Calgary put up another record year in housing occupancies, according to the City of Calgary, and got closer to the 50/50 split between new and established area growth.

The City of Calgary delivered a 2025 housing report on Feb. 5, showing nearly 28,000 occupancies on the year, which is more than double the 10-year average of roughly 13,000, they said.

More than 1,800 non-market homes received development approvals in 2025, which is five times the average annual volume, the City of Calgary said.

Calgary’s Chief Housing Officer Reid Hendry said there’s an easy answer as to why the city is seeing this kind of housing success.

“The one change was a dedicated and clear council mandate through the Home is Here strategy,” he said.

“That strategic approach has 98 different action items. Those 98 are handled by a variety of different apartments across the city. We have everything from priority streams to major capital programs to simple tax measures, and all of those work in concert.”

Secondary suites also saw record occupancy, with 6,200 of them becoming legal homes in 2025, compared with 5,000 in 2024 and 3,000 in 2023.

There was also a big shift in where the homes were built, according to the city data. In 2025, 57 per cent of the occupancies were in the new growth areas, and 43 per cent in established areas. This draws the city closer to its Municipal Development Plan targets of 50/50. In 2024, it was 73 per cent share for new growth areas.

“What’s important about that is it means that Calgarians are choosing to live across the city in all the great neighbourhoods that we have,” said Kathy Davies-Murphy, director of city and regional planning.

“We’re using our existing infrastructure really efficiently by being able to use the capacity that we have to enable more housing in established areas.”

Rezoning public hearing coming up

Calgary city council moved ahead with plans for the revision of the City of Calgary’s Land-Use Bylaw, with the intent of changing citywide zoning back to its pre-2024 format. The public hearing for that matter is slated to begin on March 23.

According to Teresa Goldstein, chief planner with the City of Calgary, there have been roughly 2,800 units enabled as a result of the citywide rezoning change to the RCG base district.

Goldstein disputed suggestions that the new housing information was a public-relations push to show the positive outcomes of the Home is Here strategy. She said that it’s about the whole sector, not just citywide rezoning.

“This isn’t one lever like citywide rezoning, but it’s a whole sector, multifamily, low density, and singles as well. The rezoning is one component,” Goldstein said.

Hendry said this is just the regular reporting to Calgarians on what they’re doing and the difference that’s being made with the housing strategy.

“That’s the real intent of releasing these numbers, trying to demonstrate as well, since Home is Here began on January 1, 2024, what the numbers have looked like in 2024 in 2025 and how those compare to the decade before that we saw as it relates to housing in Calgary,” he said.

Ward 6 Coun. John Pantazopoulos said that what the latest data shows him is that people and investment still want to come to Calgary.

“That tells us something about what we’re doing right in Calgary, but it also tells us that people still want to move here, and we have to continue as a council to make sure that we make this the best city in Calgary as we march towards 2 million Calgarians,” he said.

For city council, it means they’ll have to pay close attention to funding for infrastructure to meet the needs of a growing city.

“I mean, fundamentally, we’ve made an underinvestment in infrastructure. We heard that, through the (Bearspaw Independent Review) panel, for 20 years before the water main break, it was an underinvestment. What other underinvestments when 11 per cent of our assets are deemed poor or very poor?” Pantazopoulos said.

“That’s not the Calgary that I moved to 25 years ago, and that’s not the Calgary that the 25,000 new homeowners want to come to so it’s going to require spending. That doesn’t necessarily require additional taxes or levies, but we have to look at everything. We have to come back and make sure that we meet those needs, not only for the 25,000 but the 1.7 million Calgarians that are here.”