Mind the generation gap in Calgary's debate over zoning and townhouses

It was gearing up to be a battle for the ages: Calgar‐ y's big rezoning debate over permitting fourplexes in any and all neighbour‐ hoods in the city, with hun‐ dreds of speakers express‐ ing opinions across more than a week of hearings at city hall.

It has often appeared as a battle of the ages. It's hard not to notice the generation gap between the Calgarians fighting for the change, and those fighting against it.

One didn't even need to step inside city hall chambers or flip on the hearing's livestream to see the ap‐ parent differences.

In the plaza outside city hall on Monday morning as the public hearings began, a few dozen community associ‐ ation activists from the city's various corners wagged signs and sported black-and-white buttons that said, "NO Blanket Rezoning YYC."

At noon that day, another crowd gathered to demon‐ strate in favour of the mea‐ sure recommended by Cal‐ gary's affordable housing task force, many carrying a political action group's plac‐ ards saying, "All Calgarians deserve homes."

This was a noticeably younger group, more millen‐ nials and Gen Zs.

As the debate unfolded, one could crudely split the debating lines into younger or older, or into the haves and have-nots. The divide is between those who have and don't have homes they own.

Many Calgarians opposed to the plan were homeown‐ ers, worried about the zoning that could come to their own neighbourhoods, if one could develop duplexes, town‐ houses or row houses in al‐ most any residential district.

They expressed worry that more density amid their standalone houses could clog their streets with traffic, parking, recycling carts and tall skinny homes - while rip‐ ping out old trees and over‐ burdening nearby schools in the process.

The residents who sup‐ port citywide rezoning often aren't homeowners, but hope to be. They'd like more of a chance to join those neighbourhoods the others are scrapping to preserve as is, without the potential up‐ heaval of subdivided lots for extra homes.

Disruption? Change? Po‐ tential for struggles to find guest parking on one's block? "That doesn't supersede the need to have a roof over our head," Alex Williams said in an interview.

He's a 28-year-old who rents an Acadia house with three roommates, and recalls having to couch-surf for months with friends and family until he found a place.

"The idea of being home‐ less with thousands of dol‐ lars saved seemed insane," he said. The idea of finding a home to buy? Seems nice, though he understands why homeowners who've had what they've had for a while are less amenable to change in their neighbourhoods.

A man's zone is his cas‐ tle

One speaker was rankled by the very fact that renters were injecting their voices in‐ to this debate. Others who came out in favour of rezon‐ ing warned of the dispropor‐ tionate privilege of older homeowners who bought property well before prices spiralled out of reach for many.

The age gap was so pro‐ nounced to some speakers that one older southwest homeowner made a point of saying she wanted to "break the stereotype that every boomer is opposed to rezon‐ ing." She supported expand‐ ing options to build small multi-family developments in communities like hers.

At stake in this debate, in essence, is the abolition of R1 zoning, which only allows detached homes, and is the dominant neighbourhood mode in Calgary.

Instead of R-1 or R-2 (which allows duplexes, too), the default district would be R-CG - the grade-oriented in‐ fill district. It would allow townhouses or row houses, up to four units on a 50-foot lot, plus potentially base‐ ment suites and even back‐ yard units - totalling eight or 12 dwellings where a single bungalow currently sits.

Other municipalities in Canada and elsewhere have moved to end what planners and housing advocates call "exclusionary zoning," to al‐ low lower-cost, more com‐ pact units to enter more ho‐ mogeneously single-family districts. In plannerspeak, it's also the "missing middle," in between highrise apartment towers and bungalows - a family-friendly housing op‐ tion that sensitively adds density in neighbourhoods.

The prospect is, to many residents, not sensitive at all.

"Please don't devastate the character of our great single-family communities," Guy Buchanan urged council at the hearing.

He's a retired housing de‐ veloper, and insists there is plenty of land at Calgary's fringes where council should focus growth, instead of in established neighbourhoods.

Others argued that the city should instead focus on condos around transit stops and major streets, or devel‐ oping on vacant city land.

The rub is that city hall is working on those solutions in tandem as part of its strategy to fight surging rents, home‐ lessness and the affordability crunch that has pushed so many Calgarians out of the home-owning market, or into precarious situations.

The city stresses it's taking a "pull-all-levers" approach, and that this is one of those levers.

"No single action strives to or will on its own solve the housing crisis," said Debra Hamilton, director of com‐ munity planning, at the hear‐ ing's outset.

The rezoning pitch, how‐ ever, is the housing solution that shows up on residents' very own blocks, or right next door. Or, at least, it could.

It instills worry in some that tony Elbow Park will morph into Marda Loop, buzzing with infills and re‐ quiring large utility infra‐ structure upgrades. Or neigh‐ bourhoods by universities will become bigger magnets for investor-developers in‐ stead of the more conven‐ tional family home-buyers that older neighbours are used to.

One longtime Brentwood community activist showed off a picture of a row of sev‐ eral three-storey homes, and fretted about potentially hav‐ ing those residents able to peer into her backyard. A perennially in-demand neigh‐ bourhood for student hous‐ ing, there's concern among neighbours there that devel‐ opers will keep rushing in to further change it and make it more congested.

A younger Calgarian might say: but those tall win‐ dows would now be lit by more people who could af‐ ford to buy into that commu‐ nity, or rent there.

In northwest Calgary, the median price for a detached home is $761,000 this year, according to the Calgary Real Estate Board. For a row house, it's $477,000.

And that's a world that has changed so much over the decades. In 1990, the av‐ erage Calgary detached house cost $131,000. The median price for standalone houses sailed past $200,000 in 2002, broke $400,000 in 2007 - and then came the pandemic. In the last four years, that price has shot up by about 50 per cent to $718,400 this March, for the typical detached house, which remains the most plentiful housing type in Cal‐ gary, and the only offering available in much of the city.

Some homeowners fret‐ ted that this zoning change would sink their property val‐ ues. After this much increase, that might sound like sweet music to those young Calgari‐ ans for whom a $700,000 house, its down payment and monthly mortgage costs, re‐ main far out of reach.

A common argument came from residents op‐ posed to this change: what's the point, if tearing down an old house and replacing it

with a few brand-new town‐ houses or fourplex units won't actually create any‐ thing remotely classified as affordable housing? (And yet, so many of the critics also worry these new homes will bring crime and ne'er-dowells into their midst.)

The response from advo‐ cates is that it all adds supply to a supply-starved, demandheavy and rapidly growing city. More homes of all types will help keep increases in check.

Also, the truly "affordable" housing options are govern‐ ment subsidized. These de‐ veloper-driven infill projects create more affordable op‐ tions than single-family or duplex homes, without a tax‐ payer-funded backstop.

There are heavy echoes of last decade's debate that al‐ lowed secondary suites in all Calgary residential zones now, instead of each pro‐ posal needing council's expli‐ cit approval, it's a quicker bu‐ reaucratic process. And whereas secondary suite pleadings used to take up a huge amount of council's time, now nearly half of pub‐ lic hearings are dedicated to one-off row house, town‐ house or duplex rezoning proposals.

Advocates say reform will end red tape, while opponen‐ ts of R-CG say it denies the public a say in how their neighbourhoods change.

The suite revolution that opponents had feared (and some housing advocates may have hoped for) failed to ma‐ terialize, because suites have cropped up more gradually. But the new zoning could wind up bringing more ag‐ gressive redevelopment be‐ cause suite development is often a homeowner's own chore, compared to the more developer-intensive (and in‐ vestor-attractive) project of building new fourplexes or row houses.

One issue raised by critics was that construction labour‐ ers, already scarce, will be di‐ verted from larger-scale unit building to focus on these relatively smaller neigh‐ bourhood projects with high‐ er per-unit costs.

Boomer and bust

Coun. Jasmine Mian says this debate appears to have the biggest generational divide of anything she's handled in her first term on council, the young pushing for housing choice and change, and older homeowners concerned about the future of their property asset and how con‐ gested their neighbourhoods might get.

"It is a battle of genera‐ tions that I think is going to put council in a very inter‐ esting position about what do we do for the future of our city," said Mian.

She, along with Mayor Jy‐ oti Gondek, are among a slim majority on council whose past votes suggest they'll likely support rezoning - and many, like Mian, are among the youngest councillors.

However, at the public hearing's end, several coun‐ cillors will propose amend‐ ments to modify the pro‐ posal, either to delay its ef‐ fect or otherwise soften its impact, to make the change more palatable to reluctant constituents.

One senior planning offici‐ al, offering up a compromise, told council this week the de‐ partment would be fine ex‐ cluding backyard dwellings from the potential mix in fourplexes that already have basement suites, eliminating the prospect of 12 dwelling units on a one-bungalow lot. Only up to eight.

Any result is bound to be controversial, among one de‐ mographic or another. It has tended to be the older antireform residents who've warned about the potential blowback councillors may face in the 2025 civic elec‐ tion.

After all, tradition tells us that it's older, home-owning residents who are most likely to vote.