💧 Mayor Farkas has announced 4-weeks of water restrictions this March
Farkas is asking Calgarians to conserve water again for the month of March. (Image source: CBC News)
Calgarians are once again being asked by the mayor to flush toilets "only when necessary", keep showers under 3 minutes, and use dishwashers and washing machines only when they are full, starting March 9th until early April.
🔎Bearspaw water main break exposed how low-density sprawl "exacerbated" Calgary’s current infrastructure crisis
According to the report by the independent review panel, decades of low-density sprawl “exacerbated the risk and integrity challenges that ultimately affected the [Bearspaw South Feedermain]”. 
Source: Bearspaw South Feedermain Independent Review Panel: Final Report | January 6, 2026
The report revealed that, thanks to sprawl, Calgary has more kilometres of pipe per resident (read: more expensive) than any other large Canadian peer city. It explains how decades of council decisions prioritizing funding for infrastructure enabling low-density sprawl, instead of investing in maintenance and redundancy of critical infrastructure for existing communities, contributed to the city’s current infrastructure crisis.
🧊Just the tip of the iceberg: Calgary is facing a $7.7-billion infrastructure crisis
The Bearspaw water feeder failure is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, Calgary faces a more than $7.7-billion infrastructure gap to replace aging roads, public transit, wastewater infrastructure and more.
Repealing citywide rezoning in light of this report would be reckless of City Council. It would be willfully entrenching the status quo conditions that led to this crisis where, here in a supposedly first-world city, we are being asked to not flush our toilets, again.
🐻 Repealing rezoning would be lighting a billion federal dollars on fire
Only you can prevent Mayor Farkas from lighting a billion dollars in federal funding on fire.
A new report was tabled on February 11th that shows how the City is at risk of losing nearly a billion dollars in federal funding for housing and transit if City Council decides to fully repeal the rezoning that legalized duplexes and row homes citywide. According to the report, additional future federal money may also be at risk.
Loss of these federal funds would be a devastating blow to progress on Calgary's housing crisis, which began to see success last year with a record high number of new housing starts.
$861-million in federal funding will go up in smoke if Farkas repeals rezoning without replacing it with the gentle density that he promised. Source: City of Calgary (IP2026-0072 Attachment 6)
🎖️Farkas successfully campaigned on "gentle density"
Rather than campaigning to simply repeal rezoning like other failed mayoral candidates, Mayor Farkas successfully campaigned to repeal and replace rezoning with gentle density, but to date he has not provided Calgarians with a proposed path forward for “replacement” or how he intends to “support gentle density while building a variety of homes at a more affordable price point” as he promised in his election platform.
Rather than simply repealing rezoning and losing nearly a billion dollars in federal funding, Farkas has an opportunity to show leadership by replacing the R-CG zoning with improvements to address community concerns (lot coverage, building height, community character, etc.)
Mayor Farkas’ 2025 election campaign promised “gentle density while building a variety of homes at a more affordable price point”, but he has thus far not provided Calgarians details on his path forward despite his plans to repeal rezoning. (Source: jeromy.ca)
🏈 Citywide rezoning for gentle density helps tackle both the crumbling infrastructure crisis and the housing affordability crisis
Image source: (Globe and Mail)
Rezoning to legalize gentle density like row homes provides a viable financial path for the City to fund these necessary investments in infrastructure without overburdening taxpayers citywide or risking further deterioration and collapse of more of the basic infrastructure we depend on.
Among the key benefits of rezoning for gentle density are:
🚰 Funding reinvestment in established neighbourhoods - like lifecycle replacement of critical infrastructure;
💸Reducing Calgary’s dependency on financially costly sprawl that paves over farmland and natural ecosystems around Calgary;
📈 Maximizing land values and choice for homeowners;
🏘️ Providing a greater variety of housing options within neighbourhoods;
🏘️ Creating more housing supply to accommodate Calgary’s growing population without spreading finite public resources even thinner.
⚡️ TAKE ACTION: If Mayor Farkas can ask you to not flush your toilet for a month, we need to ask him to follow through on his promise of gentle density.
📨 Email City Council
Email Mayor Farkas to ask him to lead like he promised with a plan that supports gentle density, preserves the $871-million in federal funding for housing and infrastructure, and maintains reliable basic services (like water!) that Calgarians expect without huge tax increases or cuts to other services.
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