A Swiss university did a deep dive into Calgary's 'missing middle.' This is what they found

Looking at Calgary from overhead, one can see its downtown thick with office towers, its two rivers, the network of roads and highways, and the vast neighbourhoods that stretch out beyond the city's core to the prairies.

But for researchers in Switzerland, it's not only what they could see that interested them. It's what was missing.

What jumped out to university students at ETH Zurich who spent months studying Calgary is that the city lacks the kinds of buildings that would make for more dense, more efficient neighbourhoods.

Buildings like mid-rise apartments and row houses are in short supply — often referred to as the missing middle housing.

"One of the topics was walkability, how hard it is to walk in some of the neighbourhoods that they looked at. There's big roads, like six lanes," said Sibylle Waelty, senior researcher at ETH Zurich. 

"Going through a neighborhood in Switzerland, you just don't have that." 

Architecture, spatial planning and environmental system design students looked at walkability, downtown parking and zoning bylaws in Calgary — and ways the city could boost housing density.

The project, with most of the work done virtually, recently wrapped up. 

Students found Calgary has a relative lack of housing options between single-family homes and high-rise apartment buildings — for example, duplexes and townhouses — and a need for varied types of housing, especially for low-income groups and the elderly. 

Waelty said Calgary, like many other cities, has developed car dependency. 

That car-dependent transportation was noted not only in far-flung suburbs but in inner-city communities — places like the Beltline and parts of Renfrew and Winston Heights-Mountview, two neighbourhoods that grew significantly during the boom of the 1950s.

Unlike other major centres such as Vancouver or Toronto that have grown to the edge of natural barriers, neighbouring cities or protected green belts, Calgary has ample land all around it to boost its supply of reasonably affordable stand-alone houses.

By contrast, Europe is a small continent with a high population density. European property is also often very expensive, with Swiss housing among the most expensive in the world.

Francisco Alaniz Uribe, assistant professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the University of Calgary — who reviewed the student projects — said Calgary was a great choice for architecture students, as an example of a fairly young city in North America that exemplifies trends in development.  

"We have the typical downtown with high density towers, and quickly that changes and drops to a density that is almost single family or semi-detached residential," Alaniz Uribe said.

He said there are examples of other types of housing — like mid-rise apartment buildings and row houses — but not enough. 

Alaniz Uribe said seeing the city through the students' eyes, it became clear how car-oriented Calgary is, specifically the surface area of parking lots. 

"For them, parking doesn't have the priority it does for us," Uribe said. "They tend to use that space — that parking space — for new buildings." 

According to research done in 2021 by the Canadian Energy Systems Analysis Research initiative at the University of Calgary, there are 3.2 to 4.4 parking spots for every vehicle in Canada.

And some local developers have identified Calgary parking lots as growth opportunities. 

Alaniz Uribe said it's important to reach out and look for examples elsewhere when it comes to city design. 

"Sometimes we tend to hear counter arguments of saying, 'Oh, but we are different than Zurich,' or 'We're different than these other cities,'" he said. 

"Of course we're different, but that doesn't mean that we cannot learn the lessons that other cities have already gone through, right?" 

Last year, after a lengthy public hearing, Calgary's city council approved the creation of new zoning that will make it easier for more affordable types of housing to be built in some areas of the city.

Property owners will now be able to apply to build "missing middle developments" — such as row houses, town homes or other at grade apartments — in more parts of the city, so long as they are close to public transit.

And this week the matter was discussed at council. On Tuesday, council voted 8-7 to reject a task force's proposal to ease the affordability crisis, because a few recommendations called for easing Calgary's restrictive residential zoning rules. 

The next day, council undid that rejection. In a 14-1 makeup vote, council gave a tentative endorsement to its housing task force's ideas.