The market didn’t save Calgary from its downtown being hollowed out or its housing becoming unaffordable for average citizens, and the mayor now wants council to take “bold” proactive steps to help businesses and homeowners as affordability challenges linger.
“We figured it was just the market. You know, the boom and bust cycles that we so often refer to,” Mayor Jyoti Gondek said Thursday. “This time, however, things were not rebounding in the same way.”She said Calgary had been regarded as an affordable Canadian metropolitan centre that was supported by well-paying jobs, a high quality of life and inexpensive homes, but that recently changed.
The mayor pointed to work already underway in the city, including the sale of city-owned lands for non-market and affordable housing, funding incentives for secondary suite construction, and waiving of municipal taxes for nonprofit housing providers.Gondek also highlighted the need to provide housing across societal strata, including the roughly 200 Calgarians who tend to repeatedly be in a position of crisis.
“The conflict, though, is that we also have a responsibility and obligation to take care of Calgarians and to provide them with affordability when it comes to their power,” Gondek said.Chamber CEO Deborah Yedlin said a recent survey on non-residential taxes showed 90 per cent of respondents indicated they were negatively impacted by rising property taxes.
“I’m hoping my council colleagues realize that if we don’t make this shift, two things could happen: number one, more businesses will close, more businesses will lay off employees, and more Calgarians will suffer. And number two, if we hit a point where the ratio becomes five-to-one, provincial intervention will happen,” Gondek said, noting that ratio currently sits at around 4.6-to-one. “I’m actually quite interested in not seeing that happen.