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

So Calgary has finally solved its weird, wartlike secondary suite problem! Congratulations, Cowtown! (Cowgratulations!?) 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 buildingby-building adversarial hearings 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 keeping 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” neighbourhood 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 administration,