For nearly thirty years, Sustainable Calgary has tracked how well our city is doing across a broad range of indicators that reflect quality of life in our city.

Fiscal health, community health, ecological footprint, resource efficiency, and the quiet question of whether Calgary is building a city that works for the people who live here now, and for those who will live here long after us.

We rarely take sides in specific policy debates and remain apolitical. But when evidence accumulates clearly enough, we think it’s our responsibility to speak up.

On citywide rezoning, the evidence is increasingly clear: Prices are declining city-wide across all housing types, and more compact forms of housing make more efficient use of parks, transit, and existing infrastructure while reducing environmental impact.

If Calgary aspires to be a sustainable city, repealing rezoning risks moving us in the wrong direction.

The indicators are moving the right way

Calgary’s history of outward suburban expansion carries real costs: fiscal, ecological, and social. Spreading infrastructure across a constantly growing footprint increases per capita costs and makes it harder for people to access work, schools, and services.

Rezoning is one of the most direct tools available to address the high cost of sprawl.

After 20 months, the data suggests we are already seeing the impacts. The share of new housing occupancies in established areas rose from 27 per cent in 2024 to 43 per cent in 2025, moving Calgary meaningfully closer to its own 50/50 Municipal Development Plan target in recent years.

Building permits for townhouses and rowhouses in established areas increased 153% year-over-year. Calgary is among the national leaders in missing middle housing construction and total housing starts.

These are not abstract planning metrics. Each unit built in Calgary houses a family who decided to live in a community of their choice. This reflects an expansion of housing choice – allowing more people to live in established communities, not only in newly expanding areas.

What’s happening to prices

Housing has been a concern in Sustainable Calgary’s work for years, and on that front the recent trend is encouraging. Median sale prices have declined across every housing category since August 2024: row homes down 6.9%, semi-detached down 3.8%, detached down 2.8%, apartments down 3.6%. Calgary also posted the steepest rental rate decline of any major Canadian city, per Rentals.ca.

These are early signals, not solved problems. But they point in the right direction.

Twenty months is not a generation

Some have argued rezoning has failed because it hasn’t transformed Calgary’s housing mix in under two years. Sustainable Calgary has been tracking indicators for nearly three decades. Cities change slowly. And with rezoning, Calgary’s well-being is moving in a healthier direction.

The proposed alternative, a return to targeted corridor-focused density that concentrates all new homes in small areas of the city is the approach Calgary used for decades, during which the price of a single-detached home tripled while Calgary expanded outward into natural ecological lands.

Simply put, instead of building in well-serviced communities, Calgary opted to convert farmland, ranches, and wetlands into new suburban developments.

Sustainable Calgary’s research shows that a pattern of low-density outward growth is fiscally and ecologically costly.

Suburbs require infrastructure that must be built, maintained, and eventually replaced, costing far beyond what developers pay in levies. When more homes are built in established areas, the existing infrastructure serves more people, lowering per-resident costs and reducing the ecological footprint per household. These gains compound slowly over decades and show up clearly in the data.

Rezoning has never been sold as a silver bullet. But it is one of the few tools Calgary has that simultaneously addresses housing supply, affordability, infrastructure efficiency, and long-term fiscal health – and early data suggests it is working.

A well-built Calgary leaves a lighter burden on the future: Less sprawl to maintain, more affordable options, stronger and more complete neighbourhoods.

That is the kind of city Calgarians deserve to pass on to the next generation. Repealing rezoning would not address these challenges; it would only make them more difficult to solve.