Calgary council voted to repeal the blanket rezoning bylaw. The decision is made.

I’m not here to argue with it. What I want to talk about is the process that led to it, because I spent the last several weeks analyzing every word that was said, and I think the data raises some questions worth sitting with.

I built tools to classify all eight days of hearing testimony and more than 3,200 written submissions. There are more than 33,000 individual claims, sorted by topic, stance, and evidence type. I mapped who spoke, who wrote in, and where they came from.

Here’s what I found.

~3,500 people shaped Calgary’s rezoning repeal decision

That’s the number of unique participants. 411 spoke at the hearing. The City of Calgary said that 3,293 submitted in writing (not all analyzed as they were protected via confidentiality rules). Roughly 170 did both. Calgary has an estimated 1.6 million people. So about 0.2 per cent of the city participated.

Those 3,500 people cared enough to show up. That matters. But I think it’s important to be honest about what that sample looks like.

Of the hearing speakers, 78 per cent identified as homeowners. Renters made up 14 per cent. Students and youth: four per cent. Low-income residents: less than one per cent. According to 2021 census data, homeownership rates in Calgary were roughly 70 per cent, while roughly 30 per cent rent. Data from Point2Homes’ 2025 research showed that across Canada, the number of renter households grew at twice the pace of homeowner households from 2016 to 2021.

The people most directly affected by housing supply and affordability were the smallest group in the room.

In written submissions, 73 per cent favoured repeal. At the hearing, the split was narrower: About 51 per cent for repeal, 37 per cent against, 10 per cent conditional. Two different channels, two different pictures.

Some patterns in the participation data:

• 150+ people submitted more than once. Some three times.
• 299+ submissions were form letters. Near-identical text from templates. Normal for public engagement, but worth noting when we talk about volume.
• Only 37 per cent of written submitters could be linked to a neighbourhood. For the rest, we don’t know where they live.

None of this is unusual for a public hearing. But it does mean that what council heard was not a cross-section of Calgary. It was a self-selected group, weighted toward people with the time, motivation, and know-how to participate.

Where the opposition came from, and where the building actually happened

One of the more striking things in the data is the disconnect between where people opposed the bylaw and where development was actually happening.

Lake Bonavista had 23 people call for rezoning repeal. Zero multi-family permits filed. Elbow Park: 19 for repeal, zero permits. Mount Royal, Varsity Estates, Kelvin Grove, same story. These communities were loud in opposition to something that was not happening in their neighbourhoods.

Meanwhile, Forest Lawn had 53 multi-family permits filed and only 5 people participated (2 of whom supported repeal). Highland Park: 30 permits, 1 person for repeal. Glenbrook: 36 permits, 5 for repeal.

The communities experiencing the most development were barely represented. The communities with the most to say had the least development to point to.

Then there’s the contradiction. Speakers argued the bylaw “had no effect on housing” while also arguing it was “devastating their neighbourhoods.”

Permit data shows 995 multi-family development permits filed since the rezoning took effect: 280 approved, 602 in progress, and 113 cancelled. The cancellations show the development permit process doing its job, filtering out proposals that didn’t meet the requirements. That is not “no effect.” And the communities doing the most objecting mostly had zero permits, which makes it hard to argue devastation.

Both things cannot be true at the same time. But both were said, repeatedly, and both were treated as established fact in the hearing room.

What council talked about before the vote

I mapped what each councillor said in the final debate to the topics raised by the public. The topics ranged from housing supply and fiscal impact to process, trust, and community engagement. Some empirical. Some experiential. Some about values. All legitimate.

But the pattern in how councillors engaged with them is worth looking at.

Councillors who voted to keep the rezoning engaged with a broader range of empirical topics. Councillors who voted to repeal leaned heavily on process, trust, and community engagement, often without addressing the data-backed topics that hundreds of people raised.

Social equity was missed by almost every councillor. Environmental concerns were missed by nearly all of them. These were not fringe topics. Hundreds of people raised them.

Who wasn’t there

This is the part that stays with me.

I’ve been building civic engagement tools for a few years now, and the pattern is always the same. The people most affected by a policy are usually the least visible in the process that shapes it.

Renters. Young people trying to buy their first home. Newcomers to Calgary. People working shifts who can’t take a day off for a hearing. People who don’t know the submission process exists, or don’t feel confident navigating it in English.

These are the people most directly affected by housing supply and affordability, and they were largely absent from this process.

I don’t know what they would have said. Maybe some would have supported repeal, too. But we don’t know, because they weren’t there. When we look at who was in the room, 78 per cent homeowners, less than one per cent low-income, it’s hard to say this process heard from the people who needed to be heard the most.

That’s the question the title asks. Not who spoke, but who gets to be heard. Because right now, the answer is the people who already have the most.

Why I built this

I’m a software developer and a Calgarian. I built rezoning.pixeltree.ca because I think good data should be available to everyone.

The site has the full hearing and submission data: every claim, every speaker, every topic, every community. You can see for yourself what was said, who said it, and what the evidence shows.

The decision has been made. But the conversation about how Calgary makes these decisions, who gets heard, and how we account for the people who aren’t in the room, that conversation is just getting started.

The data is there for anyone who wants to look.

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Serene Yew is a local software engineer, data analyst and all-around civic-minded person committed to ensuring that data-informed decisions are at the forefront of civic policy. She is the founder of Pixeltree.