The City of Calgary needs to find a way to do better when it comes to building affordable housing. Here are just a few examples of how the city is dragging its feet when it comes to utilizing its vacant land for affordable housing.
Attainable Homes Calgary will be building a new development on the former Containr Park site.
ContainR Park conversion
Recently I was reviewing some of my old columns and came across one from February 2016 where I challenge the city to move forward quickly on the redevelopment of the ContainR Park site in Sunnyside, next to the LRT station. It is now 10 years later and finally the city has engaged Attainable Homes Calgary to get something built there. Ten years is too long, when you have a perfect site with community support for affordable housing. In fact, the site was vacant for decades before that and could have been a model for how affordable housing can be integrated into an established community 20 years ago.
Attainable Homes Calgary, after its success in employing ATCO to factory build its recently completed West Downtown affordable housing project, will be creating a six-storey affordable housing development with 198 homes using the same factory-built modular construction on the old ContainR Park site. This will allow the project to be fast tracked — Attainable Homes Calgary only got access to the property in March 2023 and occupancy is expected to happen in fall of 2027.
Mobile home park redevelopment
This isn’t the only example of the city dragging its feet. I wrote on May 21, 2021, how the city had approved plans for the redevelopment of the Midfield Mobile Home Park, however it took five years to start the construction of new affordable home project. I realize the city had to upgrade the infrastructure to convert the 173 trailer park sites to allow for the creation of a new community for 2,500 people, but five years seems too long.
City officials were patting themselves on the back recently when they made the announcement the first project in the old trailer park, now called Midfield Heights, would be a 180-unit affordable home building would be the first project, but in reality it will be almost 10 years from the time that the last resident moved out of Midfield Mobile Home Park in February 2018 until the same number of residents move into the new building in early 2028. They made it sound like the city was adding more affordable housing when in fact they were just replacing housing.
Yes, there are plans for another building that will be “non-market” housing, but that doesn’t mean it will be affordable housing (defined as rents that are 30 per cent of household income) for low-income Calgarians or just 10 to 15 per cent below market rents.
Bridgeland Place, an affordable housing development, is closed for renovations.
Bridgeland Place closure
In early 2021, the City of Calgary announced the decommissioning of Bridgeland Place, a major affordable housing complex near the Bridgeland LRT Station. The reason for the closure was the 50-year-old building had failing heating and water systems, asbestos concerns and prohibitive operating costs.
Note: There are several similar buildings in East Village of the same vintage that are still operating by other affordable housing operators.
It took the city two years to gradually relocate residents to other affordable housing buildings. Now the city is undertaking a $109 million revitalization of the building, to create a mixed-income housing development that should be complete by 2027, with residents moving in by 2028 — seven years later. This means the new building will have a mix of affordable housing and market housing, with the rent paid by the higher income residents used to fund the redevelopment. So, the city will spend $109 million with no net gain in affordable housing.
Ironically, the city owns the vacant land on the west side of the building, which it is looking to sell to a private sector developer, but there are no specific plans for the sale — again, dragging its feet. Seems to me it would have been a better plan for the city to build a new tower first so the residents in the old tower had somewhere to go and then revitalize the old tower so that we didn’t lose 220 affordable homes for seven years.
David White, a board member with Liberty Housing Organization, speaks at the opening ceremony in May for Village Block, a non-market housing development in Parkdale.
Village Block Success Story
In Parkdale, just west of Lics Ice Cream Shop, the city owned a vacant piece of land for more than 30 years and finally in 2023 decided to sell it to the Liberty Housing Organization that specializes in affordable housing in partnership with Truman Homes. In this case, the city sold the land in October 2023, and the Liberty/Truman partnership had shovels in the ground by November 2024 (yes, one year later) and by this summer people will be moving in. That’s execution!
The handsome brick building with striking arches at street level doesn’t look like affordable housing. It will have 57 one- and two-bedroom homes with rents set at approximately 65 per cent of market rates for the next 20 years. It is expected a one-bedroom unit will rent for around $740/month and two-bedroom at $800/month.
One must wonder why it took so long for the city to finally sell the land to an experienced non-profit housing agency that could create the much-needed housing quickly.
Last Word
These are just four examples of how the City of Calgary is dragging its feet when it comes to creating more affordable housing.
In 2024, the City of Calgary announced it was going to facilitate the construction of 3,000 new affordable housing homes each year for the next 10 years. Unfortunately, they have only been able to averaged 1,000 per year so far.
As one experienced residential expert told me, the city simply can’t execute on any of its plans.