| Housing anchors quality of life by enabling its occupants to participate fully in society. Cities, to prosper and grow, need good housing. This report and a companion document of appendix tables paint a statistical picture of housing trends and conditions in Canada's Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs). Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation undertook to produce the report with Statistics Canada for the Cities Secretariat of the Privy Council Office. It discusses the following points: Demographic and housing market trends, 1990-2003
， In the late 1990s, population growth rates and components of growth differed widely by CMA. CMAs with relatively high growth, most of them in Ontario and Alberta, gained population through migration.
， Household growth in the 1990s was concentrated in urban centres in British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta, diminishing in British Columbia in the second half of the decade and accelerating in Albert a.
， During the 1990s, couples with children declined as a proportion of all households in every CMA, while the share of one-person households and lone-parent households generally rose.
， In the late 1990s, the number of new homes built per capita was high in Census Metropolitan Areas with high rates of household growth. These CMAs were primarily in Alberta and Southern Ont ario.
， After dropping in the early 1990s, the pace of housing construction increased in most CMAs in the second half of the decade as economic conditions improved.
， The rate of homeownership increased throughout the 1991-2001 period in almost all CMAs. A variety of factors, including accelerating income growth and low and declining mortgage rates, prompted stronger increases betw een 1996 and 2001 than earlier in the decade.
， As housing demand increased in the late 1990s, supply conditions tightened in most Census Metropolitan Areas. Rental vacancy rates fell, sales-to-listings ratios rose, and new home inventories shra nk.
， With demand rising and markets tightening, housing prices and rents increased more rapidly from 1996 to 2003 than in the first half of the 1990s.
， Income growth accelerated in the late 1990s as the economy strengthened. In contrast to the early 1990s, household incomes incre ased more rapidly than shelter costs.
， As a result of the acceleration in income growth in the late 1990s and declining mortgage rates, households spent proportionately less of their before-tax incomes on shelter in 2001 than in 199 6. | 