Danielle Smith Meddles in Municipal Landuse Bylaws

Yeah, so today's announcement all has to do with Edmonton and how Edmonton permits homes, where it's how we build in Edmonton.

And just for some background for maybe some of the viewers who don't know what's Edmonton's story, for the past 20 or so years, Edmonton has been on a journey of shifting more of our housing from outward growth, a greenfield sprawl, you might call it, towards more inwards growth.

And this has been a long journey.

Back in 2010, it started with basement suites, garden suites, laneway suites, moved on to duplexes.

In 2019 or 2020, we got rid of parking minimums.

So we just let the market decide how many parking spots you could build on a given lot.

And at the same time, we, in 2023, along with overarching development plans that plan out for the next 40, 50 years that set a vision for Edmonton, we consolidated our old zoning bylaw and rewrote it from scratch.

And this is really what this focus is on.

This new zoning bylaw, it consolidated a bunch of low density residential zones and newly allowed row homes of up to eight units on a residential lot, given it's a specific size.

and essentially what danielle smith said today is that she wants us to go back to before all of that so we're going to she wants us to repeal the she's going to force edmonton to repeal that 2024 zoning bylaw go back to the pre before that rules and bring back parking minimums and then a little tidbit for you calgary folks um don't think about replacing your zoning by-law with something that allows for more density because you're going to be forced to maintain the repeal.

So that's what's been announced today.

So basically sets us back seven years.

It's kind of crazy actually, especially because Calgary for the past, I don't know, four years now has been actively working on a new zoning by-law and trying to make this work and trying to make it work within the context of the appeal that our current city council has already done.

It has not been great going for us, but I will say Calgary and Edmonton still remain two of the most affordable big cities in the country.

And the reason for that, I think, is because we've allowed the building of a little bit more of this missing middle.

We're gonna get into that a little bit and the comparison to other cities in a little bit, I think.

But first I wanna hear from Inam, first impressions on what happened today.

I am really disappointed to see that Edmonton is getting this sort of provincial hammer put to them.

One, just from a governance side, undermining local democracy and messing around when there was...

Already an election fought over this and won by the pro-housing side and councillors and mayor.

And seeing Daniel Smith undermine democracy, not fun.

And two, really disappointing because Edmonton has been a leader in this.

Across North America, you see who has been doing housing right, and I can constantly point to Edmonton.

And it's, you know, it feels like a bit of a backstab for Danielle Smith to say, oh, because Edmonton is so different and such a leader, that gives us justification because they're an outlier to meddle in their local zoning policies.