🥳🏘️ Calgary Council ends exclusionary zoning citywide!

💫Historic vote for more affordable housing passes

Calgary City Council has taken the monumental step to end outdated exclusionary zoning that has made townhomes and row homes illegal across most of Calgary. The move will improve long term affordability, housing choice, neighbourhood vibrancy, and financial sustainability for the whole city. It also unlocks $228-million in federal funding for new housing in Calgary.

 

🙏Thank you to Mayor Gondek and the following City Councillors

Thanks to these Councillors and Mayor Gondek, Calgary can finally break its reliance on suburban developers for new housing and set the city on a course for more sustainable finances, more affordable housing and better neighbourhoods. Credit to Councillor Pootmans for showing the leadership to rescue Calgary's Housing Strategy in June of 2023.

✅ Mayor - Jyoti Gondek

✅ Ward 2 - Jennifer Wyness

✅ Ward 3 - Jasmine Mian

✅ Ward 5 - Raj Dhaliwal

✅ Ward 6 - Richard Pootmans

✅ Ward 8 - Courtney Walcott

✅ Ward 9 - Gian-Carlo Carra

✅ Ward 11 - Kourtney Penner

✅ Ward 12 - Evan Spencer

 

 

💸Meet the 6 housing gatekeepers on City Council

These councillors voted to maintain the unsustainable status-quo reliance on suburban developers for new housing, thwart new market supply of more affordable housing and block housing choice. Conservative Leader Pierre Poillievre appears to have broken his promise to reign in local housing gatekeepers like his close friend Councillor Dan "Gone Golfing" McLean.

❌ Ward 1 - Sonya Sharp

❌ Ward 4 - Sean Chu

❌  Ward 7 - Terry Wong 

❌ Ward 10 - Andrew Chabot

❌ Ward 13 - Dan McLean 

❌ Ward 14 - Peter Demong

 

🤠🏅Shout out to Mayor Gondek 

It took 14 years of dithering by successive city councils and mayors to approve secondary suites. Now Mayor Gondek has passed citywide rezoning to end the ban on row homes and townhomes citywide in just one term. To say that the mayor has had it easy would be untrue. She has been the target of numerous unsavoury attacks from the billionaire Flames owners, to the far-right Take Back Alberta and UCP organizers as part of a well funded albeit clumsy recall campaign, to Post Media columnists (and honorary UCP press secretaries) Don Braid and Rick Bell, just to name a few.

Gondek deserves credit for running the public hearing on housing with grace and civility. She deserves respect for finally putting Calgary in a leading position on housing in Canada.

 

🤠🏅Shout out to everyone who helped advocate for the Housing Strategy

Thanks to the joint advocacy of hundreds of Calgarians like you, City Council has taken action to improve housing affordability and supply in Calgary and move the city in a direction of greater financial sustainability.

 

💸 Removing exclusionary zoning WILL improve housing affordability

The numbers don't lie. The graph below demonstrates how new multi-unit townhomes and row-homes can help improve affordability in neighbourhoods where they are currently outlawed. Duplexes and row homes create more housing options at a lower price point than single-detached housing. 

Image source: City of Calgary

 

Duplexes and row homes are but one tool for addressing housing affordability within realm of market housing. While none of these tools alone will solve the housing crisis, together they are part of an effective strategy to improve housing affordability in Calgary.

 

Image source: City of Calgary

 

🏘️ Removing exclusionary zoning WILL create more housing options in existing neighbourhoods

Removing outdated exclusionary zoning bylaws will  provide much needed row homes and town homes to fill the market gap between apartment-style housing and single/semi-detached houses. Seniors will have more options for downsizing within their own neighbourhoods. First time home buys will benefit too.

Source: City of Calgary

 

Change is already happening in existing neighbourhoods, but because of outdated exclusionary zoning bylaws 75% of single-detached houses demolished today are simply replaced with larger single-detached houses (also known as "McMansions").

Source: City of Calgary

 

🚰 Removing exclusionary zoning WILL make a more financially sustainable city for everyone

86% of existing Calgary communities are below their peak population levels. Many continue to decline in a spiral as they lose schools and local amenities that require a higher population to sustain.

Rather than pay for more roads, pipes, and costly infrastructure to build and maintain new suburbs, taxpayers will benefit from more efficient use of the infrastructure that's already in place.

Source: City of Calgary

 

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