On April 3, 2019, Council’s Standing Policy Committee for Planning and Urban Development convened for its monthly meeting and as its second order of business unanimously recommended that Council approve a path forward for legalizing suites in semi-detached houses throughout Calgary. Later that day I found myself sitting in my home office - a place where, prior to becoming a City Councillor in 2010, I did most of my academic, community, and professional work as a city-builder - reflecting on the momentous change this represents and the long journey it has taken to get within reach of this laudable goal.
Eighteen years ago, sitting in that office, looking out on the street in a similar state of very early springtime, I penned a letter in my capacity as Redevelopment Chair of the Inglewood Community Association to Calgary City Council. I was attempting to intervene on behalf of a landowner and their tenants in Inglewood who were facing eviction because the City was acting against the illegal condition within their building.
The building in question, a ubiquitous “seventies special,” had been built in the mid-1970s as a fourplex and then, years later, had been zoned & redefined within the 1980 land use bylaw as a semidetached (two units). The owner had bought it as a fourplex unaware that it was an illegal condition, and his tenants, long-standing and contributing members of the community, had been living there for years. It came to pass that a neighbour of their’s had a dog that was left outside day and night and barked constantly. When they complained to bylaw about this unacceptable situation, the neighbour with the dog retaliated by calling in the illegal fourplex condition of their living arrangement. I don’t know how the dog situation ultimately resolved itself, but the fact that despite my attempt to intervene the four units were reduced to two units and two members of our community were put out on the street became an early point of dissatisfaction for me that, combined with an accumulation of successive dissatisfactions, ultimately lead me to create the Great Neighbourhoods platform and seek office as Ward 9’s City Councillor.
Around nine years later, early in my time as Ward 9 City Councillor, and on account of our brand new Mayor Nenshi having made suites a significant civic issue, we were able to address a big chunk of the problem by allowing secondary suites in all R-designated land uses (with the exception of R-1 properties - we wouldn’t solve that issue until 2018). At that time I thought that we had finally solved the semi-detached problem that had weighed heavy on my mind since my Inglewood experience many years before.
so far I think I like him better as a non-politician
