Oh the Urbanity!: Edmonton is leading on housing reform
Against defeatism
Housing in Edmonton is far more affordable on a middle-class income than Vancouver or Toronto. It’s a good benchmark for what other cities should aspire to.
Lessons for other cities:
Edmonton is a good antidote to what we've called “housing nihilism,” the idea that reforms are pointless and expensive housing is just a fact of life. Many people in expensive cities like Toronto and Vancouver are so used to high rents and home ownership being out of reach that they develop a sort of learned helplessness that leads them to be pessimistic or even dismissive of housing reform.
Whenever we mention Edmonton and suggest that the housing crisis in other cities might be self-inflicted, we encounter some skepticism. Some people wonder if Edmonton is just affordable because nobody wants to live there. No, Edmonton is one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country. Granted, Toronto and Vancouver would probably have grown more than they did if not for their self-inflicted housing shortage, but Edmonton is not a Rust Belt city that's only cheap because the population is stagnating or declining.
People also wonder whether housing is cheap in Edmonton because the city is less affluent. But again, that's wrong. Alberta has some of the highest median incomes in the country, and if we adjust home prices to incomes, Edmonton does better, not worse.
And finally, people will ask how we can possibly think that Edmonton has lessons for places like Vancouver, Sydney, San Francisco, or New York, when Edmonton is a smaller city with a lot more developable land due to a lack of mountains and water.
That one is true, but if your city has to house more people with less land, shouldn't you be significantly more open to density than Edmonton? What we have here is a midsized city on the Canadian prairies that's legalized more density by right than most bigger land-constrained cities. And from what we can tell, they have a culture among planners, council, and staff of actually wanting to see things built, instead of making symbolic reforms. If you're in a bigger, land-constrained metro area and you really want to move the needle on housing, you should go well beyond Edmonton and legalize something more like eight-story midrise apartments literally everywhere. Obviously get rid of parking mandates, too.
A quote from Jesse LaFrance, a developer in Edmonton, that sounds simply unbelievable to someone in Vancouver:
We're able to deliver housing in the same calendar year that we purchased the land. That is not possible in other jurisdictions.