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By
Sonal Gupta, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter Canada’s National Observer
Calgary has rolled back a major housing reform that made it easier to add homes in some parts of the city — a reversal experts say could push the city further toward the costly, high-emissions pattern its council has long said they want to reduce.
In April, council voted to undo rules approved in 2024 as part of Calgary’s federal Housing Accelerator Fund deal. The rules made it easier to add rowhouses, townhouses and other small multi-unit homes — so-called “middle housing” or “infill” — in already developed neighbourhoods.
City documents show the rules helped 639 housing projects move ahead without each one needing a separate council debate over land use. In 2025, they accounted for 63 per cent of the smaller multi-unit homes proposed in existing neighbourhoods.
Alkarim Devani, Calgary-based co-founder and CEO of mddl, a city-building company focused on middle housing, said the 2024 rules gave homeowners and small builders a clearer path to add more homes. They allowed the building of multiple homes at different price points on a lot where only one expensive single-detached house or duplex might otherwise have been built.
In a written response to questions, the City of Calgary told Canada’s National Observer that once the repeal takes effect in August, two-thirds of residential lots will again only allow single-detached or semi-detached homes. Other housing types, including rowhouses, will need council approval, adding four to six months and more uncertainty.
The repeal does not, on its own, open the door to new suburban developments. But by making it harder to build for multi-unit housing in developed communities, experts say it could push more of Calgary’s future housing demand toward the city’s edge, where large new communities are built on previously undeveloped land.
The city said it expects continued demand for a range of housing types, including more affordable options. If those homes are less available in established communities, the city acknowledged that demand in new farther-flung communities may increase.
That pressure on the suburbs, planners say, has a lot of drawbacks for the environment, for businesses and for the liveability of a city. It’s also the most expensive way to build.
Brent Toderian, a city planner and urbanist who previously worked as a planner for Calgary, said the money argument should matter even to people who do not care about zoning or climate policy. Adding homes in existing neighbourhoods makes better use of public investments residents have already paid for, including roads, pipes, transit and community services, while outward sprawl requires more infrastructure for fewer residents.
“We’re all paying heavily for sprawl, whether we live there or not, and we’re all financially benefitting from infill housing, whether we live there or not,” Toderian said.
He added Calgary scrapped the policy before showing what would replace it or how the city would still deliver more homes in established neighbourhoods. The consequences, experts say, could show up not only in the housing market, but also in city budgets, its ability to cut emissions and Calgarians’ household costs.
The city’s own math shows sprawl comes with a massive bill. A cost-of-growth study found outward growth would cost the city more than $10 billion additional dollars compared to a future in which it chose to grow through infill.
Despite knowing outward growth costs more, Calgary has not been meeting its own goal for where growth should go, said David Barrett, a water scientist at the University of Calgary and board chair of Sustainable Calgary. Since 2009, the city has had a target of directing half of population growth to already developed areas. It’s falling well short: a 2022 report found those areas captured just 12.4 per cent of growth between 2006 and 2021.
New communities on Calgary’s edge are still being considered. In March, the city’s infrastructure and planning committee reviewed four applications for new communities, with more expected. The largest, Providence in southwest Calgary, would add about 9,600 homes outside the ring road and need $582.7 million in unfunded capital investment over several years, with developers expected to repay 42 per cent through fees that help cover roads, pipes and other services for new communities.
Barrett said developer charges can help with upfront costs but once that infrastructure becomes part of the city, the long-term cost of operating, repairing and replacing it falls back on the public system, through municipal budgets, utility rates and future tax decisions.
“We’ll build that infrastructure, we’ll enjoy the shiny new thing,” he said. “But then the next generation will be saddled with the repair and maintenance cost.”
That maintenance burden is already visible in Calgary’s water system, he said. The city has over 16,000 kilometres of water, wastewater and stormwater pipes, much of which will eventually need to be repaired or replaced.
Barrett said the cost, per household, of serving a block changes depending on how many homes share the same infrastructure. A road, pipe or sewer line still has to be maintained, but the cost is spread across more households when a block has 20 homes instead of 10.
The same growth pattern shows up in household costs. Barrett said families may be pushed toward the edge of the city because homes there appear more affordable, but that short-term affordability can be offset by the cost of owning and using vehicles more often.
Statistics Canada data released in May found Alberta households spent an average of $14,539 on transportation in 2023, the highest among provinces.
“In a province that has, most commonly, the lowest cost of gasoline purchases, we still have the highest average transportation spending,” Barrett said. That’s a result of urban planning decisions: more people spend more time getting around in cars than anywhere else in the country because of where, and how, their neighbourhoods are built.
And that logic works both ways. A 2016 Sustainable Calgary report found transportation costs can sharply limit housing choice. For a household earning $60,000, avoiding the cost of owning a car and putting those savings toward housing increased the number of Calgary homes for sale it could afford by 1,800 per cent, based on June 2011 MLS data.
The city said the repeal of its housing rules does not change its broader growth plans, which still call for more housing near transit and enough density to support city services. It pointed to Calgary’s housing strategy, Home is Here, along with local area plans, secondary suite and backyard suite programs, downtown office conversions, transit-oriented development and infrastructure-support programs as tools it is using to support housing in established communities.
Future property-tax decisions will depend on council’s priorities during the 2027-2030 budget process.
Transportation is central to Calgary’s climate challenge. “One of the most important things you could do for climate action is just have more of your growth be infill and less of your growth be car-dependent sprawl,” Toderian said. Sustainable Calgary’s recent State of Our City report found 81 per cent of all trips in Calgary are made by car, truck or van. Calgary’s climate strategy aims to have 40 per cent of all trips made by walking, wheeling or transit — a target that becomes tougher to meet as more development pushes outward into areas where a car is often the only practical option.
Francisco Alaniz Uribe, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary and co-director of the Urban Lab, said transit systems work best when enough people live close to a route to keep buses and trains full throughout the day. But as housing spreads out, transit agencies are forced to cover longer distances for fewer riders, driving up costs and leaving more people dependent on cars.
“The more we sprawl out, the harder it is for us to provide affordable and convenient public transit,” he said.
A 2024 Statistics Canada study on new housing supply and urban sprawl found that low density development is linked to higher greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from transportation and home heating.
“By increasing the density of housing, not only do you get those transit benefits, but also within that housing system itself, you’re going to be using less heating because of the shared walls that go along with these multi residential dwellings,” said Joe Vipond, emergency physician, past president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and director of the Calgary Climate Hub.
Natural Resources Canada’s household energy survey found that single-detached homes used an average of 122.8 gigajoules of energy per household — about 40 per cent more than duplexes, row houses and other attached homes and more than 2.5 times as much as low-rise apartments. That matters in Calgary, where single-detached houses accounted for about 55 per cent of occupied private dwellings in the 2021 census, Barrett added.
Vipond said the same growth pattern affects health. When homes and services are farther apart, people are less able to walk, bike or take transit for daily trips.
A Sustainable Calgary review of health and city-design research found polluted air, noise, extreme heat, car-dependent sprawl and lack of access to nature are linked to higher rates of illness and early death, with lower-income and racialized communities facing greater risks.
The city said gasoline and diesel vehicles made up nearly 40 per cent of Calgary’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 and communities designed around transit, cycling and walking can help reduce car use. But residents in new communities are expected to keep relying on cars for citywide trips until those areas are fully built out. It acknowledged that growth on undeveloped land is more likely to affect intact ecosystems and habitat — but added that newer homes are also built to higher energy efficiency standards.
Barrett said the repeal also comes as Calgary reconsiders other climate policies. Council cut $9 million from the city’s 2026 climate and environment budget in December 2025. In May 2026, council’s executive committee backed motions to scrap Calgary’s 2021 climate emergency declaration.
Vipond said scrapping the declaration could make Calgary a “backwards-looking petro city” and could affect funding for key climate programs, including mitigation and adaptation.
“Our growth patterns cost us money. Plain and simple,” Barrett said. “Until we understand that, until we can get that across to people, we’re going to continue to have politicians that make these similar decisions without thinking about the financial and other kinds of knock on effects.”
Sonal Gupta / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer.