 and 630 by 2032. But it also found that, if recent construction trends continued, the shortage could fall to 25 by 2027 and be addressed by 2032.

The difference is that Bridgewater was actually permitting homes. The report shows 133 units permitted in 2020, 181 in 2021, and an extrapolated 105 in 2022. Most of that was apartments: 121 units in 2020, 141 in 2021, and 87 in 2022. Lunenburg's comparable recent trend was about 10 new units per year.

Bridgewater isn't cheaper because it found a clever slogan. It has more room to absorb demand. Lunenburg can't copy Bridgewater's land supply, but it can copy the basic seriousness: if you know you need homes, you have to approve enough homes for the math to work.

The best small-town housing strategy is not one project

The Solterre fight should widen into a better local argument: not whether Lunenburg should approve every waterfront project, but what housing system would make the town more successful ten years from now. A reasonable version might look something like this.

Build more homes in the places that can carry them. The town should identify a small number of growth areas where multi-unit housing is expected, not exceptional. Blockhouse Hill is already part of this conversation, and it likely has water views of its own, so it probably won't be cheap either. That's fine. Premium units still help, through moving chains and a bigger tax base. But the town also needs less premium, non-waterfront sites where land costs are lower and views aren't setting the price. Both kinds of housing are the point, not one instead of the other.

Make downsizing easy. A lot of Lunenburg's housing stock is large, old, beautiful, and expensive to maintain. Many older residents may want to stay in town but not in a full house. If they have appealing apartments, condos, townhomes, or seniors' housing nearby, some will move, and that frees homes for families and younger buyers. It also lets seniors stay in their community instead of moving to Bridgewater because Lunenburg didn't build the next step.

Use public land carefully, but don't waste it. Public land is one of the few tools a small town has, and it shouldn't be sold casually. But keeping useful land underused during a housing shortage also has a cost. If the town sells or leases land, it can attach terms: unit mix, affordability share, design rules, public paths, green space, infrastructure obligations, phasing, and penalties if a developer sits on the land.

Treat short-term rentals as one lever, not the whole answer. Lunenburg's housing report says nearly 4% of inventory may have been used as short-term commercial rentals in 2021, with up to 52 units potentially removed from the long-term market in 2022. In a town whose entire gap was about 65 units, that's not a side issue, and STR rules should be part of the plan.

But STRs aren't only a drain on housing. They're also part of what makes Lunenburg's tourism economy work, and tourism is real income for local businesses. STR policy should aim for a ceiling, not zero — one that keeps tourism viable while limiting how much of the housing stock gets converted.

Even if every possible STR became long-term housing, it wouldn't meet the 2032 need, and it wouldn't create the smaller accessible homes the town needs for seniors and single-person households. STR policy can reduce leakage. It can't replace construction.

Stop treating parking as free. Parking concerns are real in a historic town. But requiring every project to solve peak tourist-season parking on-site can quietly kill the homes the town says it wants. Parking minimums raise costs, consume land, and reduce the number of homes that fit. Lunenburg needs a town-level parking and mobility strategy, not project-by-project panic.

Protect the working waterfront directly. If the concern is that residential development could crowd out marine industrial uses, then protect those uses explicitly: write the rules, preserve working waterfront parcels, separate conflicts where possible. Don't smuggle a broader anti-housing position inside a working-waterfront argument. This came up directly in the Solterre decision. Lunenburg's planning system regulates use and form separately. The Board found the Marine Form Zone controls building form, placement, site design, and signage; it doesn't require marine industrial use inside the building. A working waterfront can be a real planning goal and still be misused as a reason to block housing the actual plan allows.

Pair market supply with real affordable housing. Pro-housing people sometimes underplay this. Lunenburg needs market-rate homes, but it also needs non-market and below-market homes: inclusionary units, density bonuses, tax relief, partnerships with non-profits, public land leases, senior-government funding, co-ops, and community land trusts. The mistake is treating subsidy and supply as substitutes. Subsidize affordable housing in a market that refuses to build, and public dollars get eaten by scarcity. Build market housing without subsidy, and the lowest-income residents still get left behind. The town needs both.

Where this leaves Lunenburg

Lunenburg doesn't need to become Austin. It can't, and it shouldn't. But the lesson applies at the scale that matters: when a place allows enough homes, rent pressure can fall. When it doesn't, scarcity wins.

The same pattern shows up elsewhere. Minneapolis permitted nearly 21,000 units from 2017 to 2022 after a series of land-use reforms, and Pew found its housing stock grew 12% while Minnesota overall grew 4%. Rents grew 1% in Minneapolis versus 14% statewide. New Rochelle, a suburban city north of New York, added housing at more than double the U.S. rate from 2017 to 2021 and saw rents rise 7% from 2017 to 2023, while U.S. rents rose 31%. Auckland upzoned much of its residential land in 2016, and later research estimated rents were materially lower than a synthetic-control counterfactual several years later.

None of these are small Nova Scotian heritage towns, and the surface details don't transfer. The underlying math does: more homes reduce scarcity, fewer homes preserve it.

In Lunenburg, scarcity costs more than high sale prices. Older residents leave because they can't find the right next home, workers commute because they can't afford to live near work, families give up, businesses struggle for staff. And a historic town ends up asking a smaller and smaller group of full-time residents to carry the cost of a place enjoyed by many more people than live there.

None of this gets solved by one approved project. It takes what I've called a yes-if culture: not no by default, not approve by default, but yes, with real conditions attached. Yes, if the height and design rules are met. Yes, if the parking and infrastructure math works. Yes, if a meaningful share of the units are genuinely affordable. That's a different posture than blocking every project until it goes away.

The town doesn't have to pick between protection and growth. Protect the UNESCO character, and build enough homes for the town to stay alive. Protect the working waterfront, and create apartments for seniors, workers, and smaller households. Demand better design, and stop using imperfect design as a permanent veto. Require infrastructure math, and remember that no-growth has infrastructure math too.

The future Lunenburg should want is not a frozen postcard. It's a real town with enough people, homes, workers, children, older residents, businesses, tax base, and public life to keep the postcard from becoming the only thing left.

That will take more building than feels comfortable, in places where neighbours will object, with tradeoffs that are easier to criticize than approve. But the alternative is also a choice.

In small towns, saying no long enough eventually becomes a plan.