The City of Calgary signed on to the Liberal/NDP government’s Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) in October 2023, agreeing to meet lofty goals in providing new homes in the city. HAF was introduced in the 2022 federal budget, which allocated $4 billion of taxpayers’ money to be spent on increasing the national supply of housing through 2026-27. The fund has since been upped by $400 million, for a total of $4.4 billion to spend nationally through 2027-28. The city’s website reads: “The City has been awarded $228.5 million for the funding of seven initiatives to deliver 6,825 units over and above our three-year average growth. The funding is distributed to the City in four equal annual advances ($57,116,569 each) until the closure of the program on September 1, 2026.” Prior to signing on, Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek received a letter from Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser on September 14, 2023, which contained a caveat about receiving the funds. The letter read in part, “...in order to receive a positive decision from me on your application, you must end exclusionary zoning in your city.” Eight months later, Calgary city council held the largest public hearings in its history to debate a new zoning bylaw to replace exclusionary zoning, also known as blanket upzoning. The new zoning would allow the construction of multi-family homes (known as R-CG) in areas previously zoned for only single-family homes, without seeking a land-use amendment, which could only be obtained by appearing at a public hearing before council, which is costly and time consuming for citizens seeking the amendment. The public hearings became the most contentious ever, with 6,101 Calgarians presenting to council during the debate, with 76.5% of the presenters not in favour of the zoning change. But more than half of council betrayed the wishes of Calgarians by approving the bylaw by a vote of 9 to 6, with Mayor Gondek and Cllrs. Penner, Walcott, Carra, Pootmans, Dhaliwal, Spencer, Mian and Wyness voting to take the money and run, with Cllrs. Sharp, Chabot, McLean, Chu, Wong, and Demong against. The bottom line about how much housing must be created under the agreement are targets that will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reach, especially given that Calgary home builders are already operating at a record-breaking pace. One of the conditions of HAF funding is meeting the housing supply growth target. The housing supply growth target is to create a total of 41,858 units by October 27, 2026. This includes the 6,825 HAF-incented units and 11,200 units per year of baseline units, over and above the city’s three-year average growth. In the three years between 2021 and 2023, Calgary home builders averaged 17,300 new homes starts per year, with the 2024 total to the end of October already at 20,104. Adding 11,200 homes annually to that total will be difficult, if not impossible. Calgary’s home building community includes companies that sell and deliver different numbers of new homes. The high-volume builders will start between 450 and 550 new homes per year, almost exclusively in developing communities where they have purchased, or have committed to purchase, a large number of lots from land developers. These builders will build single-family homes, attached homes and townhomes. There are also builders who concentrate on multi-family homes and others who construct the high-rise apartment towers that are growing in numbers in the city. These builders also act as land developers, installing all infrastructure required for their towers. In all these cases, the land has been purchased years in advance, allowing the builders to build a plan to get buildings built. It’s not uncommon for some builders to buy land 15 or 20 years ahead of it being developed. There are also smaller, independent builders who might produce between 10 and 15 homes per year, some working on the very high end (homes priced above $1 million) and others doing infill work in established communities. It is the latter group of infill builders who will likely be most active under the new zoning bylaw, but it’s a stretch they will be able to provide 11,200 new homes. To be clear, the new zoning allows units with up to four homes, sometimes more, but even at four homes per unit, it still means 2,800 new builds. The biggest obstacles for these builders are labour and land; without both, the homes will not get built and the most critical shortage is labour. As per the agreement with the Feds, the city must achieve the housing supply growth target and additional targets no later than the third anniversary of the effective date, but as a condition of the fourth cash advance, the city must achieve the housing supply growth target and additional targets. Even projections from the city show that having R-CG as a base residential district will generate an additional 250 properties redeveloping to row houses per year, translating into approximately 750 net new homes annually. But it may be for naught as a group of Calgarians has applied to the courts to overturn the bylaw, “due to numerous procedural and legal errors made by council in reaching its decision,” reads the application. The errors outlined in the application include “bias, acting outside of the authority granted to city council by the Municipal Government Act (MGA), the unreasonable encroachment on private property rights, the wholesale elimination of a citizen’s right to a hearing on a zoning change and the failure to provide accurate and consistent information regarding the impact of the city’s agreement with the Federal Government for Housing Accelerator Funding.” The application will be heard on December 11, says group spokesman, Robert Lehodey, KC. “It’s a half day of the official judicial review,” says Lehodey. “We will make our formal arguments as to why the bylaw, as approved by city council, should be overturned or declared void and the city will make its argument in response and we will have a chance to rebut the city’s arguments.” Stay tuned, blanket upzoning may not be a fait accompli.
