Toronto started 156 condo units in six months. The pipeline is vanishing
CMHC's Fall 2026 supply report puts City of Toronto condo starts at 156 for the first half of the year — against a decade average near 7,000 a year. What a collapsing pipeline means for renters, buyers, and anyone watching a development site.
One number in CMHC's Fall 2026 Housing Supply Report stops you cold: in the first half of 2026, developers in the City of Toronto broke ground on 156 condominium units. Not 156 buildings — 156 units, total, in a city whose decade average is roughly 7,000 condo units a year. Population-adjusted, Toronto's first-half housing starts were the lowest since 1996, excluding last year.
This is the moment the condo glut we mapped flips into its opposite. Today's oversupply and tomorrow's shortage are the same story, separated by a construction cycle.
How empty the pipeline actually is
The under-construction numbers tell you what's coming — or not coming. Urbanation's Q2 count put GTHA condo units under construction at 38,252, down 39 per cent in a year and 64 per cent below the 2023 peak of 105,421. The backlog of already-permitted units waiting to break ground has fallen 50 per cent from its peak, project launches have largely stalled, and developers are shrinking or shelving what remains — reports this month described one two-tower project dropping about 200 units in a redesign.
Rental construction is the one bright spot: purpose-built rental starts rose 82 per cent in the first half, outpacing condo starts for the first time since 1994, and rentals now make up two-thirds of apartment starts in Canada's key markets. But it's not enough to fill the hole. Combined apartment construction in the GTHA is still down 21 per cent year-over-year — because roughly half of new condos historically end up as rentals, and those units are disappearing faster than purpose-built ones are being added.
A condo tower takes four to five years from groundbreaking to keys. The units not started in 2026 are the apartments that won't exist in 2030 — no policy can deliver them any sooner.
What CMHC says the gap costs
The same report estimates Toronto needs to increase its pace of starts by at least 50 per cent — an extra 21,000 to 26,000 homes a year — to get back to 2019-level affordability by 2036. Instead, the pace is going the other way. For renters, that's the supply side of why rents may have found their floor. For buyers, it complicates the bet that condos that don't appreciate will stay cheap forever: today's discounts are partly the market clearing inventory that won't be replaced.
Reading a stalled site near you
The pipeline contraction is visible street by street, if you know where to look. A development application that hasn't moved in a year, an approval with no construction permit behind it, a sales office that quietly closed — each is one of those missing starts. Our guides to reading a development sign and pre-construction due diligence when builders go broke cover what the paper trail means. If there's a site you're counting on — or counting against — monitor the address: the day a permit finally files, or a receivership notice replaces it, you'll know.