With much being made lately of the ongoing housing crisis, the federal government announced some policy changes in the leadup to next week’s start of the fall session of Parliament. One change is a 100% GST Rental Rebate on purpose-built rental housing projects. The other was a funding announcement of $74 million for London, Ontario from the Housing Accelerator Fund, a program based out of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), a federal Crown corporation.
Another piece of news about that program also made headlines — a letter from the Minister of Housing to the Mayor of Calgary, saying that Calgary’s application for funding under the Housing Accelerator program was contingent on eliminating so-called exclusionary zoning.
In The Zone
With governments across North America facing housing issues — worsened by increased financialization of housing through AirBnb, and the wholesale buying-up of single-family homes by investment firms — policy-makers have focused more and more on common rules that prevent housing from being built.
A growing consensus that largely crosses partisan and ideological boundaries now frowns upon the way that modern zoning — which limits the type, size, height, footprint, and eventual end use of buildings on any particular piece of land — has been operating in most places for most of the past hundred years.
As you might have noticed while driving, walking or biking around the place you live, massive sections of towns and cities across North America are reserved exclusively for spaced-out, single-family detached houses — the bedrock of suburbia — while also placed nowhere near any businesses or services. Denser forms of housing, including the duplex, triplex or row-house are excluded by this “exclusionary zoning” policy.
This way of building towns and cities has more or less been a legal requirement under modern zoning since the mid-20th century. The traditional main streets we enjoy visiting as tourist destinations or for local shopping strolls are effectively illegal in most places.
What this means is there is a pretty firm limit on the number of people who can fit in any given amount of living space. While this sounds good in the abstract — people can be pretty annoying — the costs of all these restrictions on housing have been piling up and have now come due in various ways — unaffordable housing, financially-strapped cities, crumbling infrastructure, car dependency, gigantic and inhospitable arterial roads, banal streetscapes, decaying strip malls, traffic, etc.
One remedy that has taken off in popularity among policymakers over the past few years is upzoning - or swapping the zoning rules out from underneath the feet of suburbia, making it now legal to build multiple units on a lot previously zoned only for a single-family detached house — a change that can then take place without any further special permission from the city.
Generally, you can’t replace entire neighbourhoods and subdivisions overnight with the stroke of a pen, so this involves gradual change — swapping out existing structures, one at a time, with buildings comprising two or more dwelling units.
Not every homeowner will want to do this, and not everyone who wants to necessarily has the resources available. Upzoning by itself doesn’t force people to build dense housing on land they own if they don’t want to.
Coming Soon to a Town Near You
Upzoning is a policy fad that’s rippling through North America. Many jurisdictions have joined in the fun, including several prairie cities (such as Minneapolis) and a number of municipalities in Canada, and commentators are pushing for more.
Regina itself tried to push through a city-wide upzoning in 2019, eliminating the single-family R1 zone, but it was removed from a package of reforms by then-City Councillor Barbara Young.
One place in particular has long been identified worldwide with car-dependent suburban sprawl, twisting webs of freeways and perpetual traffic jams — the state of California. In recent years, California’s super-majority Democratic legislature has been busy passing a number of laws to override local government decisions. A group of these bills combined to make it easier to build Accessory Dwelling Units (smaller houses in big leafy backyards). Another bill, AB 2011, permits the upzoning of California’s plentiful roadside strip malls into denser housing, as well as guaranteeing speedy approvals. And the legislation known as SB 9, the California HOME Act, now allows up to four units to be built on an existing single-family lot.
The number of new housing units built under SB 9 has not necessarily taken off. But that isn’t a huge surprise for this type of reform —
Think of housing reform as a series of parallel deadbolts on a heavy door—like a bank safe. Unlocking any one lock doesn’t allow the door to open. It’s only when they’re all unlocked that things can proceed.
On our metaphorical door, only one of those deadbolts is labeled “single-family zoning.” The others have different names. “Built form regulations.” “Development fees.” “Development delays.” “Access to financing.” “Cost of construction.” “Skilled labor shortage.” “Development culture and support networks.” I could go on."
-Daniel Herriges, “Has Statewide Upzoning Failed To Unlock Housing Production in California?”, Strong Towns.org
Accessory Dwelling Units, on the other hand, have proven to be a smashing success in California.
Calgary’s Plan
With an estimated 17% to 18% of its households in need of affordable housing, for the past thirty years, Calgary has been working on a Housing Strategy, “Home is Here”, based on the work of a Housing and Affordability Taskforce.
Below is a video from the City of Calgary summarizing the strategy (the link skips ahead to the solutions) —
One key item of contention, which was very nearly stripped out of the package, is centered around the so-called Residential – Grade-Oriented Infill (R-CG) zone. Recommendation 1.C.6 states the City will “Complete City-initiated land use redesignations by Q2 2024 to R-CG as the base residential district across Calgary” meaning that the zoning would be changed more or less everywhere in the City to R-CG, or “blanket” upzoning.
This is framed by the City as a way to cut administrative red tape —
Changing residential zoning rules in Calgary to R-CG would simplify the process that landowners must go through if they want to build single detached homes, duplexes, triplexes, backyard suites and rowhouses.
With 67% of Calgary’s residential parcels zoned single family-only, this offers a ripe opportunity to introduce new housing in areas that are already serviced by the city’s infrastructure.
However, the Housing Strategy proved to be somewhat controversial. After the package was initially defeated, Mayor Jyoti Gondek called a special meeting of City Council this past weekend to bring it back for another vote.
The Sprawl’s latest podcast episode - Calgary City Council’s Hesitation On Housing focused on the back-and-forth at Council, prior to the reform package being approved on Saturday night.
One notable criticism in the Twittersphere is that Calgary’s Housing Strategy failed to address Short Term Rentals (i.e. AirBnbs), which are increasingly under scrutiny for their impact on housing markets. New York City notably introduced new regulations that make these Short-Term rentals nearly impossible (Update: British Columbia’s government recently made a similar move).
Acceleration Warning
The City of Calgary was also in the middle of an application process for Housing Accelerator funding. Just as the Housing Strategy re-vote process started, Mayor Gondek shared a copy of a letter received from federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser, which warned Calgary City Council that it would be necessary to keep blanket R-CG upzoning as part of the housing package if the City hoped to get funding from the Housing Accelerator program.
Unlike the relationship between states/provinces and cities, the federal government does not have direct jurisdiction over cities, so cannot override zoning policy directly. Instead, under the Housing Accelerator Fund, the federal government offers the “carrot” of funding in exchange for the City government voluntarily adopting, and maintaining, a minimum number of key reforms. This letter seems to suggest that upzoning will be a key focus going forward.
In the next Article we’ll take a look at The City of Regina’s application for the Housing Accelerator Fund.