How Canada Made Housing Too Valuable To Fix
On a cold March 30th, I found myself pacing in circles beside Calgary’s city hall. I was holding a crinkled paper, practicing reading out loud a speech I’d written. Clouds of steam rose out of my mouth through the chilly air. I felt self-conscious due to my one audience member, a downtrodden looking unhoused man sitting twenty feet away. The meeting I was planning on speaking at was a city council public hearing regarding the repeal of citywide residential rezoning. In 2024, to address the city’s severe housing shortage, councillors voted to increase the zoned density across the entire city from a complex patchwork of low-density land-uses to a single blanket medium-density standard (R-CG) across the city. This allowed developers to build rowhouses in any residential area in the city without having to go through a costly land-use change, allowing the market to more capably meet housing demand. The topic of the meeting where I found myself was to do the exact opposite. After a wave of public backlash towards the policy, the newly elected council was doing a complete 180, reintroducing low-density zoning to preserve “neighborhood character.” My speech was in support of keeping the density in place.
Feeling ready, I walked into the chambers and took my seat. The meeting had already been running for six days. I had paid $30 for parking, knowing that I might be there all day and not have my chance to speak, needing to come back again. These public hearings can be grueling affairs. This one was the largest ever held in Calgary, with 411 speakers talking for six minutes each, with added time for questions.
Speakers in opposition to density mostly painted images of permanently changed neighborhoods. Once quiet-treelined villages, now busy and loud, with new modern housing monstrosities being built on every corner. Those who spoke in favour of density described their challenges in paying rent and finding anywhere to live. Although the councillors appeared interested in each speech, their task was one of endurance. A former councillor, Druh Farrell, described a similar meeting as akin to “giving birth to a chair.” Nonetheless, these public hearings are seen as a cornerstone of municipal democracy. A chance for any member of the public to have their voice heard. Although many councillors were decided on the issue, some charismatic speakers have changed the votes of councillors in the past. Councillor Dianne Colley-Urqhart, now retired, was known for being persuadable by speakers who could set a specific tone, and she could often be the deciding vote on a policy decision.
After a long wait, my panel was called, and I excitedly walked up to the podium. My friend, Kathryn Davies, and I had taken days to prepare the research for my speech, and it was approaching this issue from a different angle than what had been spoken about already. After Kathrine watched dozens of hours of meetings and I processed their findings, I reported to the council that these rezoning meetings didn’t represent the voice of everyday Calgarians. Their speakers were from communities that were far richer than average, with 25 percent of them being from the top 3 percent of wealth in the entire city. Instead of a straw poll on the will of Calgarians, these hearings are a form of class warfare. They are captured by a small fraction of the wealthiest citizens, who likely want to wield municipal law against the poorest in the community to protect their own assets. This revelation doesn’t just reflect on these individuals, but it reveals a systemic flaw in Canadian society and democracy that’s holding back all effective housing reform.
Before I could finish my speech, however, Mayor Jeromy Farkas spoke up to stop me, arguing that I was discriminating against the rich. He let me continue as long as I didn’t comment on any other speakers. But because that was the main pillar of my speech, I sputtered out into improvised remarks, while trying to figure out how to communicate with my hands tied. The meeting predictably concluded with higher density zoning being repealed. What I couldn’t say during that event I want to say now, in this article, starting with the housing problem itself.
I. Scarcity Comes to Calgary
The city of Calgary is a stark illustration of the housing affordability crisis. Once a shining beacon of affordable living in a large Canadian urban centre, it wasn’t spared by a massive increase in housing costs. According to CREB, between 2021 and 2024, home prices rose by 32 percent while rent prices rose by a meteoric 41 percent, from $1,235 to $1,744. In the same period, the average Calgarian’s income rose by only 8 percent meaning in a four-year period, both buying and renting rapidly became materially less affordable. This has resulted in a prediction by the city in 2025 that it will need four times more housing supply than what is currently being developed to keep up with demand, creating a reality for many young Calgarians where the idea of owning a home is a fantasy, while their new goal is simply to afford entry-level rent.
This isn’t a problem with a single clear-cut cause. The last six years were a perfect storm of them. Higher interest rates raised typical monthly mortgage payments. There is also a composition problem, where a high volume of rental units are being built but they are priced up-market, too expensive to accommodate the market segment that actually needs housing. There was also a large migration of buyers from the even more expensive metropolises of Vancouver and Toronto, who started buying up Calgary properties that they saw as bargains compared to similar houses in their own cities. Among all of the potential causes, it’s easiest to distill the problem down to its base components of supply and demand.
From the demand side, one of the most glaring drivers is population growth. In 2024, the federal government had an extremely open policy for immigration, allowing in 483,000 permanent residents over the year, who made up the vast majority of the country’s exceptionally high growth. Newcomers especially affect the rental market as they almost always rent when they first enter the country. As a knee-jerk reaction to public pushback over high housing prices, in 2025 the government dropped the allowed number of permanent and temporary resident visas, which rapidly increased rental vacancies. This was a reasonable short-term solution, but it will never be effective in the long term. A complete accounting of the housing issue needs to take into account supply as well and confront the problem of a housing-hungry population hitting up against a rigid and artificially suppressed housing supply.
Before 2024, the majority of residential land parcels were zoned to single-detached only, which effectively capped the housing supply that developers could build and all but ensured that the city sprawled out in every direction. If a builder wanted to make a building of higher density they needed to start a months long process of filing for a land-use redesignation that involved a council public hearing. According to city records, this is a process that takes 177 days on average, and it isn’t cheap either. Shameer Gaidhar of the Calgary Inner City Builders Association estimated that appeal delays could cost a small rowhouse project about $500 a day.
It’s a regulatory regime that inflicts death by a thousand cuts to new housing projects. Developers may be able to afford the land, labour, and materials for construction, but the crux that makes the project unprofitable is the series of regulatory hoops that drain them into the red before construction can even be seen as profitable. This is compounded by NIMBY (not in my backyard) neighbors of the project, who attend public meetings and push to extend them into the future. They may convince Council to ask the developer for a shadow study, and then a parking study of the site, in a cycle of review until motivation for the project folds. In 2024, when blanket rezoning was approved, 1,564 new homes and 1,473 suites skipped this process and went straight to the development permit phase, showing just how much supply the previous regime was holding back. Blanket rezoning being repealed so quickly after its passing brings up an important question: why are Canadian politicians so bound to lengthy and restrictive approval processes?
For decades, governments urged Canadians to treat their homes as safe wealth creation vehicles. Today, 66.5 percent of Canadians are homeowners. A Statistics Canada 2023 Survey of Financial Security shows total principal residence assets at $7.35 trillion, compared with $2.50 trillion in non-pension financial assets. This means that Canadians have 2.9 times as much wealth in their principal residences as in non-pension financial assets. Housing is an attractive investment for a few reasons. First, unlike stocks, land value will never drop to zero. Even if a meteor hit a house and completely destroyed it, there can still be a collective understanding that you own the land that was hit. Second, populations are statistically likely to continually rise over time, meaning there’s a high chance that a home investment will appreciate in value. As appealing as this sounds, residential wealth isn’t evenly distributed across Canadians. People born in 1990 from parents who own one home are twice as likely to own one themselves now compared to those from families without homes. If multiple homeowners are in their family, they are nearly three times as likely. This illustrates how wealth compounds within families over generations. There’s also an age component. More than half of mortgage-free homeowners are over the age of sixty-five. This creates a class and generational struggle as old money and boomer Canadians have an incentive to freeze housing supply for as long as possible to increase their asset’s value at the expense of young Canadians who haven’t even begun generating wealth.
The book Neighborhood Defenders by Katherine Einstein documents how these more privileged population segments intentionally use the levers of government to reduce housing supply across North America. In it, she studied zoning meetings from ninety-seven Massachusetts cities and towns. She found that the most common attendees of city council public hearings on zoning issues are “older, male, longtime residents, voters in local elections, and homeowners.” These demographics have the wealth, time, organizational, and public speaking skills to show up to these meetings in person. During the meetings they often don’t directly argue that higher density would decrease their housing value. Instead, they dress it up with other issues. They complain about traffic issues or additional strain on local services, using arguments that sound altruistic on their face. Whatever language they use, the outcome they are arguing for means more wealth for them and more expensive housing for younger and less established generations.
Inspired by Einstein’s book, my friend Kathryn Davies and I set out to do our own amateur research on if these trends existed in Calgary, and this became my speech. Kathrine watched the public hearing meetings for the R-CG zoning meeting mentioned earlier, and another meeting that intended to set up a standardized “guidebook” for citywide development. Whenever a public speaker mentioned the community they lived in, she recorded it. I then made a database of each Calgary community, its number of opposition and support speakers at each meeting, its population, wealth, and age. Although we didn’t have as granular of data as Katherine Einstein had in her U.S. studies, we still had open community-level data through Calgary’s Community Profiles portal, a database of slide-decks that describe the demographic makeup of each community. The outcome was truly eye opening, but to understand it better we need to grasp the city’s economic makeup.
Calgary’s population can be broken into three income groups. The first group is made up of 675,000 working-class people in communities whose median household income is less than $105,000. Households in these communities generally make around $84,000 annually. Split between a working couple, their individual income would be just under Canada’s median of $46,000. Their median age is thirty-nine, and they have a home ownership percentage of 60.5 percent. They are likely made up of Gen Z, Millennials, and Xillenials, who either are buying their first home or living in the city’s secondary suites, basement suites, and rental apartments. All unhoused people are in this group. They are the gig workers who deliver our meals. They are the retail and service workers. Their income is used to pay month-to-month bills.
The second group is made up of 583,000 Calgarians we’ll refer to as the comfortable middle class. They live in communities with median incomes above $105,000 and below $160,000. Their average median community household income is $123,000. Their age is typically forty-one, just above the working-class group. About 84 percent of them own homes. They’re likely Millennials and Gen Xers who have worked their way up into middle management and achieved homeownership. They and their families are able to save, invest, and travel.
Finally, the third group is made up of 35,000 Calgarians in fourteen communities we’ll refer to as the ultra rich. These communities have average median household incomes of $200,000. Their residents are typically forty-seven years old, likely retired Gen Xers and Boomers. Nine out of ten of them own homes, and likely own second ones as vacation homes or are renting them out to others. They may still be working, but they are heavily utilizing capital to generate income. Sitting atop of the financial ladder, their lives are almost completely different from the working class. Their wealth gives them a cushion against hardship that other Calgarians can scarcely imagine. They can make a large number of financial mistakes that would destroy Calgarians in the other groups and be completely unaffected.
II. Why the Status Quo Wins
So, what did our research find? The same trend is occurring in Calgary as Einstein found in the rest of North America. 245 speakers spoke in opposition to both the Guidebook and R-CG meetings and announced what neighborhood they were from. The average community median household income of opposition speakers in these meetings was $145,000, which is $40,000 higher than Calgary’s average. In the guidebook meeting, the average community median household income was a whopping $188,000, which is $83,000 higher than Calgary’s average.
How could these numbers be so extraordinarily high? Across both meetings, 23 percent of the speakers were from communities in the ultra-rich class, representing a group of people that only makes up 3 percent of the total population. In the guidebook meeting, that number was 50 percent. Even more startling, the vast majority of these ultra rich opposition speakers were from communities with median household incomes above $288,000.
The chart below is a scatter plot, showing the ultra rich’s virtual stranglehold over these city council meetings in another way. The Y axis shows the population of each income group, while the X axis shows the opposition speakers per one thousand in the group’s population. It shows that the working class and upper-middle class are extremely underrepresented at these city council meetings compared to the ultra rich.
To ensure that this wasn’t just an extremely rare coincidence, I ran 200,000 simulations in Excel that asked the question: if these opposition speakers had been picked at random from Calgary residents, based on the communities where people actually live, how often would we get an R-CG opposition group from communities this wealthy? Put in other words, the test is similar to pulling 245 marbles from a bag of marbles representing every Calgarian and then doing this process over and over again. The answer to the question posed was never. The makeup of the opposition speakers is so economically unrepresentative of everyday Calgarians that they didn’t appear once in 200,000 simulations.
On the other side of the debate, the group of speakers in support of housing development’s makeup was far more economically representative of Calgarians. Their average median household income was $91,000, way closer to the city’s actual household income. Only 2 percent of development supporter speakers came from ultra-rich communities, which closely matches their actual proportion of the city.
Analyzing the ages of opposition speakers, the likely median age of the opposition speakers, given what communities they are from, is 42.4 years old, which is four years higher than Calgary’s median age. This is in line with assumptions, that those passionate enough to speak in opposition to housing are in a class of more senior, wealth-holding individuals.
With our research we were able to confirm Katherine Einstein’s findings are happening in Canada. As unfortunate as this situation is, a number of Canadian cities have developed promising solutions. Victoria and Toronto have both developed citizen planning panels assembled by a citywide lottery. The random nature of the lottery allows the city to get opinions from a much more representative population than what they’d receive from open public hearings. Although they still host public hearings, they take them as one gauge of public opinion among several. There have also been exemplary efforts by cities and nonprofit organizations to build non-market housing solutions. Notably, the Alberta city of Medicine Hat has effectively eradicated chronic homelessness, by using public funds to build a high volume of simple small houses. If a resident has been living on the streets for more than ten days, they are simply given the home. The city determined that doing this was more cost effective on public services than having them live on the streets.
These solutions are inspiring, but the main roadblock to solving this issue remains that a significantly politically overrepresented proportion of the Canadian citizenry actually benefit immensely from housing scarcity. The small solutions we find that don’t directly address this central roadblock are just nipping at the sides of the problem. Changing the financial incentives that cause Canadians to stand in the way of affordability seems insurmountable, but the first step is just believing it can be done. Young people won’t be able to experience the real housing affordability they deserve until Canada as a society starts to view housing as homes instead of as investments.
III. How Does Your City Fare?
The research project that Kathryn and I did can seem complex, but it’s possible to apply elsewhere. Kathrine watched these two meetings and recorded whether each speaker was in support or opposed to the housing development issue and what community they were from. Although the meetings were very long, with many speakers between the two of them, she didn’t need to listen through each speaker’s full time. As long as she had had the initial info she was looking for, she could move on to the next speaker. We probably took one of the longest paths, and the process could potentially be sped up in a couple of ways. Companies like Ontopical offer AI generated meeting minutes of North American city council meetings. Furthermore, AI models like Gemini, with very large context windows, can potentially automatically quantify these details from uploaded chunks of the meetings.
Once this step was complete, I made a spreadsheet of Calgary communities and their age and income levels, as well as populations. I got this from Calgary’s open data portal. I then combined my work and Kathrine’s, into a single database of communities, their demographic data, and how many meeting speakers of either persuasion resided in each.
I then set up a table that calculated notable information about the opposition speakers as a group: their average age and incomes based on the median household incomes of the communities they live in and how far this group’s demographics are from the Calgary average. I calculated their P-value, which is the statistical probability that they would be chosen from a random sample of Calgarians.
To drive the point home, I ran a Monte-Carlo analysis that simulated the random selection of Calgarians, to visualize in another way the probability that these wealthy, more senior Calgarians were an unrepresentative sample of the population. It was a table with 200,000 rows, each one representing one simulation, and 245 columns. Each cell represented an opposition speaker, and “rolled the dice”, picking a random Calgarian from its total population based on the probability that they’d live in each community. Once again, this experiment proved in a more easy-to-visualize way, how non-economically representative the opposition speaker group was.
These steps are entirely replicable across many Canadian cities and towns as long as large enough pools of data are available, and I’d encourage anyone reading this with the interest and willpower to carry out a similar research effort to do so using our methods as a foundation. These methods can certainly be expanded and adapted as the situation demands. Finally, I hope that this can be only the beginning of a longer and larger national conversation about the state of democratic representation in our housing policy debates, one that can cover every region and market across the country. The stakes are too great for Canadians, especially the young and underrepresented, to let the inequitable housing status quo continue unabated. Together, let us do the hard work of bringing clarity and making change—and let us do it now.
Peter Dormaar is a policy activist and data analyst living in Calgary.