A rendering of Attainable Homes' Sunnyside project in Calgary.Keystone Architecture
The rumbling of construction equipment is a constant in Sunnyside, a vibrant neighbourhood in Calgary’s inner city whose historical charm gives way to contemporary urban living. In the middle of May, a parade of bulldozers and excavators beelined to a triangle-shaped parcel adjacent to the Sunnyside LRT station – the affordable homes the City of Calgary envisioned for the roughly 0.90-acre site more than a decade ago are finally becoming a reality.
Since 2012, the strategically located parcel sat undeveloped, as the City of Calgary, the site’s owner, sought for a partner to build affordable housing in a mixed-market project.
It wasn’t until 2023, when city council assigned the property to Attainable Homes, a wholly owned subsidiary of the City of Calgary tasked with building non-market homes for moderate-income Calgarians, that a concrete plan to develop the Sunnyside parcel was finally set into motion, amidst a rental affordability crunch.
Enabled both by council direction and a municipal housing strategy adopted in September, 2023, Attainable Homes’ Sunnyside project has proceeded at an accelerated pace.
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In three years, the housing agency put together a business plan to justify the use of a city-owned parcel to build a non-market rental project, amended the site’s land use to accommodate a six-storey building with no parking, received a development permit to construct 198 apartments, and applied for a building permit whose conditional approval allowed the developer to break ground mid-May.
Leveraging Attainable Homes’ experience with modular construction, as well as $12.5-million in government funding, the Sunnyside building is set to be manufactured off-site. The agency’s choice of a factory-built structure is expected to allow a range of moderate-income households to move into one of Calgary’s most walkable, best-connected neighbourhoods, in the summer of 2027, just 15 months after breaking ground.
“We’re on a warp-speed timeline,” says Jaydan Tait, president and CEO of Attainable Homes. “If this project was done conventionally, it would have taken significantly longer – that’s why it was never developed.”
With a target of enabling 3,000 non-market homes per year, the City of Calgary’s housing strategy was essential to the rapid development of Attainable Homes’ Sunnyside project, Mr. Tait says, as two of the document’s 98 actions specifically call for increasing the capacity of Attainable Homes and Calgary Housing, the municipality’s two housing subsidiaries, with government funding and city-owned land.
Nevertheless, the improvements introduced by Calgary’s housing strategy, alongside provincial and federal funding programs, have been slow to meet the scale of the challenge facing low- and moderate-income Calgarians.
A housing needs assessment compiled by the city in 2025, using 2021 data, estimates an affordable housing deficit of nearly 50,000 dwellings, with one in three tenants in Calgary spending more than a third of their income on rent.
Yet, only 2,823 non-market homes received a development permit between 2023 and 2025.
“Hitting that 3,000 non-market units a year was always an aspirational target,” says Reid Hendry, the City of Calgary’s chief housing officer. “We’re walking that path, and I’m really optimistic and hopeful that as this strategy continues to gain momentum and strength, we will hit that target.”
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Calgary’s aspirations pale in comparison to European jurisdictions, where non-market housing, or housing shielded from a commitment to ever-rising profit, effectively serves a significant portion of the population, rather than only those in the greatest need.
Because the private market typically leaves behind about 20 per cent of households, advocates believe that governments should aim for a similar percentage of non-market housing as a share of the total stock. To achieve this, countries like Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands have implemented strategies that span from zoning parcels for non-market housing and inclusionary zoning, to guaranteed financing via social impact bonds.
“If you look at the European systems, they’re providing affordable housing to up to median-income households,” says Carolyn Whitzman, a senior housing researcher and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. “This creates a critical mass of non-market housing that brings down private rents and house prices by increasing competition.”
In this context, Calgary’s meagre stock of non-market suggests that meeting the strategy’s target is far from a lofty goal.
According to CMHC’s latest social and affordable housing survey, fewer than 15,000 homes in Calgary are non-market. As a result, the waiting lists for deeply affordable housing grow by the hundreds each month, despite minor improvements to affordability.
In April, the wait-list for Calgary Housing’s community housing program reached a record 7,900 households. “That’s only a small segment of the need for affordable housing in Calgary,” says Bo Jiang, interim president and CEO at Calgary Housing. Of the 6,670 non-market homes the agency manages, over one-third serve the low-income households in the wait-list, a share aligned with Calgary Housing’s goal of maintaining a housing portfolio where a third of homes are deeply affordable, 40 per cent are affordable, and 30 per cent are below market.
Enabled by the city’s housing strategy, Calgary Housing is growing its stock of non-market housing. Currently, the agency has 900 non-market homes in the development pipeline, including 176 new homes currently under construction in Midfield Heights, a master-planned community developed by the City of Calgary on the site of a former mobile home park.
The Midfield Heights project is the result of a partnership between Calgary Housing and multifamily builder Rohit Homes.
“Last year, Calgary city council gave us a mandate with a brand new strategic priority: to increase affordable housing supply through a build-buy-partner model,” Mr. Jiang says, noting that this allows the City of Calgary’s wholly-owned subsidiary “to get a project from an idea to actual shovels on the ground in less than a year.”
Together, Calgary Housing and Attainable Homes plan to build an annual 1,000 non-market homes, amounting to a third of the aspirational target set by the city’s housing strategy. Without steady government funding, however, these agencies are unlikely to maintain the building momentum.
“We’re going to do everything we can to maintain the steady push we need for affordable housing,” Mr. Jiang says. “But there could very well be a time when we will not receive the funding that we need – and if that comes, we’ll have to adjust our targets accordingly.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct a quote from Bo Jiang, interim president and CEO at Calgary Housing, referring to a build-buy-partner model for affordable housing.