Calgary: Citywide Rezoning to R-CG (then repealed)

Calgary entered the 2020s with a housing supply problem that looked a lot like Vancouver's, only newer. Population was climbing fast, rents were rising, and the city's older neighbourhoods were locked into single-detached zoning that made it slow and expensive to add even a modest rowhouse. The federal government's Housing Accelerator Fund, run by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), put real money behind a fix: cities that agreed to loosen restrictive zoning would receive funding tied to building more homes. Calgary was originally awarded $228.5 million for seven housing initiatives, with a target of 41,858 units between October 2023 and October 2026, and later earned an additional $22.8 million for exceeding its early targets.

To hold up its side of the agreement, the city promised CMHC it would, in the federal agency's words, eliminate exclusionary (single-family-only) zoning across the city and let a wider range of housing types be built. That promise became the citywide rezoning proposal. Instead of forcing every homeowner or builder to apply for a one-off rezoning, the city would change the default rules for entire neighbourhoods at once. The plan was controversial from the start, and it triggered one of the longest public hearings in the city's history.

The heart of the policy was making a district called R-CG (Residential – Grade-Oriented Infill) the default base zoning across the city. Before the change, most of Calgary's established residential land sat in single-detached districts where building anything denser meant a separate application and a separate public hearing. The rezoning swept that aside and set R-CG as the starting point almost everywhere.

R-CG allows single-detached, semi-detached, duplex and rowhouse forms, plus secondary suites. In practice that meant roughly three to four units on a typical lot without a rezoning hearing. The district carried real limits: as it stood before the later repeal, R-CG permitted a maximum density of 75 units per hectare and a building height capped near 11 metres. This is the key difference from a normal, one-off rezoning. A one-off rezoning changes a single parcel after a hearing tied to that specific address. Calgary's approach changed the underlying rule for the whole city in a single bylaw, so a builder could move straight to a development permit on most lots instead of fighting a redesignation battle first.

That shortcut had a measurable effect on city process. By late 2025 the city reported that the rezoning had enabled development permits that would otherwise have required 460 separate land-use redesignation hearings — hearings that never had to happen.

The fight over the proposal was unusually large and unusually heated. The public hearing ran for 16 days with 736 registered speakers, a scale of public participation Calgary city hall had rarely, if ever, seen on a single item. Opinion was lopsided against the change among those who showed up: of the speakers, around 227 spoke in favour, 458 spoke in opposition, and 51 were neutral. Many opponents worried about parking, privacy, neighbourhood character, and infrastructure strain. Supporters argued the city could not solve an affordability crisis while keeping most of its land off-limits to anything but a single house.

The hearing itself was not free. The city later estimated the cost to prepare and run it at roughly $1.275 million. Throughout the multi-day debate, councillors opposed to the plan tried repeatedly to stop it — moving to abandon it, send it back to staff for more work, or hand the decision to voters. Each of those attempts, including a push to put the question to a citywide vote during the next municipal election, was defeated by narrow vote margins.

On May 14, 2024, council approved the citywide rezoning on a 9–6 vote. The six councillors against were Dan McLean, Sonya Sharp, Andre Chabot, Sean Chu, Terry Wong and Peter Demong. The change took effect on August 6, 2024.

A three-vote margin on a city-shaping policy is thin, and it set the tone for everything that came after. The same councillors who voted no kept the issue alive, and several of them framed blanket rezoning as a decision imposed on neighbourhoods rather than chosen by them. The closeness of the vote mattered enormously in hindsight: a policy that passes by three votes can be undone by a shift of a few seats or a few minds. That is exactly what happened. The political coalition behind the rezoning never solidified into a durable majority, and the opponents never stopped treating repeal as a live option.

For all the controversy, the rezoning did produce buildings, though fewer and more concentrated than supporters had hoped. By late 2025 the city reported that citywide rezoning had enabled 478 development permits, which the city's data tied to 1,904 housing units. The share of low-density development permits that the rezoning enabled climbed quarter over quarter, from 3% in the last quarter of 2024 to 28% by the third quarter of 2025.

How to read those numbers depends on your starting expectation. Nearly two thousand units in roughly a year is not nothing, but it is modest against a target of more than 40,000 units over three years, and the activity was very uneven. Ward 7 led with 127 developments, followed by Wards 11, 6, 9, 4 and 1, while some wards saw almost nothing — Councillor Dan McLean's Ward 13 saw a single rowhouse or townhouse redevelopment in the year. Opponents read the modest totals as proof the policy was not worth the disruption. Supporters read the rising quarterly share as evidence it was just starting to work. Both could point to the same data.

The reversal began in late 2025. Councillor Andre Chabot, one of the original opponents, set the repeal in motion in December, and council formally started the repeal process on December 15, 2025. After another long stretch of public hearings, council gave the repeal bylaw all three readings on April 8, 2026, with the first reading passing 12–3. The only three councillors opposed to the repeal were Nathan Schmidt, Myke Atkinson and Andrew Yule — a near-complete flip from the original 9–6 split.

The repeal reverts Calgary to its earlier system of 11 pre-2024 prescriptive land-use districts, and brings back the requirement for a separate public hearing on each individual rezoning. In practical terms, the citywide shortcut is gone: a builder who wants more than the old single-detached rules allow will once again have to apply parcel by parcel. The city set August 4, 2026 as the date properties revert to their prior land-use district, with one carve-out: properties rezoned in 2024 that already have an approved or in-progress R-CG, R-G or H-GO development keep their new status. Council also moved to tighten the surviving R-CG district itself — lowering maximum height from 11 m to 10 m, cutting lot coverage from 60% to 55%, and testing a density reduction from 75 to 60 units per hectare.

The reversal put federal money at risk. CMHC had warned that a full repeal could jeopardize Calgary's remaining Housing Accelerator Fund payments, since the agreement required the city not to reintroduce single-family-only zoning. Calgary secured its third instalment of $64.7 million, but the final payment was left uncertain pending the city's compliance.

Calgary's reversal stands out precisely because nearby jurisdictions did not reverse course. Edmonton overhauled its own zoning bylaw effective January 1, 2024, consolidating its older infill zones into a single small-scale residential (RS) zone that allows up to eight units on a standard lot — a more aggressive limit than Calgary's three-to-four. Edmonton kept that framework, and missing-middle housing there more than doubled after the overhaul. Edmonton has discussed refinements, but it did not roll the policy back.

The contrast with British Columbia is sharper still. BC's small-scale multi-unit housing rules came from the province, not from city councils. Bill 44, the Housing Statutes (Residential Development) Amendment Act, received Royal Assent on November 30, 2023. It requires local governments to permit small-scale multi-unit housing such as triplexes and fourplexes, and municipalities had to update their bylaws to comply by mid-2024. The crucial difference is the source of authority. Calgary's rezoning was a choice its own council made and could therefore unmake. BC's rules are provincial law. A Vancouver, Burnaby or Victoria council cannot simply vote to repeal Bill 44 the way Calgary repealed its bylaw; the mandate sits above the municipal level.

The clearest lesson from Calgary is about durability — how confident you can be that the rules you build under today will still be the rules tomorrow. A zoning reform that one city council adopts can be undone by a future council, sometimes within a single term. Calgary went from approving citywide rezoning on a 9–6 vote in May 2024 to repealing it on a 12–3 first reading in April 2026 — under two years from in to out.

For a BC owner or builder weighing a multiplex project, that distinction is the practical takeaway. The BC framework that allows small-scale multi-unit housing comes from provincial legislation, not from a local bylaw a council can repeal on a close vote. That does not make it permanent — a future provincial government can amend any law — but it sits at a higher and more stable level than a municipal policy. A reform a single council can repeal carries a different, higher risk profile than a provincewide mandate. Calgary also shows the value of protecting work already underway: even there, projects that had already secured approvals were allowed to keep their new zoning after the repeal. The general principle holds for BC builders too: an approval in hand is worth far more than a favourable rule that a future vote could take away.