The Backlash to Blanket Rezoning
Are YIMBY Wins Already Being Reversed?
Upzoning reforms are facing a growing backlash across Canada. Municipalities that agreed to allow fourplexes and other missing middle housing are hesitating, scaling back, or reversing course entirely. Calgary has rolled back its ambitious upzoning initiative. Toronto watered down its citywide plan. Markham and others walked away despite federal funding incentives.
So what’s going on?
In this conversation, we unpack why upzoning victories aren’t sticking, the political incentives driving municipal resistance, and what Edmonton is doing differently. We also explore whether provinces should take the lead, how federal funding could be structured differently, and why advocates may need to shift from winning policy changes to defending them.
If the choice is “tall or sprawl,” many cities are choosing neither — and that’s leaving Canada stuck in the middle of a housing shortage.
(Quick note from Cara: This was recorded before the first round ended. If the Oilers are already out at this release, I would like the record to show that I believed in them right up until the end, and that next year is our year!)
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: Blanket rezoning, while not dead, is certainly in trouble. Rules that allow for as-of-right building a fourplex and other missing middle housing types in existing residential neighbourhoods is seen by supply advocates as a way to increase housing options, making it easier for families to live closer to where they work while reducing sprawl. But municipal governments are fighting back against the idea, with Markham and Toronto losing housing accelerator funding, refusing to enact blanket rezoning reforms they already agreed to.
And recently, Calgary’s municipal council voted 12 to 3 to overturn one of Canada’s most ambitious blanket rezoning initiatives. Which leads to the question: are YIMBYs losing the as-of-right fight?
Mike Moffatt: So the day the federal government announced the Housing Accelerator Fund and put in a requirement that communities agree to blanket upzoning — which in most of those agreements required four units as-of-right — I knew there would be pushback, and I was right. Windsor, Ontario, for example, voted 11 to 3 against allowing fourplexes as-of-right across the city, and as such was not allowed to sign onto the Housing Accelerator Fund and lost out on somewhere between $40 and $70 million.
So that part really didn’t surprise me. But I did expect that once cities signed on, they’d begrudgingly follow through with the terms. Instead, many simply refused to implement the changes that they had already agreed to. Now, many of these holdouts are in the GTA, and that’s your neck of the woods, Cara. So what’s going on there?
Cara Stern: As always, protecting the status quo tends to be popular among those who are doing well. Surprise, surprise. And these are all cities where people who own single-family homes have done very well with them financially. In Oakville, they agreed initially to the Housing Accelerator Fund’s requirements, but then they backed out when it came time for an actual vote.
The mayor said the money wasn’t worth risking “our neighbourhood’s livability.” Though I will say having more people living there means more property taxes in the long run. Markham agreed to it at first, too, but then the mayor decided he didn’t want fourplexes, and he even used his strong mayor powers to veto the vote to allow them citywide, even when council approved them.
That was something that people warned would happen when Doug Ford gave mayors those powers, but Ford promised it wouldn’t because there was a caveat to the powers that said it could only be used to support provincial goals. But here we are.
And lastly, Toronto agreed to changes beyond the minimum. They said everywhere would allow sixplexes. They took some money from the fund and then when it came time to actually vote to allow it, they cut it down to only nine of the wards, mostly Old Toronto and East York.
Mike Moffatt: In the case of Calgary, though, they did implement the reforms and arguably rather ambitious ones. Yet recently, that City Council overturned those changes and reverted back to something resembling the old rules. So what happened there?
Cara Stern: Well, they approved four units plus secondary suites all throughout the city almost two years ago, and there was a fight at the time where you had more people showing up to fight it than support it, but it still passed. There was some success there, though not as much as Edmonton, but in less than a year, the city’s housing officer credited the blanket upzoning with 814 new units and 765 new secondary suites.
But then it did become a core issue in their municipal election. There were several candidates who ran on a promise to repeal it, and the winner, Jeromy Farkas — coincidentally, their first millennial mayor — was one of those, and he promised to tackle it early on, and he did.
They went back to what it was before, where you can mostly only build detached and one suite in two-thirds of the city. Now, Calgary is still relatively affordable, especially if you compare it to Toronto and Vancouver, but the trajectory hasn’t been great.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I’m a Flames fan. You’re an Oilers fan, so this pains me to ask. But Edmonton is often cited as best-in-class when it comes to building multiplex infill housing. So what are they getting right that Calgary is getting wrong?
Cara Stern: Just like their hockey team, Edmonton is getting it right on housing. They allowed eight units as-of-right, which means you don’t need to fight with your neighbours to beg them to allow it, and we’re seeing that translate into actual builds. There was a record approval for 17,500 homes in 2025, and more of those homes were 5 to 8 units than single-family homes.
Most of the new homes being built were eight units, and so that’s key. The more units are allowed, the better the chances that the project makes financial sense to build.
I’ve got to give credit to Jacob Dawang here, who was a housing advocate that I first heard of with More Neighbors Toronto, and I was disappointed when he moved to Edmonton. I was like, “Oh, we’re losing a really good advocate here.” But he brought his fight along there, and he’s got probably the best review of the result of the zoning change.
And I think what we’ll keep seeing for a while now is exactly what we see in the NHL, where Edmonton’s chugging along, destined for greatness, while Calgary is just sitting at home and watching.
Mike Moffatt: Well, luckily, Edmonton’s rezoning doesn’t rely on questionable goaltending. But let’s go back to the issue at hand.
One thing that drives me up the wall is when people dismiss actions like Markham’s where they block fourplexes and they say, “You know, it’s no big deal because the economic conditions wouldn’t allow for multiplexes to be built anyway.” That really bugs me, but I’d love to get your take on it.
Cara Stern: Well, they’ll be built if we make them financially viable to build. So if you put in all these restrictions that make them legal on paper but effectively impossible to build, then of course they’re not going to be built. But they’ve never been legal and easy to build before. So I’ve always thought it was pretty silly to not allow them on that basis. Let’s make it legal, let’s make it easy to build. Let’s find out what people want and whether it actually makes sense to build them.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and that’s why I’m so bothered by it, because it assumes that we know what’s going to happen, or it assumes that today’s conditions will hold a year or 5 or 10 years from now. Maybe it will build a lot of multiplexes, maybe it won’t, but you won’t know unless you try.
And I find it funny—there’s often two arguments against blanket upzoning. The first is that it’s going to cause a massive amount of development and it’s absolutely going to destroy neighbourhoods. And the second argument is that it’s pointless and it accomplishes nothing. What strikes me as funny is that often these arguments are made by the same people.
Cara Stern: They’re just using any argument they can to keep the status quo. They don’t care if it makes sense.
What they found in Edmonton, though, is that less than half a percent of properties in mature neighbourhoods were redeveloped. I think people picture developers buying up these full neighbourhoods and redeveloping them—that isn’t going to happen. It’s not like tomorrow we’re going to have all these dense neighbourhoods where right now they’re single-family homes. People have this fear that’s going to happen and it’s just not true.
People have to decide to sell, and then a developer has to decide to buy that land—and sometimes multiple of them in order to make it work. It’s not happening overnight and probably not for a long time. We hope that it’ll make some difference. It’s just not as drastic as people think it’s going to be.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and that’s what the experience of places like Edmonton shows. When it comes to things like blanket rezoning, I think there’s a real lesson here for advocates: getting changes implemented is not enough. You have to work to make them stick.
It reminds me a lot of carbon pricing, where in my way, too many advocates moved on to other issues once carbon pricing was implemented, figuring that they had won the battle. But like rezoning in Calgary, we can’t count on these policy victories to be permanent.
Cara Stern: I will say that a lot of the people who fought for change in Calgary did show up again to fight for the changes to be kept. Unfortunately, it became a core issue in the election and council basically about half of it turned over. So you had a whole bunch of different people on council voting that way, and it was still the same sort of divide: the suburb part of Calgary versus the downtown and more walkable parts of Calgary. But the advocates continue fighting there.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I suppose that’s fair. It is a little much to suggest they all moved on to something else. But I do think in policy we often see advocates take their foot off the gas when it appears they have a victory. Either way, that raises a question: where do we go from here?
I’d like to present you with some possible approaches and get your take on each one. Are you game for this?
Cara Stern: Always.
Mike Moffatt: Okay. So the first possible approach that I see is that simply we should focus our attention elsewhere. Maybe we should recognize that blanket rezoning isn’t going to get enough units built relative to the size of the political fight. Instead, maybe our focus should be on other reforms, like lowering development charges or changes to the building code, or expanding urban growth boundaries to open up more land for development.
Cara Stern: I get the idea, but I’m not into it because I just think we need higher levels of government making blanket rezoning happen. The provinces can do it, like B.C. is doing it. And yes, there’s a bunch of mayors who are not happy, but the changes have been made and I just don’t think there’s a substitute here.
We can’t keep expanding our cities indefinitely. It’s terrible for the environment, terrible for commutes. I think we just need to really put pressure on our political leaders in the provinces to make the changes at that level.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I don’t love the idea either, because blanket rezoning can help, and I think it’s worth the fight. It’s a bit of a false dichotomy to suggest that we have to choose between blanket rezoning and lowering development charges. I think we can fight for both.
So your suggestion gives me another idea, and it’s to have blanket rezoning done by the provincial government rather than municipality by municipality. I also like that one a whole lot more because it ensures that every community is doing their part and that some just don’t free-ride off of others.
I’ve long been an advocate for the provincial government being the one to decide the parameters for the rules that govern what could be built in a low-density zone or medium-density zone. That includes things like minimum lot widths, setbacks, height limits—with the roles of municipalities being to decide which zones go where.
In other words, I think that the province should decide on the color of each of the crayons and the municipality decides where to use each color.
Cara Stern: That would make it much easier to get more competition in development, which is something we always want. You don’t have to go back to the drawing board for designs every time you want to build in a different municipality, even if they’re super close to one another. It’s basically getting rid of inter-city trade barriers.
Right now every city has an incentive to let the next city over absorb the growth while keeping their own neighbourhoods frozen because it’s popular with the constituents who are there right now. And that’s not fair for the surrounding communities either.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think there’s a lot of benefit in that kind of regulatory harmonization. Have the rules be the same in Cambridge as in Mississauga and Kitchener and so on. When it comes to low-density zoning in particular, I’d like to get away from talking about height limits and unit maximums entirely and have the provincial government enact something called form-based zoning.
This is what it means: building codes across Canada distinguish between large buildings, which are governed by Part 3 of the building code, and smaller buildings, which are less than four stories and under 600 square meters of floor space, governed by Part 9.
When it comes to low-density zoning, I think the rules should be simple: In any low-density neighbourhood, you should be able to build any purely residential unit that’s covered by Part 9 of the building code, so long as you’re meeting setback and lot coverage ratio requirements.
It strikes me as incredibly odd that both the building code and zoning rules define what low-density housing is, but their definitions aren’t the same. You can have buildings that are considered low-density in zoning but not in the building code, or vice-versa. It makes no sense, and it’s just pointless red tape.
Cara Stern: Is it bad that my reaction to hearing you say that is: “Hahaha, municipal government making it easy, making simple building codes! That’s hilarious!” Imagine if they would do that. That’s never going to happen, Mike. Come on.
Mike Moffatt: Well, it’s not going to happen unless we try. And that’s again why I think the province has to lead on this.
Cara Stern: They just need to make it easier to build. Stop layering definitions like that. I didn’t know that was a thing, but that makes a lot of sense. Why double up like that? Why confuse people with that?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, exactly. Why have two different sets of rules trying to govern the same thing?
So next on my list is to make blanket upzoning an even bigger requirement in federal agreements with provinces and municipalities, like infrastructure agreements and perhaps the next generation of the Housing Accelerator Fund.
Cara Stern: I do like the idea of the federal government using their money as leverage because it can work. But what we did learn from the Housing Accelerator Fund is that it isn’t working.
Cities took the money and made the promises, and some just didn’t follow through. So I’m only on board with this if there are actual clawback mechanisms—not just losing future funding, but maybe you have to actually give back money that you took if you don’t follow through. That gives them real consequences for backing out and maybe that’ll deter them from doing that.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I think I’m with you on this one. I’m a bit torn on it. I do think that if the federal government is going to give money to other orders of government, it has every right to ask for something in return. It should attach strings. But given how small the penalties were for non-compliance under the Housing Accelerator, I really don’t have a lot of faith that the federal government will strictly monitor and enforce those agreements. So I’m kind of meh about this one.
I’ve got one last one for you. Here’s what this is trying to solve: right now we’ve got municipal governments who are refusing to expand urban growth boundaries for very good reasons. They want to avoid sprawl. They make arguments that we can’t sprawl, so we should build infill instead. And then they refuse to implement the policy reforms that are actually needed to build infill.
They use infill as an argument not to expand out, and then they don’t allow for the infill to be built, and we find ourselves in a housing shortage.
In my view, municipalities can’t have it both ways. So I say let the voters decide. Have a referendum and have two options on the ballot: Option One: blanket rezoning. Option Two: urban growth boundary expansion. Make it clear to the voters the financial cost of each and let them choose, instead of having this idea where we can have our cake and eat it too, where we can block everything and still have housing be affordable.
Cara Stern: No, I hate this option. I’m not a fan of referendums because you’re basically asking the public to get up to speed on a topic they may know nothing about and make this giant decision that I think is better off left to the experts.
I suspect the answer to this referendum question would be sprawl every time because you’re asking people to vote on something that sounds abstract and threatens their current neighbourhood versus sprawl, which happens way over there, not in my backyard.
The same people who have the time to show up to public consultations to block housing would be campaigning on this one, convincing people their own neighbourhoods will change for the worse if infill was allowed.
Although I’m thinking back to when Hamilton decided to do a public consultation on this. They asked, “Do we want to expand our urban boundaries or do we want to do some infill?” and the public consultation came back and they decided let’s go with infill—but they were like, “Infill over there where no one lives right now, as long as we’re not touching our neighbourhood.” But I also think that when you’re doing it, you have to make it clear that every neighbourhood has to be upzoned. It can’t just be “over there” where the city is not as built up yet.
Mike Moffatt: Well, absolutely. And the suggestion is blanket upzoning. I get the idea of letting the experts handle it, but my point is the experts aren’t handling it. Again, they’re both blocking expanding out but also blocking infill. So basically nothing’s happening.
I get the reservations about it. I kind of like it mostly because it’s kind of a trollish idea, but yeah, it’s not going to happen. So I don’t think we really need to worry about it, but I like anything that makes the trade-offs explicit because right now we’re kind of assuming they don’t exist.
Cara Stern: A lot of times, housing advocates will talk about how we have to decide either “tall or sprawl.” And I think that what we’ve decided is “not at all” right now. And that’s not worked out very well. So, yeah, if people understood that there actually had to be a trade-off and if there was some way to enforce it, that would be great too.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. Because I just feel like we’re ragging the puck a lot of times, going back to our hockey metaphors here, and that’s a problem.
I will say that ultimately, though, I think blanket rezoning will only ever happen if supporters of the ideas can win hearts and minds of the general public. That’s the only way you get sustainable change.
In my view, how we get there is not by couching the discussion in terms of sacrifice and what it does for other people, but rather the benefits of blanket rezoning for existing residents in the neighbourhood.
Blanket rezoning gives them downsizing options while still allowing them to live in the neighbourhood they love. It makes it easier for kids to stay in that neighbourhood and raise kids of their own, so Grandma and Grandpa actually get to see their grandchildren. I think that’s the only way we get sustainable policy change—not to couch it as sacrifice, but going, “No, this actually improves your life and this is why we should do it.”
Cara Stern: It’s unfortunate you always have to convince the “haves” to be on board with that to see change, that we can’t just be like, “Hey, this is the thing to do that’ll make it better for society.” But I get that people vote for what makes them personally benefit a lot of the time.
Mike Moffatt: And I thought you said “Habs.” And I think both Oilers fans and Flames fans can agree we don’t want to do anything for the Habs.
Cara Stern: Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.
Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about the Flames beating the Oilers in 1986, please send us an email to [email protected].
Cara Stern: It was so long ago, it doesn’t even matter! I wasn’t even born then!