Two cheers for the concealment of Calgary’s secondary-suite shame

So Calgary has finally solved its weird, wart-like secondary suite problem! Congratulations, Cowtown! ( Cow-gratulations!?) For those who don’t know about this particular quirk/quirky particularity of local politics, Calgary has long suffered the effects of a curious anomaly: any homeowner who wanted to subdivide his residence, install an extra stove, and rent out that part of it had to wait to apply to the full city council for an exemption from zoning regulations.

In 2016, these building-by-building adversarial hear- ings took up one-fifth of the elected council’s total meeting time. No other large Canadian city handles secondary suite applications this way, for obvious reasons. It made Calgary look vaguely preposterous, hurting the city’s reputation as a laissezfaire frontier town— especially since, until this week, the council couldn’t seem to agree on a means of extricating itself from its own chronic, and intensifying, crisis.

None of the councillors liked having their time consumed with pettifogging presentations that always seemed to run late. Local journalists on municipal watchdog duties liked it even less, and had begun to grumble, projecting the city’s embarrassment onto the national stage.

The hearings often involved taxpayers telling sad and sometimes awkwardly intimate stories about how their incomes were not keep- ing up with their mortgage, or how they were simply trying to make room for broke or disabled loved ones. At the same time, there might sometimes be a gang of wary voters in the chamber, determined to oppose individual applications that could “spoil” a “heritage” neigh- bourhood (wink, wink!) by permitting the proliferation of flophouses or opium dens. Councillors could face a choice between appearing cruel and possibly racist, or offending an entire street’s worth of motivated voters.

So council has now solved the problem. But let us be specific here. The council has solved ITS problem, and the beat reporters’ closely related one. Whether it has alleviated the underlying housing problem for individual residents of Calgary... well, that’s another question.

The motion passed Monday instructs the city admin- istration, in the name of the council, to cook up changes in the land- use bylaws that will “include secondary suites as discretionary uses” in lowdensity residential zones. The idea is that the existing bureaucratic process for development permits will take over secondary suites as well, with appeals going to the existing Subdivision and Development Appeals Board, a citizen group mostly made up of architects and lawyers.

Advocates of freedom for secondary suites hailed council’s move as a good first step. And as a professional cynic, I can see that it was a necessary step. But I am not so sure about the overall effect. If the administration creates unrealistic standards for suite applications, and rejects the vast majority of them, applicants might find themselves worse off than they were when they at least had the chance to grovel in public.

The more obvious danger is that the large volume of applications will simply overwhelm a bureaucratic channel that was never designed to discuss whether Old Lady Jones should be allowed to move in with her niece and cook her own meals. If it takes umpteen years for a suite application to work its way through an endless backlog, Calgarians are likely to resort to the solutions some are probably using already: operating illegal, unregulated secondary suites, possibly equipped with portable stoves.

Say what you want about the old system of bringing secondary suite applications before the full council: it did have the merit of involving elected officials, who have a healthy fear of public feedback. Councillors have saved themselves a great deal of time by fobbing the applications, and the creation of a new bylaw, off onto nameless, unaccountable administrators.

Ideally the rewritten law will shift the burden of proving harm from a new secondary suite strongly onto nervous-nelly neighbours, and allow for the expeditious decision-making that the council says it envisions. But whether or not crushing the creation of secondary suites is the goal of this change, it might easily end up being the outcome.

In short, advocates of wider secondary suite use — or just of freedom for property owners — should celebrate with caution. But reporters who hate having to show up for Secondary Suite Day council meetings can go ahead and break out the bubbly. These time- consuming arguments will now happen out of sight, and out of mind!

ADVOCATES OF FREEDOM FOR SECONDARY SUITES HAILED COUNCIL’S MOVE.