Q&A: Naheed Nenshi and Jeromy Farkas talk about the politics of housing

A council committee held the second day of its public hearing on housing strategy at city hall on Friday as it continued to consider recommendations from a plan that aims to make housing more affordable and accessible in Calgary.

The committee, in a bid to come up with a solid strategy, has been reflecting on recommendations suggested in the City of Calgary's Housing Strategy coupled with the opinions of over 100 Calgarians who've stepped up to voice their concerns at the hearing so far.

Former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi and former city councillor Jeromy Farkas shared their thoughts on the debate, appearing on The Calgary Eyeopener Friday morning with host Loren McGinnis. 

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

LM: Jeromy, I'll start with you. What is at stake for the city as council considers this housing strategy?

JF: I think it's really a defining moment. I think this current crisis, at the halfway point, really reminds me of our tax shift and our business tax revolts that we saw about two years [into our last term in council]. We have an unpopular arena deal, a vulnerable mayor, provincial government missing in action, and a lot of councillors actually jockeying for leadership positions and starting to actually plan for the next election.

And most of all, you have a really wickedly complex problem that really, no matter what anyone says, doesn't have any simple solutions. But that's where I think the similarities actually end.

I think our response back then, on the tax shift bluntly, it was really haphazard. It wasn't very well thought out. And this housing strategy, on the other hand, I think it's comprehensive. It's OK, it's good. It's not great.

LISTEN | Nenshi and Farkas tackle the politics of housing:

It's not perfect, but there are things like eliminating parking requirements that make me anxious. As I think [former] Coun. [Brian] Pincott used to say, if we're more worried about where cars will sleep than where human beings will, we're in pretty big trouble.

So I think I just want to underscore that we're well past the point of a perfect solution. Not everyone is going to get what they want. And I think that we need to accept that.

If I had one message for the holdouts on council right now, I would say we need you to lead.

I think someone somewhere needs to be the first mover on housing. And it can be us. It should be us. It has to be us.

LM: Thank you for that, Jeromy. Naheed, to bring you into the conversation. How do you see this issue and the decision facing council?

NN: I'll echo what Jeromy just said, which is that this is a defining moment. And let's not forget, it's a defining moment because things are bad and getting worse. 

Affordability is eroding in a really shocking way. In Calgary housing affordability, that is. 

We're at the beginning of an S curve that we've seen in cities like Toronto and Vancouver before and it's quite scary. When you think about the fact that rents in Calgary have increased by nearly 40 per cent in under a year, you know this is a real problem for a lot of people. And it's not just landlords being predatory, we got to do something about it.

So [I] actually think that the recommendations that are before council are incredibly bold. They're generational in terms of the change that they're looking at. They go further than anything I tried over 11 years and the moment calls for that.

And certainly, I watched some of the hearing yesterday. What was surprising to me is when we were making tiny, tiny changes around codifying best practices for development, you know, the NIMBYs came out in force saying shocking and offensive things about the kinds of people they wanted in their neighbourhood.

And yesterday, I don't believe there was a single person who spoke in opposition to these, or if there were, they were [a] tiny minority to these recommendations, which are huge.

In fact, the one we've been talking a lot about — the zoning change — in my mind, is one of the mid-level changes in terms of effectiveness. You know, there are really consequential things in there. 

The most important for me is the provision of what we call mandatory inclusionary zoning, which is requiring every new development to have a set aside for affordable housing. By the way, the UCP government said they were going to get rid of that power from the cities. I don't think they ever got around to doing it. 

But it's kind of a shocking thing that that incredibly important tool was being taken away by the province in a moment of incredible housing crisis.

LM: Jeromy, we're seeing federal Conservative MPs chiming in, you know, with a particular interest on housing on what Calgary City Council should do. What do you make of that dynamic?

JF: I think it's really good to see … bipartisan support for addressing housing. And it's good that this hasn't really devolved into the traditional left versus right battle. If anything, there's a lot of soul-searching amongst Conservatives on this. 

At the end of the day, as Naheed said, we're at a crisis point, we're at a tipping point, one in five Calgary households today cannot afford their current home.

And I think the left needs to accept that the private sector needs to be allowed to build to demand and the right also needs to accept that we need significant increases to government-funded and subsidized housing stock.

So I think we're at a point where it's really ... a wet clay moment where this I think is going to be a defining moment for council. And my hope is that they don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

LM: Naheed, I want to bring you back. The federal dimension of this, how do you see it?

NN: I really dislike when federal politicians try to get involved in city issues, largely because they don't know what they're talking about. And so it's been fun, as Jeromy pointed out, to kind of watch the infighting in the Conservative Party where we have MP Michelle Rempel Garner and the party's housing critic, and Pierre Poilievre himself, coming out very strongly in favour of recommendations that are more typically aligned with sort of the progressive side of the ledger.

Whereas MP Greg McLean, the more progressive member of Parliament for Calgary Centre, who marched in the pride parade, has come out strongly against this in opposition to his own party.

And that's sort of been fun to watch just from a political-watching perspective. We also had the Liberal government come in and try and take the knees out of the Conservatives by saying exactly the same thing.

• Feds won't fund Calgary housing strategy unless city agrees to axe certain zoning rules

It is slightly different. Pierre Poilievre is saying, if cities don't do what I want, then we're going to take away the meagre money we give them anyway. And the Liberals are saying if cities do what we want, then we'll give them more money. But it's the same argument. 

But the interesting thing is, if you read Minister Fraser's letter, which I thought was really inappropriate to send, just as council was having a discussion about this, and you look at Mr. Poilievre's housing strategy that he announced yesterday, they are remarkably naive. 

So Minister Fraser's letter makes it sound like townhouses are illegal in Calgary and we need to legalize them, which is of course not at all the case. This is a very different issue.

He focuses on the zoning issue, which as I suggested, is actually almost a minor issue in this whole conversation. And Mr. Poilievre, well, first of all, his policies are an attack against math, because he says you have to be 15 per cent more efficient every year. At some point, there's diminishing returns. 

But also my favourite part … is you think the Conservatives would know better about snitch lines, but he wants to create a NIMBY snitch line.

So if your neighbours are NIMBYs, then you're going to phone the federal government, and they will stop funding transit or something. You know, it's really not thought out at all. 

And so I hope as we get into this conversation, both parties actually get a little more sophisticated in their thinking about how to move the needle on housing. And by the way, affordable housing and housing generally is a provincial responsibility.

Where is the provincial government on this? We have not heard a word from the province on what they intend to do.

I'll give them some free political advice. The first thing they need to do is back off on [removing] mandatory inclusionary zoning and allow the cities to be able to do that because that's the only leverage we have to ensure that building more houses doesn't equal building more unaffordable houses.

LM: Jeromy, I'm gonna give you the last word and it's gotta be quick. 30 seconds on the province's role in this?

JF: I'm not thrilled how Mayor Gondek, Vancouver Mayor [Ken] Sim, for example, categorize the provinces and the feds as sort of senior orders of government. The truth is that the municipal government's the first order [and] is the closest to the people, shouldering often the greatest responsibilities with the least support.

And we've seen, basically nationwide, various provinces have come up to the bat to match say, the GST cut, that's going to be able to create, say, between 200,000 [to] 300,000 additional units.

On the high end, that's about 10 per cent of the three-and-a-half-million that CMHC says that we need to build by 2030 to make Canadian housing affordable again, but I think that this is a great opportunity for every other government to come forward with their solutions.

But regardless of what the feds do, regardless of what the province does, I think that we can be leaders here in the city of Calgary. Somebody somewhere needs to be the first mover and it should be us.