A coalition of pro-housing organizations gathered in front of city hall Monday to urge local lawmakers not to forget about Calgary’s housing needs, after city council voted to repeal the blanket rezoning policy last week.
The gathering included roughly two-dozen representatives from groups that spoke favourably of blanket rezoning during the lengthy public hearing, including More Neighbours Calgary, Calgary Transit Riders, the Calgary Alliance for the Common Good and the University of Calgary Students’ Union, among others.
Willem Klumpenhouwer, co-founder of More Neighbours Calgary, accused Mayor Jeromy Farkas of reneging on his campaign promise last fall to replace blanket rezoning with a new framework to help promote densification
“We’ve simply voted to go back to where we were several years ago,” Klumpenhouwer said. “We’re basically back at Square 1 — we’ve taken one of the core pillars of the housing strategy, which had a nice green check mark next to it, and we’ve put a big red X next to it. And as far as I can tell, we don’t have any plan to bring that back to a green check mark.”
Following an eight-day public hearing that included more than 400 speakers, council voted 12-3 last week to repeal blanket rezoning. The citywide zoning policy, a component of the Home is Here housing strategy approved by the previous council, allowed homeowners to redevelop single-family detached dwellings into denser housing types, including duplexes and row houses, without first requiring a land-use change from the city.
Group says repealing blanket rezoning will drive up housing costs
Klumpenhouwer argued that scrapping the policy — which rezoned around 306,000 properties — will have a negative effect on housing affordability in Calgary by making it more expensive and time-consuming to develop multi-unit dwellings.
While Calgary has led Canada in housing starts for the past two years and rents have started to stabilize, Klumpenhouwer said the city is still in a housing crisis.
“This didn’t happen overnight,” he said. “This came from this steady pace of housing getting more and more expensive, more and more scarce, with less and less variety. And because of that, people are falling more and more below being able to attain housing.
“That isn’t going to go away if you don’t add supply at both ends of the housing spectrum.”
Council didn’t give blanket rezoning enough time to adequately judge its merits, Klumpenhouwer said.
In response to Monday’s rally, Farkas told reporters that council is committed to addressing housing affordability, but not solely through zoning policies. He touted the city’s recent efforts to sell municipal land to non-market housing providers, as well as its new Indigenous housing program and transit-oriented development projects.
“We know that in the case of the blanket rezoning that it did not deliver the housing in the appropriate places at the price points that Calgarians could afford, and that’s why we’ve been focusing on the non-market element,” said Farkas, who voted in support of the blanket rezoning repeal.
“We’re going to be working in close collaboration with the provincial and federal government to ensure that non-market (housing) at the affordable and deeply affordable rates continue to be built here in Calgary.”
While he also voted in support of the repeal last week, Ward 4 Coun. DJ Kelly said the groups rallying on Monday are correct that council needs a replacement policy that allows for gentle densification.
Ward 4 councillor DJ Kelly said there is housing that needs homeowners.
Kelly noted the current population in his ward, which includes several neighbourhoods north of the Bow River, is believed to be 25,000 less than its historic peak.
“The infrastructure exists there,” he told reporters. “We need to bring more people back into the community in order to be able to keep our schools open and in order to be able to provide reliable transit. Those are things that you need a population density in order to be able to do, so (the advocates) are definitely right in terms of, this can’t be the end.”
However, he mused that a replacement framework for blanket rezoning could take 12 to 18 months to formulate, considering the upcoming rollout of a new municipal development plan, called the Calgary Plan, and a new zoning bylaw.
“That (zoning bylaw) is likely the place where you’re going to see more of these changes occurring,” he said.
Councillor calls for more LAPs to guide redevelopment
Kelly said he wants the city to increase and accelerate its number of Local Area Plans (LAPs) to guide redevelopment across the city, and hinted that he intends to bring forward a notice of motion to that effect next month.
LAPs are long-term road maps that direct future growth, change and redevelopment in clusters of neighbouring communities. The LAPs set out various rules and guidelines, such as building scale maximums and urban form requirements based on different designations, such as whether a road is near public transit or commercial entities.
City council has approved eight LAPs so far, with another three currently under development in Calgary’s southeast and northeast quadrants.
Kelly said his motion will outline the budgetary and resource requirements necessary to accelerate another three LAPs.
“Neighbours always should have a voice in terms of where growth occurs in their neighbourhood, where change occurs in their neighbourhood, and the Local Area Plan is the best tool the City of Calgary has in order to be able to enable that,” he said.
“We have to get to work on increasing the amount of local area planning that we’re doing as a city in order to be able to codify exactly where that density belongs in our neighbourhoods.”