Coun. Sarah Hamilton may have shocked everyone late Friday when she fired a few public F-bombs at a colleague who seemed to be questioning her professionalism. Read More
Coun. Sarah Hamilton may have shocked everyone late Friday when she fired a few public F-bombs at a colleague who seemed to be questioning her professionalism. But frankly, I suspect there were a lot more expletives expressed behind city hall’s closed doors last week, most notably at mayoral contender Tim Cartmell’s bizarre and spurious approach
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Coun. Sarah Hamilton may have shocked everyone late Friday when she fired a few public F-bombs at a colleague who seemed to be questioning her professionalism.
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But frankly, I suspect there were a lot more expletives expressed behind city hall’s closed doors last week, most notably at mayoral contender Tim Cartmell’s bizarre and spurious approach to a public hearing on zoning reforms.
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Zoning, as we’ve learned over the last two years, is political quicksand. It has buried municipal officials up to their necks in deep ideological and generational divides, and engendered fierce opinions about the reshaping of city neighbourhoods with six-plexes and eight-plexes.
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With all that at stake, council’s management of the hearing, which stretched into multiple overflow days ahead of their summer break, was hardly ideal. Along with that one moment of profanity, pettiness and provocation were also in the air.
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But what really didn’t help was having Cartmell — probably the front-runner in the mayor’s race — make a reckless overreach with his pitch for a partial infill ban, blame colleagues for its failure, and then petulantly blame them again for his decision to miss council’s final votes on real and legitimate zoning reforms.
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In fact, had he participated Tuesday, his preferred outcome on infill maximums would’ve proceeded, rather than falling one vote short.
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All told, this felt like a mayoral wannabe in meltdown.
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Unzipping zoning
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However, before I go further down that road, it’s important to understand some of the context around why there is such tension in Edmonton on zoning.
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Speaking generally, on one side of the issue are established property owners alarmed at the scale of change around their homes, which, they note, represent not just the primary investment of their life, but also the thing most closely associated with their quality of life.
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On the other side — again, generally speaking — are younger and newer residents without inherited wealth, whose fear is that they will forever be on the wrong side of the housing crisis. Edmonton needs to be aggressive about boosting housing options and supply everywhere, they say, not just through suburban sprawl that leads to higher emissions, higher city costs and higher taxes.
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The first group wants property values to rise, the second needs them to drop, or at least stabilize.
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As I said, there is no easy solution here, and yet Edmonton does have a blueprint on the books for managing many of these dynamics. The City Plan, circa 2020, calls for, among other things, a gradual shift toward infill densification, more choice and affordability, and more options for moving people around.
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The last couple of councils were responsible for putting together the City Plan. The current council has been responsible for implementing it, which is a much scarier proposition. It’s one thing for greater density to be an aspirational exercise, and quite another for people to see it being built next door.
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Zoning reforms — one of the city’s few major tools to put the plan in motion — came into effect at the start of 2024, allowing the construction of more height, more units, and more housing types across the city. Among all the changes, the allowance of eight units on a standard mid-block lot has probably garnered the most attention.
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Intended effect?
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As to how it’s played out, early returns show the new zoning has been remarkably successful, or at least that it has had the intended infill effect — even beyond what was anticipated. City statistics show there were a record 16,500 new dwelling units approved in 2024, 40 per cent of which were inside Anthony Henday Drive. More than half of those were approvals for multi-unit housing, including a lot of row housing.
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While not all developers are using these inner-city sites to their maximum density, many are. Since the new rules came into effect, 80 per cent of the development permits issued for mid-block row housing have been for more than six units — and the trend is growing quickly. While 64 permits in that category were issued in all of 2024, 116 were issued in just the first half of 2025.
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However, when we dive in a bit deeper, a couple of interesting wrinkles emerge.
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Though such densification activity has touched neighbourhoods across the city, the bulk of it has been concentrated in a handful of communities — Glenwood, Grovenor, Brittania Youngstown and Westmount among them — presumably because of cheaper housing stock and/or their proximity to the Valley Line west LRT project.
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A lot of the concerns we’ve heard about the speed and volume of development have come from these areas, though it’s important to remember parts of these communities have long been destined for higher density because they lie along major transit routes.
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It’s also worth mentioning that not all developers are created equal. I have myself toured some multi-unit properties in the west end where the developer — to my eyes, at least — has tried to act responsibly, such as by using street-friendly designs and including some garage space.
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Other companies, particularly one with a lot of properties on the south side, have been the subject of complaints that their projects show little regard for attractive design, community character, parking and other impacts to neighbours.
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In other words, while speed and volume of change is a big issue for residents, so, too, is quality, and there is not a consistent picture across the city.
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Smoothing the rough spots
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Council’s public hearing over the past week has been to determine what zoning tweaks might best mitigate some of these concerns with multi-unit structures.
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In general, I agree with the moves to reduce side entrances, trim the maximum building length and improve the esthetics of front facades. I also thought Coun. Michael Janz’s pitch to reduce the maximum units from eight to six was a reasonable accommodation that hopefully wouldn’t compromise progress on housing choice and affordability.
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Council, however, in a 6-5 vote, chose to keep the eight-unit cap, at least until more research is done.
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Of course, such changes won’t be enough for some opponents who are not just perturbed by the zoning bylaw itself, but also appear to want to re-litigate the entire City Plan. And to be fair, some may have a legitimate gripe in feeling that council and city administration have too often tried to brush them off with “change is hard” platitudes rather than showing appropriate sensitivity to their fears.
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This brings us all the way back to Cartmell, who after previously supporting the City Plan and the zoning bylaw, is now seemingly trying to appease their detractors — but not in an especially genuine way.
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In regard to his motion for a moratorium or a “pause” on mid-block, mid-neighbourhood infill development, there are issues in both substance and execution.
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When Cartmell made his motion on June 30, it ticked off many of his council colleagues who felt he was grandstanding for a position he knew had no chance of proceeding.
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Mayor Amarjeet Sohi almost immediately declared the motion out of order, and it was at that point we learned that all of council, including Cartmell, had received a memo days earlier from city lawyers warning that any blockade of building permits would likely violate Alberta’s Municipal Government Act.
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For his part, Cartmell says there was a legal pathway to achieve his aim, but he never got to make that case because of Sohi’s ruling. I’m not so sure. I think if Cartmell really wanted to force the issue, or at least get it on record, there were ways he could have tried to do that. The fact that he didn’t only adds to the perception that this was more about political performance to curry favour with the electorate.
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Either way, my biggest concern was not with the questions of legality, but rather the nature of the proposal itself.
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Dubious placation
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In his brief introduction to the motion before it got shut down, Cartmell said it was born of the alarm he had heard from communities. A pause on infill is warranted to allow for more engagement and clarity, he said, even suggesting that the housing crisis might be subsiding.
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I have no doubt that alarm is real, but so is the risk of placating communities with false expectations.
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Yes, Cartmell can try sell the idea that a temporary ban will give the city time to get zoning right, but there is a snake-oil element to that. Because after those six, 12 or 18 months pass, the most likely scenario is that council will be right back where it started — having the same arguments, mired in the same long-term pressures, and realizing that the city does actually need to get more aggressive about housing supply.
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And when that realization happens, Cartmell may find that his moratorium has chased away development capital, exposed the city to lawsuits, and led to harmful construction delays.
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Cartmell has talked often about council lacking the fortitude to make hard choices. Well, here is a big one staring him in the face, and instead of standing firm on the policies he previously supported, he instead has his hand on the chicken switch at the first sign of trouble.
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In that same vein, it was also not a productive choice to put another nail in his deteriorating relationship with fellow councillors by blaming them for his decision to miss Tuesday’s final debate.
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Sure, the public hearing turned into a marathon — Cartmell likely contributed to that with his attention-grabbing moratorium — and it wound up cutting into his prearranged vacation time.
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But while he and other councillors undoubtedly need a break, if I was running for mayor, I would probably find a way to participate remotely in an issue that is clearly of major importance to Edmontonians. It’s especially galling that after supporting a six-unit maximum, he wasn’t there to cast the vote that would have ensured that outcome.
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At this point, all I can say is I hope Cartmell uses his time away to re-evaluate his leadership approach, and then come back to council and the election campaign with a far more reasoned attitude.
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It’s one thing to curse council, but Cartmell should really be cursing himself for blowing an opportunity to show he’s worthy of mayor’s chair.
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