Affordable housing may be the most prominent public issue in Calgary. The most recent Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey pegs the median price for a single-family home in Calgary at $358,400. By comparing that to our median family income, Demographia considers Calgary housing “seriously unaffordable,” with the average home overpriced by about $110,000 (before the flood, which has reportedly increased prices by seven per cent).
Calgary Real Estate Board spokesperson Doug Firby says the city’s housing problem is a consequence of a boomtown in which price is no object for many, but which, like every city, also needs lower-income earners to function.
“Everyone should be able to own a home of their own, but then you run into these market factors,” he says. “But how can [low-wage earners] afford to live here? It’s quite a dilemma isn’t it?”
The general consensus is that instead of densification policies that actually drive prices up by inflating the value of inner-city land, the solution lies in reducing land prices by making more available to housing.
Ward 9 alderman Gian-Carlo Carra, who is also an urban planner, says that even if the city has the power to cap the price and size homes could be sold at, he thinks the best solution is “to do everything you can to reduce the cost of land and incent the development of units.”
“Zoning is a major issue because land speculation in this city is rampant,” he adds. “I’m very interested in a new planning system that gluts the market with entitled land and forces the price of land down.”
John Brown, a University of Calgary architect and founder of the local “slow home” movement, also suggests Calgarians are too quick to associate quality with size. He believes Calgary’s plethora of large, mass-produced homes forces people to spend more than they should on a home they don’t need.
“We equate quality with quantity in lots of things but particularly real estate. And if you ask just about anybody to describe their house the first thing they’re going to do is tell you how big it is,” Brown says.
He compares it to “only looking at how much someone weighed when you were trying to decide if you were going to marry this person or not. The actual size of a house makes almost no difference in terms of the design quality.”
Brown advocates for smaller, cheaper but better-designed homes instead of building more suburbs where enormous houses typically sell for over $500,000.
For the full article by Suzy Thompson in FFWD Magazine, click here.