Hundreds of people showed up at Calgary’s city hall on Thursday to make their opinions known on a proposed affordable housing strategy.
Dubbed “Home is Here,” the new strategy aims to address a worsening housing crisis that, according to city numbers, sees nearly one in five households unable to afford their housing and 110,000 new residents expected to move to the city in the next five years.
“Rent has increased, by some reports, as much as 40 per cent, and to afford a single detached home, a household requires an income of more than $150,000,” Tim Ward, manager of housing solutions with the city, said.
“To afford the average rent, a household requires an income of $84,000.”
The proposed strategy aims to increase the supply of housing, support affordable housing providers, help the city’s housing subsidiaries to improve service delivery, ensure diverse types of housing to meet the needs of equity-deserving populations, and address the affordable housing needs of Calgary’s Indigenous population.
The city’s community development committee started hearing nearly 150 speakers on Thursday, as part of their deliberations.
During the committee meeting, a rally was held outside city hall in support of the recommendations, with nearly the same numbers in attendance.
A survey commissioned by the city in August showed nine in 10 of the 500 adult Calgarians polled agreed that housing affordability is an issue.
If the committee endorses the strategy, a special meeting of council on Saturday will decide whether or not to adopt the new strategy.
Refugees and seniors
Speaking to the committee, Calgarians from all walks of life shared stories like having to live unhoused as a child, trying to find a place to live while they go to university, and having to make sacrifices in order to keep a roof over their head.
The Centre of Newcomers’ chief program officer Kelly Ernst said people immigrating to Calgary from outside the country was not driving the city’s housing affordability problem. But he said despite setting up a microloan program to help newcomers find shelter to build a new life in, nearly 10 per cent of their clients have housing as a primary concern.
“Five years ago, nobody showed up at the Centre for Newcomers with suitcases. We now see that in regular frequency,” Ernst said.
“Even this week, families are showing up with their suitcases at our centre saying, ‘I’ve lost my home’ or ‘I’ve arrived and I have no place to stay, What do I do now?’ That’s a substantial change from five years ago.”
Ernst said rental housing is “absolutely critical” to recent arrivals.
Jennifer Rapuano-Kremenik of Harvest Hills Cares Calgary said stabilizing housing costs and preventing extraordinary rent increases will provide more stability to other Calgarians who are vulnerable to cost-of-living shocks.
“Earlier this afternoon, I received a phone call from a senior whose rent went up $1800 from $675. That’s how bad this this crisis is,” Rapuano-Kremenik said. “This senior’s using 80 per cent of her income to pay rent and we’ve been covering her medications for three months.
“We’ve been giving food hampers monthly and we are only supposed to help once every six months, which is why we need to bring forth more social services and mental health supports by expanding access to these supports that can assist vulnerable populations in securing housing and addressing underlying issues that contribute to the homelessness.”
Arguments in favour of the housing strategy also came from the business community.
Calgary Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Deborah Yedlin said having a city that workers can afford to live in is a business-friendly advantage.
“Keeping our advantage is critical to continue to build our city and increase our … diversity. We must both increase and diversify our housing stock. People need places to live,” Yedlin said.
Calgary Economic Development president and CEO Brad Parry said CED is currently in negotiations with a “large European company” hoping to woo them to the city, and the topic of affordability came up in recent negotiations.
“They’ve heard what’s happening. They’ve seen what’s happening. We need to ensure that we continue to be positioned as one of the most liberal cities in all the world,” Parry said.
“As part of that conversation, we also know that this competitive advantage will go away if we don’t have housing that’s affordable and a variety of stock of housing for our community.”
Rally for housing change
Outside city hall, scores of people rallied to urge councillors to accept the proposed housing strategy.
One mother Global News spoke with, when looking at possibly moving to a new home, said it would take 70 to 80 per cent of her husband’s paycheque to pay the rent.
Members of the official Opposition and unions were present at the rally, speaking to the need for housing Albertans can afford.
“It’s not right. This is unconscionable that, in a province as wealthy as ours, so many folks are struggling at this time,” Janis Irwin, Alberta NDP critic for housing said.
“This housing crisis is going to need to take a range of solutions. It’s not going to be just one approach that’s going to solve it.”
Ryan Andersen with the Calgary Alliance for the Common Good recognized that elements of the recommended housing strategy, like removing parking minimums and going to one common land-use designation, became politicized before Thursday’s meeting.
“What we expect from our leaders is to cut through that politicizing and actually address the needs of Calgarians. They’re real and so real leadership addresses the real needs of communities,” Andersen said.
Feds push for change
The hearings came on the same day the federal Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Sean Fraser responded to an inquiry about the city’s application to the Housing Accelerator Fund which was previously declined.
Fraser, a former Calgarian, said those funds hinged on council passing the housing strategy, specifically saying “you must end exclusionary zoning in your city.”
One of the recommendations from the Housing and Affordability Task Force, which the new housing strategy includes, is to make the default zoning one in which multiple levels of density can be developed, not just a single-detached home.
Critics have called it a “blanket re-zoning” of the city.
“These kinds of attitudes are a major reason why we are living in a national housing crisis,” Fraser wrote to Mayor Gondek on Thursday. “We will never solve the housing crisis in Calgary if it is not legal to build the homes required to meet the moment.”
Mayor Jyoti Gondek said the letter from Fraser was an indicator the task force did “some exceptional work.”
“We have some very bright people who have done a lot of research into what a good housing strategy should look like, and ours is an exemplar of this, and the Minister was quite positive about his support for the strategy that we’ve got coming before us,” Gondek said.
“And he was pretty explicit as well that in order to get the funding for the Housing Accelerator fund, we would need to approve the strategy in its entirety.”
Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the federal government is removing the GST on the construction of new rental apartment buildings.
It was a policy point advocates in Calgary were hoping to see changed.
Looking at all the options
Another recommendation is for council to consider rent controls after looking into what has or hasn’t worked in other jurisdictions.
Ward 11 Coun. Kourtney Penner said the sticking point with that recommendation seems to be around exploring the idea, not actually enacting a rent control policy.
“The recommendations are to do some research and a jurisdictional scan to understand what may or may not be working,” Penner said.
“I think we have seen case studies coming out of the (United) States where rent control hasn’t worked, but those are also decades-old policies.
“So what are some of the other options that are out there? And can we look at a breadth of them?”
Ward 1 Coun. Sonya Sharp there was no question that the city is in a housing crisis.
“We know that, and we need to action some of the things immediately,” Sharp said. “Some of the other things that we’re going to talk about are a little more controversial, like the blanket rezoning and that’s OK.
“We have to be able to have those difficult conversations. But having members of the public actually come and speak to us is exactly what we wanted and why we made that reconsideration in June to be here.”
In June, council initially voted down the recommendations from the task force, but voted in a reconsideration after immediate public backlash to bring the item back this month.
Gondek said there was always going to be the opportunity for the public to make their voices heard directly in council chambers with any changes to the Land Use Bylaw.
“A ‘yes’ vote today actually gives the public the opportunity to weigh in through a public hearing process to say whether they agree with a different based land use district or they don’t agree,” Gondek said.
“If you do not approve the recommendations today, you are denying the public the opportunity to weigh in.”
The committee meeting is expected to run into Friday before Saturday’s scheduled council meeting.
— with files from Global News’ David Baxter and Sean Previl
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