Historic Garneau streets with heritage homes are under threat to be destroyed under Edmonton City council’s rezoning plans.
The City of Edmonton is accelerating development in virtually all of Garneau to be 8-storey or up to 30-storey buildings.
Save Garneau is a lobby group with the mandate of preserving some of the dwindling number of blocks with heritage homes still left in Edmonton. While we are in favour of thoughtful and sustainable densification of the city and in parts of Garneau, we also support the Garneau Community League’s Mandate to:
Maintain 33% of the community as small scale residential, with the goal of preserving a mix of housing and diversity in the community. This is reasonable and still allows significant densification in underutilized areas of Garneau.
When zoning changes of the sort being pushed through by the City of Edmonton pass, it is typical for property values to drop and for developers to outbid families on homes for sale, leaving houses vacant and deteriorating over decades while they wait to buy up large parcels for development. Derelict homes and vacant lots attract increasing crime to the area. Garneau will no longer be the charming area of small business and mixed residential that is an attractive backdrop to the University of Alberta campus.
The Garneau Community League has asked City Councillor Michael Janz to advocate for these concerns with city council, and on OCTOBER 4, 2024, he brought forward a motion to support the Garneau Community League's request to maintain 33% of the community as small scale residential, with the goal of preserving a mix of housing and diversity in the community. Sadly, the motion was defeated.
Voting FOR the motion to protect housing diversity in Garneau: Councillors Janz, Hamilton, and Principe. A big thank you to these councillors!
Voting AGAINST the motion to protect housing diversity in Garneau: Mayor Sohi and Councillors Rice, Tang, Stevenson, Salvador, Cartmell, Rutherford, Wright, Knack, Paquette.
To see the City Council Meeting:
This is what happens to blocks with heritage homes when rezoned for high-density development.
Pictured here is 86th Avenue between 110th and 111th Street in Garneau in August of 2024. The block was rezoned to higher density in 1982. Over the past 40 years, the previously well-kept, single-family character homes have been bought up by developers and non-resident investors. It took almost 40 years for a medium density building to be built on the South side of the block, and the North side continues with deteriorating, derelict homes and vacant lots with broken fences while developers wait to buy up the rest of the homes.
Is this the backdrop students and visitors want for accessing the University of Alberta Campus for decades to come?
So many blocks throughout Garneau have already been rezoned and are in this process of decades of deterioration before development can occur. Save Garneau is only asking to preserve 33% of the neighbourhood from this fate.
Densification can continue to occur in the many blocks that have already been rezoned as well as the other areas along major arteries that are scheduled for rezoning.
Would rezoning Garneau add “flexibility” and “housing options” to the neighbourhood? No, it would not. Here’s why:
Garneau is already the 4th most densely populated neighbourhood in Edmonton (https://www.edmonton.ca/public-files/assets/document?path=2014%20Residential%20Density%20by%20Neighbourhood.pdf) and densifying since this report.. Adding density through high buildings does not increase housing options in an already dense neighbourhood; it reduces them. Garneau already has numerous options for condo and apartment living. By densifying even further, we only take away the small number of remaining options for students who want to live in houses communally (such as in fraternities) and for the few remaining families who stay in the neighbourhood throughout the summer when most students leave and whose children attend Garneau school and populate Garneau parks.
In fact, the rezoning the City of Edmonton is planning for Garneau would take away the rights of owners to rebuild their own single-family homes or fraternities not on university property (even in the event of a fire or the house becoming structurally unsound). Nor could these owners do any significant renovations because the zoning would not permit them to build anything smaller than a building with the number of stories for which the area was zoned. For this reason, rezoning of this type leads of necessity to derelict housing as houses run down and cannot be replaced.
New development in a neighbourhood like Garneau does not tend to be low income, so adding density to Garneau would not provide a solution for the increased need for low-income housing in Edmonton for students or for other residents.
Contact
Contact us to add your email to our contact list for further information on what you can do to help our cause.
Email
savegarneau@gmail.com