Did rezoning enable the units it promised?
What citywide rezoning did to Calgary's housing supply — while it lasted.
For about two years before Council repealed it, citywide rezoning let more homes go straight to a development permit instead of a rezoning first — lifting permit volumes and stripping a costly approval step out of the way. Every figure below traces that change in supply to a primary source: the City’s Q1-2026 briefing and Open Calgary.
Citywide rezoning was in force for only about two years before Council repealed it. This case file is about what it did while it lasted: it let more homes go straight to a development permitinstead of a rezoning first — pushing permit volumes up and stripping a costly approval step out of the way. The figures below trace that change in supply; a companion page prices the council-time red tape the rezoning step removed.
Units enabled by citywide rezoning, by quarter
Across 4 quarters (Q2 2025 to Q1 2026), citywide rezoning enabled 1,033 low-density units in Calgary’s established (older, built-up) areas. This chart shows how many homes the rezoning made possible each quarter, and the running total.
Why we show counts, not the briefing's percentages
Development permits to build R-CG infill, by month
Once R-CG became a base district, owners could apply directly for R-CG homes without rezoning first. (R-CG is the zoning that lets a lot hold a rowhouse, townhouse, or a few smaller homes, instead of only one detached house.) Development permits in R-CG jumped from 180 in 2023 to 2,746 in 2025.
The lighter line is all development permits citywide, on the same axis. It barely moves — so the R-CG surge isn’t extra permits piled on top, it’s a growing share of the same permit activity: by early 2026, R-CG infill is on the order of half of all monthly development permits.
Land-use redesignations by proposed district, by year
As more infill could go straight to permit, applications to rezone parcels into R-CG fell from 128 in 2023 to just 13 in 2025. R-CG became the default, so owners rarely needed to rezone into it.
This drop is R-CG-specific: across all districts, total redesignation applications fell only from 378 to 194, and rezonings to H-GO and other districts continued.
“Genuine” means the proposed district is different from the parcel’s current one. Area-plan policy changes and tweaks to parcels already zoned R-CG are excluded, because they are not actually rezoning to R-CG.
Approval time for an R-CG home: rezoning vs development permit
Before citywide rezoning, a typical R-CG home needed two approvals in sequence: a rezoning (a land-use amendment at Council), then a development permit to build. In the data the rezoning approval ran a median of about 5.3 months and the development permit about 2 months. After R-CG became a base district the rezoning step disappeared — owners went straight to the same, unchanged development-permit process. What citywide rezoning removed is the rezoning step, not time off the permit.
Before citywide rezoning — land-use amendment, then development permit
After citywide rezoning — development permit only
Sample and tracing
New dwelling units created, by council term
The bottom line: actual homes. Every building permit records the new dwelling units it creates, so this is the city’s own unit count — permitted (building permit issued) and completed — grouped by the council term in which it happened. Units permitted rose from 48,464 in the 2017-2021 term to 79,904 in 2021-2025 — 1.65× as many, the term that adopted citywide rezoning. Suites added inside existing homes count too — not just new construction.
Rezoning also has a price at the council table. see alsowhat a land-use amendment costs in council time estimates the elected-official time behind each amendment.