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How Canada’s Richest Residents Block Affordable Housing

In Calgary, the wealthy have a virtual stranglehold over meetings where key decisions are made

On a cold March 30, I found myself pacing beside Calgary’s city hall. I was holding a crinkled paper, reading out loud a speech I’d written. Clouds of steam rose from my mouth in the chilly air.

I was planning to address a city council public hearing on whether to undo one of Calgary’s most consequential reforms. In 2024, faced with a severe housing shortage, city council voted to sweep away its patchwork of low-density residential zoning in favour of a single medium-density standard (R-CG) across the city—a move also known as blanket rezoning. This allowed developers to build row houses in any residential area without having to go through a costly land-use change, allowing the market to more capably meet demand.

But after public backlash toward the policy, the newly elected council was doing a complete 180, reintroducing low-density zoning to preserve “neighbourhood 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. These public hearings can be gruelling 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 dire images of permanently changed neighbourhoods. Villages, once quiet and tree-lined, were now busy and loud, with 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.

After a long wait, my panel was called. My friend Kathryn Davies and I had spent days preparing my remarks. I wanted to shift the debate in a different direction. Davies had watched dozens of hours of similar council meetings while I processed the findings. What I found was 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.

I reported to the council that, 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, however, Mayor Jeromy Farkas spoke up to stop me, arguing, in effect, 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.

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 the Calgary Real Estate Board, 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. For many young Calgarians, the idea of owning a home is a fantasy: their new goal is simply to afford entry-level rent.

No single event created this crisis. Rather, the past six years brought together a perfect storm of forces. Higher interest rates raised typical monthly mortgage payments. There is also a composition problem, where a high volume of rental units is 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 demand and supply.

From the demand side, one glaring driver is population........

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