I moved to Edmonton in 2023, along with 100,000 others in two years, in the middle of a housing crisis engulfing much of Canada. It was a good year to be a housing advocate. Governments at every level had finally acknowledged that housing supply matters. Toronto, Edmonton, and our rival city Calgary all passed broad housing reforms that year, spurred in many cases by the federal Housing Accelerator Fund. British Columbia went furthest of all, legalizing small-scale multiplexes province-wide and mandating transit-oriented apartment development alongside them.
Since then, almost all of it has stalled or gone backwards. Toronto refused to legalize six-unit multiplexes citywide, settling for the core city and one suburban ward. Vancouver shot down permitting midrise apartments in "villages" scattered across the city. And Calgary, after a year of not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) backlash and a municipal election, repealed its reform outright, reverting the majority of its residential land to permit only a single-detached home.
Edmonton is the exception, and not for lack of trying on the other side. The provincial capital has its own share of NIMBYs. Indeed, there has been a coordinated campaign to repeal our new Zoning Bylaw, and it came closer to succeeding than most Edmontonians realize. At one point, we held the line by a single vote, and only because two of our opponents were on vacation. We have given ground: City Council has scaled back how large these buildings can be. But we kept the parts of the rules that make multi-unit rowhouses in established neighbourhoods not just legal but feasible. In 2025 alone, those rules permitted over 2,500 homes in mature neighbourhoods and changed where Edmonton grows.
So, what made the difference? Three things, each reinforcing the others. We started early, which gave the public fifteen years to buy into a different way of growing before anyone asked them to approve the big reform. We elected and hired competent people, who raised the level of public debate and implemented evidence-based policy. And we built a community of advocates willing to hold those people to account, and to show up with data when the reforms were threatened.
I. The RS Saga
The reform at the centre of all this is the Zoning Bylaw Renewal, or ZBR: a complete rewrite, from the ground up, of Edmonton's zoning, the framework that dictates what you are allowed to build where. There is much more to ZBR, but the most important and most controversial piece was the RS zone, which consolidated a number of low-density zones and covered the majority of residential land in established neighbourhoods. In its initial form, it permitted up to eight units per lot subject to a lot area requirement, three full storeys of height, and a reasonably large building footprint. After years of consultation, City Council voted in favour of ZBR 11-2 in October 2023. It wasn't even close.
ZBR came into force in 2024, and at first, it seemed like it was not going to be a big deal. Figures I compiled from Edmonton's building permits showed a slight uptick in multiplex and rowhouse building in mature neighbourhoods, but nothing compared to what had historically driven housing supply: greenfield sprawl outside our ring road, the Anthony Henday, and apartment buildings in mature neighbourhoods. These initial results validated my priors. Missing middle housing, I concluded, would not be a meaningful player in providing the kind of dense housing supply Edmonton needed.
The first half of 2025 toppled my views. The eightplex started dominating housing supply in mature neighbourhoods, with building permits for over 2,500 homes. Even better, these new rowhouses were shifting Edmonton's growth pattern outright. 2025 was a record year for building near the LRT, shifting the entire curve of where we build relative to transit. Housing permitted in mature neighbourhoods nearly equalled the amount permitted in greenfield outside the Henday. We had accomplished a huge shift in how we develop our city, and it was thanks to the mighty RS zone.
What I had mistaken for failure was a lag. Builders needed time to learn a new form, assemble land, and line up financing, and that lag is dangerous, because it means the disruption of a reform arrives long before the benefit does. By the time the first rowhouses were under construction, anti-infill forces had been coalescing to undo the RS zone, or at least set it back. A new group organized very well by going neighbourhood to neighbourhood, scaring people about the eightplexes going up everywhere that would destroy the neighbourhood. Residents could only suffer the downsides of construction without experiencing the upside of a more vibrant, repopulated neighbourhood with new neighbours. It was easy for people to hate a pit in the ground, and hard to convince them it would pay off in the end. It didn't end there: 2025 was a municipal election year.
In the face of these headwinds, City Council's once steadfast endorsement started wavering. Tim Cartmell, a mayoral candidate, promised an infill moratorium. City administration brought forward amendments to reduce the maximum allowable size of buildings, which Council easily endorsed. Most surprisingly, even councillors who were huge infill supporters and urbanists started turning, scared of the consequences in an election year. Michael Janz, an infill ally on paper and on the record, brought forward a motion to reduce the maximum number of dwelling units permitted from eight to six. Councillors Ashley Salvador and Andrew Knack, who was competing for the mayoralty against Cartmell, joined Janz in the charge against infill.
It may have seemed like a small change, but the eight-unit rowhouses were the key to feasibility in the overwhelming majority of RS permits. Losing two units hits the financials of a development hard and would render many of them not worth building at all. For most lots, this wouldn't have been a decrease from eight to six. It would have been eight to zero.
We got to work. Our advocacy organization, Grow Together Edmonton, compiled permit and assessment data showing not just how much the RS zone had produced, but how little of any given neighbourhood would actually turn over, fractions of a percent, against the "avalanche of infill" opponents were describing. We ran email campaigns to council, placed op-eds, and turned speakers out to the hearing, where we again made up roughly half of the 100 registered, the same share we had managed for ZBR itself two years earlier.
It still came down to luck. We held the eight-unit limit by a vote of six to five in July 2025, with Councillors Cartmell and Hamilton on vacation. Both had made their positions clear, and had they been in the room the cap would have fallen.
Then the election came, and every pro-infill incumbent who ran again was returned. Janz and Salvador, who had feared an anti-infill blowback, won handily. As I wrote in the Edmonton Journal the next day, this was a clear endorsement of the infill agenda and it was time to charge ahead.
We had one more battle. In December 2025, now-Mayor Knack moved again to cut the midblock maximum from eight units to six. Administration returned in February 2026 with a package that included the reduction and went further, cutting units on corner lots and raising lot area requirements across the RS zone. We ran nearly the same playbook again: data, direct advocacy, media, and added in short vertical videos on social media that performed well. This time we did not need the luck: we won the vote to maintain the eight-unit cap by eight to four, this time with Knack, Janz, and Salvador voting our way, all three of whom had voted in July to lower it. Council did cut the maximum height by a metre, to 9.5 metres, but with 80 percent of rowhouses already under that limit, the amendment was not consequential.
Three attacks in two years: we lost the first, on building size; survived the second by a single vote; and won the third by four, giving up a metre of height. Winning those votes proved that a city can weather intense NIMBY resistance without surrendering the mechanics that make missing middle housing financially viable. But we only won them because of work that began long before the RS zone was ever drafted.
II. Starting Early
The Zoning Bylaw Renewal was not the start of anything. It was the culmination of years of public discourse and incremental policy steps taken before the leap. In 2009, Edmonton made secondary and garage suites a discretionary use across the low-density zones of the city. That was followed in 2010 by the first infill target written into Edmonton's plan, at 25 percent of all new homes. Between 2014 and 2020, we fully legalized garden suites, allowed lot splitting to build skinny homes, removed parking minimums, and eventually permitted duplexes across the city. Effectively, Edmonton had legalized four units per lot years before that became part of the national conversation through the Housing Accelerator Fund. 2020 also brought the City Plan, Edmonton's integrated development plan, which set an ambitious target of 50 percent of new homes coming through infill by the time we reach two million people.
None of those reforms built many homes on their own. What they built was the argument. Because Edmontonians had been talking about infill for over a decade before ZBR, people had a chance to internalize its necessity. Friends of mine with no particular interest in municipal politics or urbanism would spout off phrases like "sprawl is bankrupting our city" or "we need more density to support walkable neighbourhoods." Next to my non-wonk friends in Toronto, they would pass for municipal development experts. When I doorknocked with candidates in the municipal election, people at the door generally knew and accepted why we needed to build more homes in existing neighbourhoods.
That accumulated public understanding is how we were able to chase an ambitious reform at all. It's how we turned out around 150 people, half of all speakers, to the first ZBR public hearing in support.
Calgary is the counterexample, and the reason I think the running start matters more than anything else on this list. Calgary went from a patchwork of low-density districts to a modestly higher-density default in a single vote in May 2024, without the fifteen years of smaller fights that preceded our experience. The difference was highlighted at the public hearings. Where half of Edmonton's three hundred speakers came in support, Calgary's 2024 hearing drew over 700 presenters across twelve days, with a clear majority opposed. As Peter Dormaar has written in this journal, public hearings are not representative of the city. Opposition turns out. Indifference does not. The Edmontonians who stayed home weren't persuaded so much as unbothered: infill had already become a regular part of life. Calgary's Council passed the rezoning anyway. A year later, it was the central issue of a municipal election, and it was repealed shortly after.
Edmonton's leaders had the foresight to start changing how we build our city before the housing crisis caught up to us. We took one big step forward from a running start. Calgary attempted the leap without one and fell back. I don't think that makes Calgary's Council wrong on the merits, and I don't think Edmontonians are wiser than Calgarians. We were simply earlier, and being earlier is the whole difference.
III. People in Power
It's easy enough to say “start early,” but it took competent leadership to start the small reforms and finish the story with the big one. In Edmonton, both the elected officials and the bureaucracy have a deeper working understanding of housing economics than I have found in other cities.
Take the basic proposition that increasing the supply of homes puts downward pressure on prices. In Edmonton, that is treated as fact by Council and administration alike. Even where zoning reform does not produce below-market homes, politicians and bureaucrats understand and say publicly that building more homes leads to market affordability. This sounds elementary. It is not a given. In Toronto, I found that many politicians and city staff members deny or downplay the role of supply in a healthy market, often arguing that if new housing is not capital-A affordable then it doesn't help or is actively harmful.
In one of the first council meetings I listened to after moving here, I heard Councillor Aaron Paquette discuss inclusionary zoning, which refers to the policy of requiring developers to set aside a proportion of units as below-market housing. He pointed out that inclusionary zoning functions as a tax on new homes and would therefore reduce supply and raise prices. When the same debate reached Toronto, councillors and many members of the public insisted it could not raise prices, because prices are set by "what the market will bear." That ignores the effect of taxes and requirements on what the market will bear in the first place.
The difference also shows up in how councillors spend their time between votes. Michael Janz, yes, the one who tried to torpedo the RS zone, holds events year-round with urbanist guest speakers, a practice which brings new people into the fold and curates a community of advocates. Others use blog posts, Instagram and TikTok reels, and traditional media to educate the public on urban issues. Because these debates have been running for over a decade, those messages have been reaching Edmontonians for over a decade too, building the general support that made ZBR possible.
Most importantly, transforming how the city develops is the single highest priority for a number of councillors. They don't need convincing that urbanist policy is worth doing. They will go as far as they think they can while still holding enough public support to be re-elected. And they don't just vote for housing reform when it's put in front of them; they reach for ways to build more homes where people want to live. It may seem obvious, but electing councillors who make urban planning a priority yields results.
That said, this is the piece I would caution other cities not to over-rely on. The motion to cut the RS zone from eight units to six came from urbanists. Janz, Salvador, and Knack have spent their careers on this, and in an election year they still moved against the policy. Competent, committed leaders will waver when they are frightened by political blowback, and ours did. What saved us is that we had enough of them. When three wavered, others held.
IV. A Community of Advocates
My own group, Grow Together Edmonton, is relatively new. We formed in 2023, when it looked like ZBR might fall out of reach. But we arrived in a city that already had a network of industry and grassroots organizations that are scrappy, organized, and willing to hold Council to account. Paths for People, YEG Bike Coalition, Edmonton Transit Riders, Bike Edmonton, and others draw on a pool of people who are broadly aligned and working in the same direction. We support each other's campaigns, speak at council for each other, and show up to each other's events. That expands everyone's reach beyond a single organization, making it easier to get our content in front of the public and get more people writing to their councillor.
In the fights to save ZBR, Grow Together's particular contribution was data. The city publishes building permit and assessment records, and nobody was putting them together in the context of infill. That turned out to be the whole opportunity. Opponents were arguing from what they could see out their window, and a single number about how little of a block would actually turn over was enough to put their strongest claim out of reach.
At the February 2026 fight, we came with data showing that increased lot area requirements per unit would be similarly disastrous for the RS zone, and that administration's case for directing more development to nodes and corridors was misguided at best. Answering the concerns of infill opponents can feel like whack-a-mole, but there is real space for advocates to shape the narrative with Council and the media by doing quality analysis. Combined with a council that responds to evidence, we flipped all three of Knack, Janz, and Salvador, who voted this time to maintain the eight units per lot.
That flip is the whole case for this kind of work. The same three councillors who had moved to kneecap the RS zone twelve months earlier voted to keep it, and nothing about their politics had changed. What changed was that the evidence in front of them was better, the public turnout was there, and the election had already shown that supporting infill was survivable. Data alone doesn't win these votes, and turnout alone doesn't either. What wins is having both ready at the moment a councillor is deciding whether the risk is worth taking.
V. The Future Is Bright
Every quarter, when I recompile the building permit data, I gaze in awe at how just one policy is reshaping Edmonton. With density as the backbone, we're on the path to a more walkable, transit-oriented, and livable city.
But I keep coming back to the two votes. The first time we saved the eight-unit cap: in the middle of an election year, we won by six to five votes with two of our opponents on vacation. The second time, we won by eight to four, and Knack, Janz, and Salvador all flipped to vote with us. The first win was advocacy plus luck. The second was the three pieces working together: a public that had been talking about infill for fifteen years, councillors who understood housing economics well enough to be moved by evidence, and an advocacy community organized enough to put that evidence in front of them at the right moment. You cannot count on the vacation. You can build the other three.
For cities earlier in this process than we are, that suggests a few things. Take the small reforms seriously: garden suites, lot splitting, and parking minimums are the reason Edmontonians accepted the large reform as much as they did. Expect the lag, and plan for the window in which residents see the construction but not yet the neighbourhood it produces. And watch the specific numbers, because watering down can be lethal. Eight to six sounds like a compromise. On most of our lots, it was eight to zero.
Other Canadian cities have stalled, and Calgary went backwards. None of that was inevitable, which is exactly why advocacy matters. With leaders willing to push the discussion forward, and a growing community of housing advocates across the country, the small reforms being passed today can still grow into the big ones. Edmonton is only a few years ahead.
Jacob Dawang is a data scientist and housing advocate with Grow Together Edmonton. Previously, he was a core advocate with More Neighbours Toronto.
Photo by Carl David / Pexels.