CANMORE – The Town of Canmore’s Housing Accelerator Fund application didn’t meet the federal government’s ask of bold and ambitious attempts to create housing.
The Town received notification early last week it didn’t make the cut for the $4 billion nationwide initiative as the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) was notifying all applicants for the fund.
“There’s more applications than can possibly be funded,” said Mayor Sean Krausert. “It’s disappointing Canmore wasn’t chosen, given the criteria we’ve gleaned it seems that there may not have been a fit for Canmore despite the fact that we are taking aggressive action with regard to housing.”
Krausert said the Town’s general manager of municipal infrastructure Whitney Smithers and general manager of corporate services Therese Rogers spoke with CMHC representatives last week, but didn’t receive specific information as to why Canmore wasn’t selected.
He noted one aspect the federal housing ministry had been pushing for was an end to exclusionary zoning, which Krausert said didn’t fit all areas of the community.
He said the Town was concerned that allowing the greater density could lead to further luxury homes, impact safety if more development was permitted near flood areas and require large infrastructure investments in certain areas of town in the future.
“Having more duplexes, fourplexes or eightplexes does not mean that it’s going to be the type of housing that will meet our housing crisis,” Krausert said. “When we take a look at the town, there’s already a large amount that allows for dense residential. There’s some parts of town that you wouldn’t want it because there’s public safety risks for having greater density and that’s what we’ve learned from the steep creek analysis we’ve done over the last decade.”
With the Town’s population projections forecasting for the last 25 years roughly 30,000 people, Krausert noted it could also lead to water licences being insufficient.
In CMHC’s 10 best practices to receive funding, it noted ending exclusionary zoning was a necessity to getting approval, but so too was increasing processing efficiency and improving development processes.
The best practices also ask to reduce or eliminate parking standards, eliminate restrictions such as height, setbacks and building floor area to allow more density and design and implement guidelines for missing middle housing or specific accessory dwelling housing.
The federal ministry received 544 applications from across the country. Of those, 179 were successfully approved.
The application process had 70 come from the large urban category and a further 108 were either small, rural, northern or of the Indigenous field. Quebec received $900 million, which was matched by its provincial government.
“While all the funds under HAF have been committed, discussions are still ongoing to notify unsuccessful applicants, with one being Canmore,” said Leonard Catling, a media relations spokesperson with CMHC.
“The evaluation process was highly competitive, with many strong applications received, but unfortunately demand for the program significantly exceeded the available budget.”
Though the money for the fund has been exhausted, Catling said “CMHC is committed to and will continue working with all applicants to seek positive housing solutions for their communities through collaboration with the CMHC municipal relations team and other National Housing Strategy programs.”
The Town and the development community have specifically been at loggerheads for several years over permitting timelines, with the development sector continuing to press for an increase in processing times to meet the provincially legislated timelines.
Bow Valley Builders and Developers Association (BOWDA) commissioned a third-party review of Canmore’s planning timelines in 2022. It came after surveys went to its members between 2018-22, with lengthy timelines the biggest concern for developers.
Canmore’s Housing Action Plan was approved by council last June and focused on phasing out tourism homes, updating policies, approving the Palliser Trail area structure plan, looking at developing on Town- and Canmore Community Housing (CCH)-owned land, examining tax structures to incentivize purpose-built rental units and potential changes to its land use bylaw.
The Town has initially focused on phasing out tourism homes, taxing vacant or second homes and supporting purpose-built rentals. The recommendations came out of the Livability Task Force that was struck last year.
Council directed staff to begin work earlier this year, which will likely return to elected officials for consideration later this year or early 2025.
Among other plans were to look at options for a comprehensive planning process for infill housing and possibly eliminating the building of single-family homes as well as changes to residential districts in the land use bylaw. The initiatives are intended to begin work this year, according to council’s resolution list.
Other initiatives are completing the downtown area redevelopment plan, updating the Climate Action Plan, starting work on Stoneworks flood mitigation and revising CCH’s vital homes bonusing structure in the Town’s land use bylaw.
Krausert said the fund would’ve “made some things quicker and easier, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re still moving ahead” with the Housing Action Plan.
When Sean Fraser, the federal government’s minister of housing, infrastructure and communities, announced Banff’s funding in February he highlighted the money would run out and it was “only for the most ambitious communities in Canada.”
He emphasized any municipality that had applied for funding needed to be “among the very most ambitious and certainly more ambitious than their neighbours. …
If anyone else is listening in neighbouring municipalities, consider doing more to match the ambition of your neighbours and we’re happy to have conversations about what that means for specific applicants.”
Fraser added after the City of London became the first recipient – getting $74 million – the ministry was “flooded with correspondence from cities afterward that indicated they too were willing to increase their ambition.”
Fraser stated it was an expectation of successful applicants to end exclusionary zoning and expediting permitting timelines, emphasizing the need for a fundamental change to the way municipalities allow development in population centres.
Jason Nixon, the province’s housing minister, also challenged Canmore it needed to do more when it came to housing.
“The No. 1 thing Canmore and the Bow Valley need to do if they want to see large investments in affordable housing in their community from us or the federal government, who have both been clear, then they better start approving projects because our government is focused on getting money out the door, shovels in the ground and units built for people to live in and are not interested in seeing multi-million housing projects being blocked by a municipal government going forward,” he said.
The Housing Accelerator Fund was established with the goal of creating 100,000 new homes across Canada. It now estimates changes made by municipalities across the country to increase building could lead to 750,000 homes in the next decade. It’s funding is based on the estimated number of residential units built over a four-year time frame.
The Town of Banff received $4.66 million on Feb. 19 and was the first of the small and rural stream to get funding. To get the full funding, 240 new homes have to be issued by development permits by Jan. 29, 2027. Of those, a minimum of 43 have to be affordable units.
A week after getting accepted, Banff council approved $369,000 for the creation of two new positions with a two-year I.T. contract to develop an e-permitting system and a two-year contract for a development planner to process residential development permits.
On Monday (March 11), Banff council gave first reading for further amendments to its land use bylaw that was part of its Housing Action Plan by taking the next step to changing minimum residential parking requirements and amending the residential land use districts.
The potential changes will have an extensive public engagement period followed by a public hearing and consideration for second and third reading by June.
Other initiatives include increasing residential density, an accessory dwelling incentive program and providing financial tools and tactics to encourage residential development.
The accessory dwelling incentive program has already been approved in the 2024-26 operating budget for $265,000 a year.
A full-scale review of Banff’s land use bylaw is also underway that will look at such potentials as converting non-residential land to residential use, looking at municipally-owned lands for rezoning to residential, amendments to permitted and discretionary uses and a three-year contract position for a housing liaison.
On March 5, the City of Airdrie received $24.8 million with the intent of fast-tracking more than 900 homes in the next three years and 3,500 over the next decade.
The City of Calgary received $228 million last November, while the City of Edmonton got $175 million in February and five other smaller Alberta communities received roughly a combined $9 million at the same time as Banff.
“It’s not unusual CMHC funding doesn’t fit the Canmore situation. We have found that previously, but hope it can change at some point. We recognize the Canmore situation is relatively unique, even different than Banff,” Krausert said. “We believe our application was ambitious, but some of the things that would’ve gained us points we were already doing and some things such as removing exclusionary zoning wasn’t something that would’ve fit well in the Canmore situation.”
