That there is part of the situation too. Buyer pool is cut, the same way people assess a single family property next to an existing multi unit apartment complex.
Quality of life for the resident is impacted, fair argument or not they will perceive it as a negative impact. Then they’ll look to sell to move to a property, probably less likely to host similar impact from adjacent development (the burbs and beyond). Their resale value took a hit however.
Developers reap the benefit of the previous developers neighbouring work and the chain reaction continues.
And surely there’s many properties opposite to that of a dilapidated bungalow left untouched by a now 85 year old widow being impacted too.
The middle two points are really what should be discussed.
People bought into communities with an expectation of stability and a long term plan (decades) and the last city council shattered that expectation. Sure, people could sell their homes if they do not like how their community is changing... but that is bull####. They shouldn't have to change their life plans because of a poorly executed policy that was not a part of the mandate of the last city election. The politics of this issue is doubly bad because it appears that the only stakeholders who are actually benefiting are the private developers (and not the people of Calgary).
Even if you agree with the intention of the blanket rezoning, I am sure most of you could think of ways it could have been executed better to actually get the support of the citizens and get their buy-in.
Instead, we have now had a "Blanket Rezoning" election and the result is that 7 members of council are moving to repeal the blanket rezoning. It will be interesting to see their approach but they only need 1 more vote right now and there is another guy who ran on repealing, so I do not see a need to compromise.
There are other opportunities that city hall could have worked on first to solve the housing crisis before coming back to the blanket rezoning.
One of the actions could have been blanket rezoning that did not change RC1/RC2 houses.
Start a second phase of the main streets initiative to try and stimulate targeted development on the fringes or neighbourhoods
Force the development of undeveloped land. (How long has that lot on 17th ave & 11th st SW been empty? 15 years?)
Expropriate corporate own land to build housing
Continue converting office buildings to condos
Spend the money to develop the west village (it is only going to get more expensive to remediate)
Stand up a public home builder to compete in the market and work to slow down or reduce housing prices
Hopefully the city comes up with some great ideas in place of the rezoning strategy..... time will tell.
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Buying a house instead of renting or living like a nomad.
Buying a house might not be a big deal to you, but to most people it is the single largest investment of their lives and is not done on a whim. I would suggest that most people take a fair bit of time to evaluate where they want to buy a house and view the purchase as a very long term asset.
I believe most people consider a lot more than just the aspects of the house and lot when making a purchase. They look at the street and community. Some people consider their commutes to work or the nearby amenities and shops. Other people look to see what is nearby for schools, fire departments, police stations, or even proximity to a hospital.
When you look at realtor websites they often talk about the proximity to other places or how it is a "quiet street". The realtors do that because people are looking for those things when buying a house.
So then if you go and rezone the entire city and turn it into a development free-for-all, you may be able to understand how people suddenly feel like their life plan is under attack and not just their pocket book.
Buying a house instead of renting or living like a nomad.
Buying a house might not be a big deal to you, but to most people it is the single largest investment of their lives and is not done on a whim. I would suggest that most people take a fair bit of time to evaluate where they want to buy a house and view the purchase as a very long term asset.
I believe most people consider a lot more than just the aspects of the house and lot when making a purchase. They look at the street and community. Some people consider their commutes to work or the nearby amenities and shops. Other people look to see what is nearby for schools, fire departments, police stations, or even proximity to a hospital.
When you look at realtor websites they often talk about the proximity to other places or how it is a "quiet street". The realtors do that because people are looking for those things when buying a house.
So then if you go and rezone the entire city and turn it into a development free-for-all, you may be able to understand how people suddenly feel like their life plan is under attack and not just their pocket book.
How about when you're retired, living empty nest, and with a small retirement income. Don't you want affordable and easy to maintain options in your neighbourhood or do you want to have to be forced into moving away and losing that connection to the community that you specifically sought out - if that's even the case - I am doubtful there are people in CityScape or Cranston were that considerate about where they're buying.
It's still not a free-for-all anyway. It's not like builders are given carte blanche to build anything they want. It's like people think they're getting rid of City Building Inspections.
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There are other opportunities that city hall could have worked on first to solve the housing crisis before coming back to the blanket rezoning.
One of the actions could have been blanket rezoning that did not change RC1/RC2 houses.
So blanket rezoning that doesn't result in any rezoning? Doesn't seem like a good faith suggestion.
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Start a second phase of the main streets initiative to try and stimulate targeted development on the fringes or neighbourhoods
Blanket rezoning tackles this far more efficiently. There's already a disproportionate amount of time spend on land use redistricting, adding years to the process to just end up bickering why that street is getting up-zoned while this street isn't won't help increase housing supply in any efficient manner. And will RC1 and RC2 houses on the table for rezoning in this scenario?
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Force the development of undeveloped land. (How long has that lot on 17th ave & 11th st SW been empty? 15 years?)
Expropriate corporate own land to build housing
Stand up a public home builder to compete in the market and work to slow down or reduce housing prices
Force how? You can't force developers to build, and if you tried the REITs would have the city in courts for years. So how do you incentivize it? I'm all for land value taxation, but that only works if there's upward pressure on zoning to maximize development by also punishing underdeveloped lots to prevent the minimum from going up indefinitely until the conditions allow for the higher density to be built. This would then put pressure on the main streets, people with single family homes on the up-zoned corridors will see penalties and higher property taxes to reflect their lack of development. Which I certainly support, but I'm not sure if it will be palatable.
A public builder is fine and can be useful at supplementing housing supply, but if it's just going to be cannibalizing the private development I'm not sure how there can be a net positive outcome. There's enough undeveloped lots out there that the city trying to replace private capital while also adding to what it's building isn't feasible.
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Continue converting office buildings to condos
Did you think the rezoning policy stopped this from happening or removed it as an option? The city did work on this first and is continuing to be involved with it. Again, not really a good faith suggestion.
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Spend the money to develop the west village (it is only going to get more expensive to remediate)
Spend what money? Where's this money coming from? Victoria Park and the East Village has the CRL that was boosted via the office building boom with what can be considered a gerrymandered map to include The Bow. A West Village CRL won't have that same kind of property tax draw available to it, and has a significantly higher remediation burden. Between land expropriation and penalizing lack of development, there isn't going to be much private money willing to get involved, whose property taxes would be required to pay for the remediation in the first place. But ignoring that, the city won't want to have competing development between CRLs, so without external funding, the likelihood of something happening before 2048 (when the Rivers District CRL expires) is pretty low, otherwise it could risk repayment of those projects.
Unless the province steps in with the money for remediation and to re-route Bow Trail, the West Village isn't seeing anything happening for a while. Especially not if there's billions in spending on expropriated lots that needs to happen elsewhere.
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Hopefully the city comes up with some great ideas in place of the rezoning strategy..... time will tell.
The first idea is to slow down the development process that will result in fewer housing starts, so it's not looking great early on.
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How about when you're retired, living empty nest, and with a small retirement income. Don't you want affordable and easy to maintain options in your neighbourhood or do you want to have to be forced into moving away and losing that connection to the community that you specifically sought out - if that's even the case - I am doubtful there are people in CityScape or Cranston were that considerate about where they're buying.
It's still not a free-for-all anyway. It's not like builders are given carte blanche to build anything they want. It's like people think they're getting rid of City Building Inspections.
I would argue that those are things that are a part of your life plan. Have a family (or not), grow old, empty nest, retire, downsize, etc. Those are all normal stages of life that people may or may not go through.
Having politicians make a decision that drastically impacts your life plan, or quality of life, is not really comparable to a normal stage of life. It is even worse when it is a fairly significant impact and something that was not campaigned on or had a referendum about.
Housing affordability is a big issue and I agree with taking action to combat housing affordability. I just think that impacting people's most significant assets and quality of life should be one of the last moves we try instead of the first.
I agreed with the main streets approach. No one wants to live in a crappy run down bungalow along a busy street. Focusing density on those areas makes sense, it also made sense to have the approach of trying to create more mixed retail & residential density to promote more walkable neighbourhoods. In the planning stages there was consultation and revisions, which helped engage the citizens and help them feel heard. The execution of main streets leaves a lot to be desired but the goal was okay and if the city had taken a more heavy hand in the execution of the development in the main streets zones then maybe their goals would have been realized faster and they could have expanded the effort into additional phases to further gain density.
I agree with expropriating corporate owned land to get housing density. Whether it is an office building or an at-grade parking lot or an empty field on top of a train station. All of those projects should be accelerated.
I also think the city should stand up a public home builder. They could use the money from the federal government grants to build affordable housing and then partner with a non-profit organization to run the rental properties. They could also build housing in specific projects where private corporations refuse to build because they are worried about the profits not being big enough. Or they could build regular houses at a more reasonable price than the private developers.
What they did instead was a lot like a free-for-all, perhaps not a quality free-for-all, but definitely a huge shift from the long standing rules that maintained the continuity of communities up until that point. You had neighbourhoods that had pretty strict rules about building SFHs and suddenly those rules were lifted. Those neighbourhoods represent a huge opportunity for private developers to make profit rolling out their playbook that they were never allowed to use there before. But it wasn't like it just went a gradual step from single family homes to infills, the developers could go all the way to 8 unit complexes in a formerly RC1 neighbourhood.
Had they taken a different path, I doubt this would have been such a hot topic in the election and the new council wouldn't be gearing up to dismantle the blanket rezoning.
Those neighbourhoods represent a huge opportunity for private developers to make profit rolling out their playbook that they were never allowed to use there before.
They were allowed to use it before. R-CG land use applications had a 95% approval rate.
So blanket rezoning that doesn't result in any rezoning? Doesn't seem like a good faith suggestion.
Blanket rezoning tackles this far more efficiently. There's already a disproportionate amount of time spend on land use redistricting, adding years to the process to just end up bickering why that street is getting up-zoned while this street isn't won't help increase housing supply in any efficient manner. And will RC1 and RC2 houses on the table for rezoning in this scenario?
Well, we keep hearing about how the rezoning cleaned up 30 different zones in Calgary by consolidating. Is your argument that consolidating those zoning adds no value unless the RC1/RC2 zones are included? There must be some value, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered with the larger consolidation effort.
Anyway, efficiency is good but it wasn't balanced against impact and the result was a lot of unhappy stakeholders. People felt that the only winners of the rezoning was the private developers that were making profits while "breaking" the communities that they loved to live in. Now we have a new city council where only 4 members were re-elected. That seems like a pretty hefty failure of the previous council.
To say this all a different way, my issue isn't what they did so much as how they tried to do it. Had they tried to move ahead with a different strategy to address the housing affordability crisis, then maybe the strategy wouldn't be getting repealed. Even if they had just been selective on graduating RC1 to a new RC1 set of rules and then RC2 to a different new set of rules and then rolled the other zones into the new H zoning... something more gradual and nuanced might have survived.
I am happy to go back and forth over my ideas, primarily about "expropriating corporate owned land" and "using a public builder to develop more affordable housing" because we are in a "housing crisis" but what would you have done differently to manage the impact and have your affordability-strategy survive the next election?
Having politicians make a decision that drastically impacts your life plan, or quality of life, is not really comparable to a normal stage of life. It is even worse when it is a fairly significant impact and something that was not campaigned on or had a referendum about.
Can you drill down specifically on what you think the significant impact is to the enjoyment of your property and/or day to day life?
I'll have a longer response tomorrow to the second sentence quoted here that's also related my earlier question, but the TLDR is that the CITY (not councillors) have been explicitly and implicitly laying the groundwork on this for years. This was not really driven by any single council in the way people think...20 years ago council directed the experts to engage the citizens and write a 60 year Municipal Development Plan, and blanket re-zoning is one of many fruits of that ongoing labour.
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Well, we keep hearing about how the rezoning cleaned up 30 different zones in Calgary by consolidating. Is your argument that consolidating those zoning adds no value unless the RC1/RC2 zones are included? There must be some value, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered with the larger consolidation effort.
It's about ripping the bandaid off once in a way that is fair to everyone. Or unfair to everyone if you prefer.
Infill ripe areas (ie. built in the 50s) have been effectively living under this system for years. If you live in a 60s neighbourhood it should have been pretty obvious that big changes were imminent. For everything newer, this is basically warning long in advance of how it will work when the time comes.
But the factors that made areas R1 in the first place are still generally there. They are the furthest from nodes and corridors. They were/are 'nicer' than their adjacent R2 counterparts. Ergo dwellings in R2/etc are more likely to be rundown and/or a better location, and therefore more likely to be redeveloped. But the free market will sort through things even more sensibly and fairly now, as hard as that may be to believe.
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Well, we keep hearing about how the rezoning cleaned up 30 different zones in Calgary by consolidating. Is your argument that consolidating those zoning adds no value unless the RC1/RC2 zones are included? There must be some value, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered with the larger consolidation effort.
Why should R-C1 have been spared in the consolidation efforts but not R-C1L or R-C1N? Or R1, R-1N or R-1S?
What makes R-C2 sacred but not R2, or R-2M?
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It's about ripping the bandaid off once in a way that is fair to everyone. Or unfair to everyone if you prefer.
Infill ripe areas (ie. built in the 50s) have been effectively living under this system for years. If you live in a 60s neighbourhood it should have been pretty obvious that big changes were imminent. For everything newer, this is basically warning long in advance of how it will work when the time comes.
But the factors that made areas R1 in the first place are still generally there. They are the furthest from nodes and corridors. They were/are 'nicer' than their adjacent R2 counterparts. Ergo dwellings in R2/etc are more likely to be rundown and/or a better location, and therefore more likely to be redeveloped. But the free market will sort through things even more sensibly and fairly now, as hard as that may be to believe.
Yeah, it drives me crazy that people who call themselves conservatives are opposed tp this as governmemt overreach.
Zoning is the government telling you you're not allowed to do something on property you own. Less zoning restrictions is less government overreach.
Why should R-C1 have been spared in the consolidation efforts but not R-C1L or R-C1N? Or R1, R-1N or R-1S?
What makes R-C2 sacred but not R2, or R-2M?
So you think the repeal will roll back all of the zoning changes so we can have all of those shades of grey? That would probably be the most efficient way for someone like Dan McLean to wrap his head around it - "Just hit the Undo button until we are in the 1980s again".
I would think that to satisfy their mandate they will roll back the RCG change to put back the RC1 / RC2 categories but ideally not blow them up into all the different variants or change anything about the rest of the zoning consolidation effort.
So you think the repeal will roll back all of the zoning changes so we can have all of those shades of grey? That would probably be the most efficient way for someone like Dan McLean to wrap his head around it - "Just hit the Undo button until we are in the 1980s again".
I would think that to satisfy their mandate they will roll back the RCG change to put back the RC1 / RC2 categories but ideally not blow them up into all the different variants or change anything about the rest of the zoning consolidation effort.
So if I had an R-C1L(s) zoned house that then got moved into R-CG it would revert back to R-C1 or it would stay as R-CG? This will matter significantly to people as these are the things that can make somebody’s secondary suite legal or illegal (and whether or not your house can be sold to build multi-unit dwellings). If it’s just a ‘well if you have one then you can keep it’ then you have to keep the variants because that’s what the variants are for.
I don't think there's actually any real debate today. It is only a matter of forwarding it to a regular council meeting for actual debate. They actually could not debate the merits of the motion itself today
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