The War Over Upzoning Just Escalated

Cities across Canada are backing away from upzoning. After agreeing to allow fourplexes and other missing middle housing, municipalities like Calgary, Toronto, Markham, and Windsor are scaling back — or reversing — reforms altogether. What’s behind the pushback, and are YIMBYs losing the as-of-right fight?

In this segment, we break down:

Why cities are rejecting upzoning after agreeing to it

What Calgary’s reversal means for housing reform

Why Edmonton is succeeding where others aren’t

The politics behind fourplex opposition

Whether provinces — not cities — should lead upzoning

What advocates should do next

Is this just a temporary backlash, or the beginning of a broader retreat from upzoning?

(Quick note from Cara: This was recorded before the first round ended. If the Oilers are already out at this release, I would like the record to show that I believed in them right up until the end, and that next year is our year!)

Chapters:
00:15 | The Housing Accelerator Fund and Refusal to Implement Changes
01:03 | GTA Holdouts: Oakville, Markham, and Toronto
02:04 | Calgary's Policy Reversal After Election
03:06 | Edmonton: Getting Infill Housing Right (8 Units As-of-Right)
04:11 | Debunking the Myths 
06:08 | The Policy Lesson: Working to Make Changes Stick
07:18 | The Path Forward: Debating Future Approaches 
15:29 | Winning Hearts and Minds: Focusing on Benefits 

Research/links:

Majority of Windsor council stands firm in fourplex decision, limits them to certain areas of the city
https://www.ctvnews.ca/windsor/article/majority-of-windsor-council-stands-firm-in-fourplex-decision-limits-them-to-certain-areas-of-the-city/

Fourplexes: A tale of two neighbouring communities
https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/projects/2024/04/fourplexes-a-tale-of-two-neighbouring-communities

2025: The year Edmonton built the missing middle
 https://www.jacobdawang.com/blog/2026/zbr-two-year-review/

Hosted by Mike Moffatt & Cara Stern & Sabrina Maddeaux

Produced by Meredith Martin

Funded by the Neptis Foundation https://neptis.org/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Getting changes implemented is not enough. You have to work to make them stick.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Municipal governments making it easy, making simple building code. Just make it simple. That's hilarious. Imagine that they would do that.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

Demographics, hosted by Mike Moffat and Kara Stern.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

I knew there would be pushback, and I was right. Windsor, Ontario, for example, voted 11 to 3 against allowing fourplexes as of right across the city, and as such, was not allowed to sign on to the Housing Accelerator Fund and lost out somewhere between 40 and 70 million dollars. So that part really didn't surprise me. But I did expect that once cities signed on, they'd begrudgingly follow through with the terms. Instead, many simply refused to implement the changes that they had already agreed to. Now, many of these holdouts were in the GTA, and that's your neck of the woods, Kara. So what's going on there?

SPEAKER_02 1:03

As always, protecting the status quo tends to be popular among those who are doing well. Surprise, surprise. And these are all cities where people who own single family homes have done very well with them financially. In Oakville, they agreed initially to the housing accelerator funds requirements, but then they backed out when it came time for an actual vote. The mayor said the money wasn't worth risking, quote, our neighborhood's livability. So I will say having more people living there means more property taxes in the long run. Markham agreed to it at first too, but then the mayor decided he didn't want fourplexes, and he even used his strong mayor powers to veto the vote to allow them citywide, even when council approved them. That was something that people warned would happen when Doug Ford gave mayors those powers, but Ford promised it wouldn't because there was a caveat to the powers that said it could only be used to support provincial goals. But here we are. And lastly, Toronto agreed to changes beyond the minimum. They said everywhere would allow sixplexes. They took some money from the fund. And then when it came time to actually vote to allow it, they cut it down to only nine of the wards, mostly Old Toronto and East York.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

In the case of Calgary, though, they did implement the reforms and arguably rather ambitious ones. Yet recently that city council overturned those changes and reverted back to something resembling the old rules. So what happened there?

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Well, they were approved four units plus secondary suites all throughout the city almost two years ago. And there was a fight at the time where you had like a lot of people, more people showing up to fight it than support it, but it still passed. There was some success there, though not as much as Edmonton. But in less than a year, the city's housing officer credited the blanket upzoning with 814 new units and 765 new secondary suites. But then it did become a core issue in their municipal election. There were several candidates who ran on a promise to repeal it. And the winner, Jeremy Farkas, coincidentally, their first millennial mayor, was one of those. And he promised to tackle it early on, and he did. They went back to what it was before, where you can mostly only build detached and one suite in two-thirds of the city. Now, Calgary is still relatively affordable, especially if you compare it to Toronto and Vancouver, but the trajectory hasn't been great.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Yeah, yeah. I I'm a Flames fan. You're an Oilers fan. So this pains me to ask. But like Edmonton is often cited as best in class when it comes to building multiplex infill housing. So what are they getting right that Calgary's getting wrong?

SPEAKER_02 3:20

Just like their hockey team, Edmonton is getting it right on housing. They allowed eight units as of right, which means you don't need to fight with your neighbors to beg them to allow it. And we're seeing that translate into actual builds. There was a record approval for 17,500 homes in 2025. And more of those homes were five to eight units than single family homes. Most of the new homes being built were eight units. And so that's key. The more units are allowed, the better the chances that the project makes financial sense to build. I've got to give credit to Jacob Dwang here, who was a housing advocate that I first heard of with more neighbors Toronto. And I was disappointed when he moved to Edmonton. I was like, oh, we're losing a really good advocate here. But he brought his fight along there. And he's got probably the best review of the results of the zoning change that we'll link to that in the comments. And I think what we'll keep saying for a while now is exactly what we see in the NHL, where Edmonton's chugging along, destined for greatness, while Calgary is just sitting at home and watching.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Yeah, yeah. Well, luckily Edmonton's rezoning doesn't uh rely on questionable goaltending, but you know, let's go back to the issue at hand. One thing that drives me up the wall is when people dismiss actions like Markham's, where they block fourplexes, and they say, you know, it's it's no big deal because the economic conditions wouldn't allow for multiplexes to be built anyway. That really bugs me, but I'd love to get your take on it.

SPEAKER_02 4:34

Well, they'll be built if we make them financially viable to build. So if you put in all these restrictions that make them legal on paper but effectively impossible to build, then of course they're not going to be built. But they've never been legal and easy to build before. So I've always thought it was pretty silly to not allow them on that basis. So I'm like, let's make it legal. Let's make it easy to build. Let's find out what people want and whether it actually makes sense to build them.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

Yeah, and that's why I'm so bothered by it because it assumes that we we know what's going to happen, or it assumes that today's conditions will hold a year or five or 10 years from now. So, you know, maybe it will build a lot of multiplexes, maybe it won't, but you won't know unless you try. And I find it funny, there's often two arguments against blanket up zoning. You know, the first is that it's going to cause a massive amount of development and it's absolutely going to destroy neighborhoods. And the second argument is that it's pointless and it accomplishes nothing. And what strikes me as funny is that often these arguments are often made by the same people.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

They're just using any argument they can to keep the status quo. They don't care if it makes sense. What they found in Edmonton, though, is that less than half a percent of properties in mature neighborhoods were redeveloped. I think people picture developers like buying up these full neighborhoods and redeveloping them, but like that isn't going to happen. It's not like tomorrow we're gonna have all these dense neighborhoods where right now they're single family homes. And people are like, they have this figure that's gonna happen, and it's just not true. Like people have to decide to sell it, and then a developer has to decide to buy that land and sometimes multiple of them in order to make it work. And it like is it's not happening, definitely not overnight, and probably not for a long time. It's it we hope that it'll make some difference. It's just not as drastic as people think it's gonna be.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Yeah, and that's what what the experience of places like like Edmonton shows. And when it comes to things like blanket rezoning, I think there's a real lesson here for advocates, and it's that getting changes implemented is not enough. You have to work to make them stick. It reminds me a lot of carbon pricing, where in my view, too many advocates moved on to other issues once carbon pricing was implemented, figuring that they had won the battle. But like rezoning in Calgary, like we can't count on those policy victories to be permanent.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

I will say that a lot of the people who fought for change in Calgary, like they did show up again to fight for the changes to be kept. Like, unfortunately, it became a core issue in the election, and council basically about half of it turned over. And so you had a whole bunch of different people on council voting that way. And it was still the same sort of divide, like the suburb part of Calgary versus the downtown and more walkable parts of Calgary. But the advocates, they continue fighting there.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Yeah, I suppose that's fair that it is a little much that suggests that you know they all moved on to something else. But, you know, I do think in policy we often see advocates, you know, take their foot off the gas when it appears they have a victory. But either way, that raises a question, you know, where do we go from here? So I'd like to present you with some possible approaches and get your take on each one. So are you game for this? Always. Okay. So the first possible approach that I see is that simply we should focus our attention elsewhere. Uh, that maybe we should recognize that blanket rezoning isn't going to get enough units built relative to the size of the political flight. And instead, maybe our focus should be on other reforms like lowering development charges or changes to the building code or expanding urban growth boundaries to open up more land for development.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

I get the idea, but I'm not into it because I just think we need higher levels of government making blanket rezoning happen. The provinces can do it, like BC's doing it. And yes, there's a bunch of mayors who are not happy, but like the changes have been made. And I just don't think there's a substitute here. Like we can't keep expanding our cities indefinitely. It's terrible for the environment, terrible for commutes. I think we just need to really put pressure on our political leaders in the provinces to make the changes at that level.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Yeah, I don't love the idea either, because blanket rezoning can help. And I think it's worth a fight. And it's a bit of a false dichotomy to suggest that we have to choose between blanket rezoning and lowering development charges. You know, I think we can fight for both. So your suggestion actually gives me another idea, and it's to have blanket rezoning done by the provincial government rather than municipality by municipality because you said you like it. And I also like that one a whole lot more because it ensures that every community is doing their part and that some just don't free ride off of others. You know, I've long been an advocate for the provincial government being the one to decide the parameters for the rules that govern, you know, what could be built in a low density zone or medium density zone. And that includes things like minimum lot widths, setbacks, height limits, with the rules of municipalities to decide which zones go where. You know, in other words, I think that the province should decide on the color of each of the crayons, and the municipality decides where to use each color.

SPEAKER_02 9:07

That would make it much easier to get more competition and development, which is something we always want. You don't have to go back to the drawing board for designs every time you want to build in a different municipality, even if they're like super close to one another. So it's like basically get rid of intercity trade barriers. And right now, every city has an incentive to let the next city over absorb the growth while keeping their own neighborhoods frozen because it's popular with the constituents who are there right now. And that's not fair for the surrounding communities either.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think there's a lot of benefit in that kind of regulatory harmonization. So have the rules, you know, be the same in Cambridge as in Mississauga, it is Kitchener and so on. When it comes to low density zoning in particular, I'd like to get away from talking about height limits and unit maximums entirely and have the provincial government enact something called form-based zoning. And this is what it means. So building codes across Canada distinguish between large buildings, which are governed by part three of the building code, and smaller buildings, which are ones that are less than four stories and they're under 600 square meters of floor space. And those are governed by part nine of the building code. And when it comes to low density zoning, I think the rule should be simple that in any low density neighborhood, you should be able to build any purely residential unit that's governed by part nine of the building code. You know, so long as you're meeting setback and lot coverage ratio requirements and so on. Because it strikes me as incredibly odd that both the building code and zoning rules define what low density housing is, but their definitions aren't the same. So you can have buildings that are considered low density in zoning, but not in the building code, or they're considered low density in uh the building code, uh, but not in zoning rules. It makes no sense. And it's just pointless red tape.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

Is it bad that my reaction to hearing you say that is like, ha ha ha, municipal governments making it easy, making simple building code? Just make it simple. That's hilarious. Imagine that they would do that. That's never gonna happen, mate. Come on.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

Well, it's not gonna happen unless we try. And that's again why I think the province has to lead on this.

SPEAKER_02 11:09

They just need to make it easier to build. So, like, stop layering definitions like that. I didn't know that was a thing, but that makes a lot of sense. Like, why double up like that? Why confuse people with that?

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Yeah, exactly. Like, why have two uh different sets of rules trying to govern the same thing? So, next on my list is to make blanket upzoning an even bigger requirement in federal agreements with provinces and municipalities, like infrastructure agreements and perhaps the next generation of the housing accelerator fund.

SPEAKER_02 11:36

I do like the idea of the federal government using their money as leverage because it can work. But what we did learn from the housing accelerator fund is that it isn't working. Cities took the money, made the promises, and some just didn't follow through. So I'm only on board with this that there are actual clawback mechanisms, like not just losing future funding, but maybe you have to actually give back money that you took if you don't follow through. And that gives them real consequences for backing out, and maybe that'll deter them from doing that.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Yeah, I think I'm with you on this one. Like I'm a bit torn on it. You know, I do think that if the federal government is going to give money to other orders of government, it has every right to ask for something in return. It should attach strings. But given how small the penalties were for non-compliance under the housing accelerator, I really don't have a lot of faith that the federal government will strictly monitor and enforce those agreements. So I kind of eh about this one. So I've got one last one for you. And I'm gonna have to set it up a bit, but here's what it's trying to solve that right now, we've got municipal governments who are refusing to expand urban growth boundaries uh for very good reasons. They want to avoid sprawl, and they make arguments that, well, no, we can't sprawl, we should build infill. And then they refuse to implement the policy reforms that are actually needed to build infill. So, you know, they use infill as an argument not to expand out, and then they don't allow for the infill to be built, and we we find ourselves in a housing shortage. So, my view, you know, municipalities can't have it both ways. So I say let the voters decide. Have a referendum and have two options on the ballot. Option one, blanket rezoning. Option two, urban growth boundary expansion. And make it clear to the voters the financial costs of each and let them choose instead of having this idea where we can have our cake and eat it too, where we can block everything uh and you know, still have housing be affordable.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

Yeah, I know I hate this option. I'm not a fan of referendums because you're basically asking the public, get up to speed on a topic they may know nothing about and ask them to make this giant decision that I think is better off left to the experts. And I suspect the answer to this referendum question would be sprawl every time, because you're asking people to vote on something that sounds abstract and threatens their current neighborhood versus sprawl, which happens way over there, not in my backyard. So you'll get the same people who have the time to show up to public consultations to block housing. They'll be campaigning on this one, convincing people their own neighborhoods will change for the worse if infill was allowed. Although I'm thinking back to when Hamilton decided to do a public consultation on this and they said, do we want to do expanding our urban boundaries or do we want to do some infill? And people voted for, I don't know if it was a voting, the public consultation came back and they decided, let's go with infill. But they were like, infill over there where no one lives right now, as long as we're not touching our neighborhood. So I it brought me back to the thinking about that. But I also think that when you're doing it, you have to make it clear if you're gonna do that, that every neighborhood has to be up zone. It can't just be like over there will be up zone in that area of the city that's not as uh not as uh built up yet.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Yeah, well, absolutely. And the the suggestion is blanket upzoning, right? So it's not kind of uh point uh upzoning. And I get the idea of you know, let the experts handle it. But my point is the experts aren't handling it. That again, they're they're both uh blocking, expanding out, but also blocking infill. So basically nothing's happening. So I get the reservations about it. I kind of like it mostly because it's kind of a trollish idea, uh, a little bit. Uh, but yeah, it's not gonna happen. So I don't think we really need to worry about it. But I like anything that makes the trade-offs explicit because right now we're kind of assuming they they don't exist.

SPEAKER_02 15:13

A lot of times in housing advocates we'll talk about how we have to decide either tall or sprawl. And I think that what we've decided is like the not at all right now, and that's not worked out very well. So yeah, if people understood that there actually had to be a trade-off, and if there was some way to enforce it, that would be great too.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Yeah, absolutely. Because I just feel like we're writing the puck a lot of times, going back to our hockey metaphors here. So I think that's a problem. I will say that ultimately, though, I think blanket rezoning will only ever happen if supporters of the ideas can win hearts and minds of the general public. Like that's the only way you get sustainable change. And in my view, I think how we get there is not by couching the discussion in terms of sacrifice and what it does for other people, but rather the benefits of blanket rezoning for existing residents in the neighborhood. That blanket rezoning gives them downsizing options while still allowing them to live in the neighborhood they love. Uh that blanket rezoning makes it easier for kids to stay in that neighborhood and raise kids of their own. So grandma and grandpa actually get to see their grandchildren. I think that's the only way we get sustainable policy change is not to couch it as, you know, sacrifice, but going, no, this actually improves your life and this is why we should do it.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

It's unfortunate you always have to convince the Habs to be on board with it to see change, that we can't just be like, hey, this is the thing to do that'll make it better for society. But I get that people vote for what makes them personally benefit a lot of the time.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

And I thought you said HABs. And I think, you know, as both Oilers fans and Flames fans, we can agree we don't want to do anything for the Habs.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

And if you have any thoughts or questions about the Flames beating the Oilers in 1986, please send us an email to missing middle podcast at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_02 17:03

That was so long ago it doesn't even matter. I wasn't even born then.