It was almost a foregone conclusion that Calgary city council would vote last week to repeal their predecessors’ move to implement blanket rezoning.
Bubbling discontent over the change propelled many campaigns ahead of October’s civic election, with many current council members promising at the time to revisit housing policies in established neighbourhoods.
Even with the housing policy reset, a number of councillors and Mayor Jeromy Farkas have openly stated Calgary still needs better rules to govern growth in older neighbourhoods.
As they search for yet another solution that leaves fewer people unhappy, the constraints they face are very similar.
There remains an expressed desire to allow for something other than small, single-family homes on large lots close to commercial areas, near transit hubs, and along major bus and CTrain corridors.
Perhaps the city will consider tweaking maximum height of buildings and lot coverage. They might limit where row housing is allowed by default.
But there are only so many ways to accomplish this.
Day one of the Public Hearing Meeting of Council on Planning Matters, specifically to repeal blanket rezoning, on March 23, 2026.
And remember that even under the old zoning policy Calgary is going back to, it was always possible to rezone a residential parcel to replace a single-family home with some other kind of low-density housing. It just took an extra public hearing, which the vast majority of applications sailed through with no issue.
In retrospect, the removal of this seldomly used safety valve seemed to cause more concern than the actual issue of densification.
The last council’s blanket rezoning policy gave many people the mistaken impression it would be open season in every established neighbourhood for anyone to build whatever they wanted, without any guardrails and no public input.
Such a thing was never the case, by the letter of the law. If anyone had the gall to propose a multi-story tower sandwiched between single-family homes in the sleepiest parts of Haysboro or Charleswood, there would absolutely have been a public hearing, which would no doubt would have eventually led to a rejection.
May the current council have better luck with this difficult balancing act and make it crystal clear that new zoning rules don’t mean a complete laissez-faire attitude toward home construction.
Many speakers at the current and previous public hearings on blanket rezoning spoke in support of more housing density — as long as it happened somewhere other than their own neighbourhood.
This is frankly an impossible request for the city to fulfil, because if everyone prefers the policy only apply somewhere else, it will effectively be applied nowhere.
Day one of the Public Hearing Meeting of Council on Planning Matters, specifically to repeal blanket rezoning, on March 23, 2026.
Still, this point of view constitutes a quiet acknowledgment that housing reform is desired and, ultimately, a tacit admission something needs to be done.
As if local concerns weren’t enough, Calgary and other cities are also feeling the squeeze on housing from the province and the federal government.
The latter has expressed disdain for off-site levies — development charges mainly meant to offset the cost of extending city infrastructure in new neighbourhoods where no taxes have yet to be collected to pay for such things as roads, water pipes and sewer lines.
Without such levies, the cost of new infrastructure on the city’s outskirts would have to be borne upfront by current residents, which would lead to higher property taxes or increases in other fees.
Meanwhile, the province recently limited what such levies can pay for (making them acceptable to fund essential infrastructure only) while also pushing municipalities to cut back on public hearings and other red tape from housing construction.
While cities can help create more housing, they can’t bring down prices alone without help from higher orders of government in terms of financing and other regulatory matters.
Perhaps Farkas and the current crop of mostly new councillors can bank on their relative popularity to ease their way to a new path for improving the availability of housing in older parts of the city, all while trying to keep local residents and higher orders of government happy.
But as our elected officials go about reinventing Calgary’s default residential zoning rules yet again, they will come up against the same challenges as the last council — so don’t be shocked if what emerges on the other side of this latest exercise doesn’t look too different from what was just thrown out.
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