Step by step, the Calgary we used to know, with its sense of shared community, disappears
Call it revenge of the nimbies.
What did city hall expect? That Calgarians would simply roll over and accept that neighbourhoods in which they’ve sunk deep roots to be so easily upended by a council decree, one fuelled by a toxic mix of arrogant social engineering and simple greed?
No. Those who pushed blanket rezoning across our city — allowing developers to disrupt stable, single-family neighbourhoods by erecting fourplexes, secondary suites and row houses — are about to feel the pushback.
Ironically, it’ll result in the opposite outcome most council members imagined when backing this rezoning malarkey after being bribed with cash from Ottawa, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s regime invents one ruse after another to solve a housing shortage it helped engineer by allowing 1,270,000 newcomers into Canada during 2023 alone.
Did our prime minister think all those immigrants, guest workers, foreign students and Ukrainian refugees would simply sleep on the streets? But you know the answer to that: consequences are irrelevant. Only that initial 15-second sound bite counts in Trudeau-land.
Grabbing this federal bribe wasn’t enough for council. A majority of councillors also saw in this rezoning bylaw a way to foster more inclusiveness, despite Calgary being among the most welcoming cities on Earth.
(If only council’s social engineering enthusiasm was matched by an interest in the more traditional form of engineering, then perhaps we wouldn’t have suffered through a summer of water restrictions and busted pipes.)
Thanks to their need to make us all mingle, we’re now on course to ensure whatever divisions there are between neighbourhoods and quadrants in Calgary will widen.
These individual contracts are attached to the land title of a home, placing restrictions on its future use as a different type of structure. This covenant stays in place even if the original owner moves on. And they’re devilishly difficult to remove.
If a large percentage of residents sign such documents, it prevents developers from buying up a chunk of any street and subsequently building a bunch of row houses. They could challenge this in court but, let’s face it, if there are easier and cheaper places to do business, who’ll bother with such time-consuming legalities?
Residents of Lake Bonavista in the city’s southeast are the latest to jump aboard the covenant bandwagon. Already one in five have signed up and the ball’s just got rolling. When they heard developers are already targeting homes in the similar communities of Queensland, Lakeview and Braeside, support soared.
Meanwhile, residents of Chinook Park, Kelvin Grove, Varsity and Eagle Ridge are also investigating such covenants.
The legal fees involved are approximately $500 per home, a possible deterrent for many families in these tough times. And that’s where things get interesting with council’s tone-deaf social engineering experiment.
Some neighbourhoods are relatively richer than others, so those will be the ones where more homeowners can afford to go down this legal pathway. Not-so-well-off areas might balk at paying the fee.
So extrapolate that a half-dozen years. Lake Bonavista, for example, now has a significant number of homes covered by these covenants. Developers, therefore, will give it a wide berth when looking for a new site for a series of fourplexes.
What does that do for the area’s property values? They go up, because people looking for a nice middle-class home in an established area will be keen to pay the higher price. Meanwhile, all the multi-storey builds now occur in areas that found covenant legal fees too onerous. What happens to their property values?
We’re not talking ghettos, but it does suggest a widening divide between the haves and have-nots when it comes to future neighbourhoods.
Step by step, the Calgary we used to know, with its sense of shared community, disappears.
Chris Nelson is a regular columnist.