St. Albert needs to grow smart if it wants to avoid losing schools in the future, argues a housing expert.
Simon O'Byrne was the lunchtime speaker at Thursday's Re-Envision Housing Symposium. Organized by the Capital Region Board, the event brought about 125 leaders and civic officials to the Strathcona County Community Centre to learn about smart growth and affordable housing.
O'Byrne is the head of Stantec's urban planning division and the chair of the Greater Edmonton Region Chamber of Commerce.
Demographic shifts mean that one out of four people in the Edmonton capital region will be over 65 in the near future, O'Byrne said in an interview. That, he said, means planning for a society with reduced mobility and allowing for more mixed-use, walkable neighbourhoods.
It also means all those suburbs built during the 1970s and 1990s will soon be childless, he continued. Edmonton is already feeling the consequences: whole districts full of empty nesters that have to close schools due to lack of students.
And it means that seniors will have a hard time getting around those places without a car.
"You're going to impair the lifestyles and quality of life for a quarter of your residents."
The shift to smart growth
Today's planning laws are the result of our 1950s love affair with the car, according to Larry Beasley, the distinguished practice professor of planning at the University of British Colombia and the keynote speaker at the conference. That led to car-dependent development practices like single-family homes, separated land uses and long commutes.
Gen-Xers have crushing debts and can't afford single-family homes, O'Byrne said. "Duplex housing is yesterday's single-family home," he said, and you can see the results in Toronto and Ottawa, where the majority of new developments are all row housing.
Property values show that today's consumers want the 1930s-style developments found in places like Old Strathcona in Edmonton: smaller homes close to shops with a mix of architectural styles.
"If you tried to build a 1930s-style neighbourhood in Edmonton today, it would be illegal," he said because planning rules prevent developers from building walkable, affordable homes even if they know it's what people want.
St. Albert's share of housing starts in the capital region plummets every year, O'Byrne said. "If you want to reverse that, you have to encourage new types of development. If you're a young family today that's Generation X or Y, how can you afford to buy into St. Albert?"
New tools
Cities can get more affordable, walkable neighbourhoods through legislation, according to Beasley.
Most development rules nowadays emphasize enforcement, he explained, banning practices without encouraging others. He pushed for a shift to discretionary zoning, where developers are given incentives to do stuff a city wants.
He's working on a 2,000-unit development in Vancouver where the city has implemented such incentives. There, developers have agreed to build about $150 million worth of parks and affordable homes in exchange for the right to pack more homes on their land.
"They're not complaining about it, by the way, because they're being allowed to do so much more development that they're making a lot more money."
O'Byrne pushed for a shift towards regulating based on design instead of use. "It's okay to have an accountant living next to you," he said. By focusing more on what a building looks like than what happens in it, St. Albert could get more walk-friendly communities and ground-floor businesses.
Beasley said communities could pilot these new techniques on infill sites, such as obsolete strip malls, or in new areas. "They can't just replicate what they're [now] doing."
St. Albert thumbed its nose at many of these principles when it rejected the proposed Smart Growth plan for the annexed lands last year.
Mayor Nolan Crouse, who attended the conference, said he did not see any attempts to change the city's development bylaws in the future, apart from tweaks to its guides to infill development. Smart growth principles could still happen, but "it's going to be more community by community instead of an overarching philosophy."