Amid an affordability crisis that has been fuelled by housing costs, Calgary city council received a trio of reports and accompanying recommendations addressing Indigenous affordable housing, the housing and affordability task force and the Housing Accelerator Fund on Tuesday.
In a 7-8 vote, council ended the task force’s work without moving forward on any of their recommendations.
Mayor Jyoti Gondek thanked the task force for the past year’s work, “since council clearly couldn’t do that.”
“I’m very disappointed,” she told reporters on Tuesday evening.
“We heard loud and clear that we have a housing crisis. We heard it from the community. We’ve heard it from individual Calgarians. We’ve heard it from administration.
“We had every opportunity to receive updates on a quarterly basis and weigh in on the things that we agreed with and the things that we disagreed with. And we gave it up. I don’t understand it.”
Defining a ‘crisis’
Long regarded as an affordable place to live when compared to other Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, Calgary is losing its competitive advantage in that regard, officials said.
“It’s frequently cited as one of the main components of Calgary’s status as one of the world’s most livable cities. If we lose our housing affordability, we lose all manner of economic benefits that come from being a city where people can afford to live, can afford to raise a family and start a business and contribute to that continued economic growth,” Tim Ward, manager of housing solutions, told council.
The data about housing affordability in the city are part of why task force member Maya Kambeitz called the housing situation in the city a “crisis”:
- People earning less than $87,000 per year have affordable access to only 40 per cent of the city’s market housing stock.
- According to the latest Statistics Canada data, the median individual income in 2020 was $44,250 and three-quarters of individual Calgarians less than $80,000 per year.
- More than 80,000 households are paying more than a third of their income on housing, a measure of being able to afford that housing.
- Rents in the city have increased by around 25 per cent in the past year and house prices by 29 per cent in the past four years, Ward said.
- One in 10 households are at risk of homelessness.
- Calgary’s affordable housing supply of 3.5 per cent is below the national average of six per cent.
- The city has had an influx of 100,000 people over the past four years — the highest rate of in-migration in recent years — and another 110,000 are expected in the next four years, putting more demand on the city’s housing market.
Since being convened a year ago, the task force’s 15 members — 10 members of the public and five city officials — produced recommendations focusing on three outcomes: increasing and diversifying the housing supply in Calgary, strengthening the ties within the housing sector, and improving living conditions for people in rental housing.
The recommendations fell into three broad timelines for implementation, based on resources and legislative requirements, which would have required public input and further council approval.
The city’s planning department recommended changes to the Land Use Bylaw as part of making it easier for developers and non-profit housing providers to build housing. Other recommendations included putting more city-owned land on the market, and to mandate minimum affordable housing amounts in new developments and Local Area Plans.
“Any type of land use change has to go through a very fulsome process of an item being brought forward to council. When it’s brought forward to council, there must be a public hearing. If you’re changing land use, we’re all used to that. We know that this was no different,” Gondek said.
“As a matter of fact, what we said is that instead of an update at the end of the whole program, which was the original recommendation, we would be very interested in getting quarterly updates on what the implementation plan was going to look like so we could make informed decisions as a council. So I’m at a loss for a vote. That means we are not endorsing task force recommendations when we know we’re in a housing crisis.”
City officials aimed to increase market builds by 1,000 more a year and 3,000 non-market affordable homes a year.
Josh White, director of city and regional planning, said the city can affect the supply of housing through policy change, which would put “downward pressure” on rental and purchase prices.
“A lot of damage is going to happen to the city because we did not want to act today, even though we had stage gate after stage gate, opportunity after opportunity to say no to the changes that come forward but still we delayed,” Ward 8 Coun. Courtney Walcott told reporters.
“I’m very, very frustrated. I don’t know how not to be. I’ve heard these stories over and over again. I watched councils from other municipalities make these decisions, and we’ve seen the reaction that they get when a national crisis is dismissed.
“What we had today was not dramatic or drastic. It was the beginning to a process that we were too afraid to even start.”
Parking, rent controls
One change would be to eliminate the red tape around parking minimums, which officials said can be an extra cost for non-market and affordable market housing. One example given was an underground parking space costing an average of $80,000 as part of a development.
White said that households will self-select to developments with or without parking, as they need.
“Another important factor here is that even though we have a zero parking minimum (in the recommendations), it’s a very rare instance where you actually have zero parking. So it’s a matter of deciding who’s the right body, who’s the right entity to decide what’s the right amount of parking,” he said.
An investigation into how rent control measures could impact the city’s market was another recommendation.
“While the idea of rent control models could give some of you pause, the task force did feel it was important to ensure that the city of Calgary investigate models used in other jurisdictions to ensure market rents are balanced, remain affordable and so we can better understand the cost drivers for rent,” Kambeitz said.
“It is important that we not leave certain tools on the table and that we continue to investigate and collaborate on what may work for our city.”
Gondek said the years of advocacy to the federal government came back with a constant response: “‘Calling a national housing crisis is not something we’re going to do. Each municipality has to do it on their own and you have to demonstrate that you’re doing something about it or we will not give you funding.’”
The mayor said a previous council also had an opportunity to address housing affordability in the city, but didn’t.
“These are, frankly, actions that we should have taken seven years ago when this was presented to council and it got shelved and ignored,” Gondek said.
Land use at issue
Many of the councillors, including Kourtney Penner, Courtney Walcott, Sonya Sharp and Terry Wong shared stories of the challenges they’ve personally had with housing in Calgary.
But in the end, councillors like Jennifer Wyness, Richard Pootmans and Andre Chabot expressed concerns over one action item: “making the base residential district Residential-Grade Oriented (R-CG) with guidance for single, semi-detached, row and townhouses into a single land use district.”
The task force’s work reached its conclusion in a 7-8 vote Tuesday evening, with councillors Chabot, Sean Chu, Peter Demong, Dan McLean, Richard Pootmans, Sharp, Terry Wong and Wyness in opposition.
“We need a little more time to work it through, make sure that we understood precisely what the recommendations meant and whether we have the capacity to do it or whether it is the right way to do it,” Wong told reporters Tuesday.
“I’ve always said we do the right things and I think housing is the right thing. But I’ve also said we do it in the right way and have given herself enough time to do that.
“Having said that, we haven’t disband the task force. We will go back to administration to bring back answers to the questions we want to ask. And if that means administration brings back a different set of recommendations in the future … We look forward to it. This is not dead.”
That vote impacted the decision on the Indigenous affordable housing recommendations, whose funding was part of the task force recommendations.
Following an in-camera session, council passed the recommended action plan for the Housing Accelerator Fund by a 12-1 vote, with Coun. Chu in opposition.
–With files from Paula Tran, Global News.