Anne is an urban planner who is passionate about building an equitable city that serves all residents. Following an undergraduate in international development and economics, she went on to complete a masters degree in urban design. After ten years of studying and working abroad, Anne was thrilled to return to her hometown of Edmonton in 2012. She spent seven years at the City of Edmonton in a variety of roles, including leading the Jasper Place Area Redevelopment Plan and co-managing the Zoning Bylaw team. Anne currently works as Director of Strategic Initiatives with the Right at Home Housing Society and is advancing a range of new affordable housing projects across Edmonton.

What steps do you believe are necessary for Edmonton to achieve balanced growth between greenfield and infill development as outlined in the City Plan?

I believe that balancing our growth between greenfield and infill development is one of the most important factors in the sustainability of our city. Infill development allows us to make more efficient use of our existing infrastructure, helping to keep the city’s operating costs lower and making us more climate resilient. Well-managed greenfield development can also help us maintain housing affordability and build complete communities that can be designed to be resilient in the future.

Because the majority of our growth still occurs in greenfield areas, one of the most important steps in achieving balance is to remove barriers to infill. Replacing outdated neighbourhood plans with more robust district plans is a key step in this process. I believe that the district planning framework must clearly highlight infill opportunities to provide clarity to both community members and industry. Zoning Bylaw Renewal is another essential process for streamlining infill development, a project I’m proud to have helped initiate. I believe it’s also essential that we create more predictability and cost-share measures in regards to off-site levies and infrastructure upgrades, discussed further below. This includes revisiting existing standards to ensure they remain relevant and reasonable. There is also still a gap in development permit approval times between infill and greenfield development that needs to be closed in order to enable a better balance.

Part of creating that balance also means ensuring that all future planning aligns with the City Plan’s policies. That will involve careful consideration when authorizing new statutory plans, and requiring substantial completion of developing areas prior to allowing plans for undeveloped land to be approved. We also need to ensure that future greenfield plans will result in communities that are developed to be resilient to future change, including housing options to address neighbourhood life-cycles, a mix of land-uses, and a diverse and connected transportation network. 

How will you support Edmonton’s competitive advantage and market affordable housing? How do you see fees, levies, taxes and municipal cost control playing a role in housing affordability? Note: CHBA-ER refers to “market affordable housing” as housing that is market priced and meets the general requirements of affordability based on household income. Market affordable housing may include market rental housing and market home ownership.

Housing affordability is an issue that’s incredibly important to me. As an employee of the Right At Home Housing Society, a non-profit housing provider, I have an intimate understanding of how housing affordability impacts all of us. One of the most important things the City needs to do is reduce the cost of regulatory processes that add time to projects but add no value to our communities.

Fees, levies, and taxes need to be predictable and clearly linked to their purpose. I believe that it is unfair for levies to be making up general tax revenue shortages. This is true for all types of development, but is particularly important when it comes to ensuring housing affordability. There needs to be a clear and demonstrable rationale for fees and levies that is directly related to municipal costs and impacts associated with new development. We also need a fairer split in taxes. The significant increases in commercial property tax that have recently been imposed have had a hugely negative impact on all residential landlords. These costs erode housing affordability and are often passed on to the renter, who may already be living on low income. As a non-profit housing developer, I’ve seen these impacts first hand and they are troubling. I'm committed to finding a better balance. 

What steps do you believe are necessary to reduce red tape and support business investment in the residential construction industry?

The Zoning Bylaw Renewal process is the most important initiative happening right now to radically shift our regulatory process towards reducing unnecessary regulations that get in the way of providing well-built communities. Completing this project and ensuring that it results in significant change is the best way we can reduce unnecessary red tape for the residential construction industry. I believe in the importance of targeted and intentional regulations to help us build the well-designed cities we want, but so many of the current regulations don’t add value or improve quality. One of the best examples of this type of no-value-ad regulation was minimum parking requirements. I’m proud to have led the project to remove these requirements from Edmonton’s Zoning Bylaw.

Enabling more efficient reviews of new plans, rezonings, and development permits reviews are also incredibly important to ensuring we have well-built communities. Development Service’s Business Transformation project has also been a positive approach in streamlining DP applications, and I support its continued implementation and monitoring to ensure that the processes developed through it continue to work for the development industry, City staff, and residents.

Do you support welcoming a diversity of housing types throughout Edmonton?

I am a huge supporter of housing diversity and believe that all neighbourhoods need to have a balance of housing types. Housing choice is incredibly important as it creates more resilient communities by lessening the impacts of neighbourhood life-cycles. It also allows us to build more inclusive communities by providing more options for different households and ensuring people can stay in the neighbourhoods they love at all stages in their lives. While I was working as the Senior Planner of the City’s Zoning Bylaw team, I worked to significantly expand opportunities for secondary suites, garden suites, semi-detached and duplex housing, and missing middle housing forms through numerous transformative Zoning Bylaw amendments.

How do you envision City Council expanding infrastructure capacity to support future development as outlined in the City Plan?

As with a number of the items listed above, I believe a rethink in how the City looks at infrastructure requirements is essential to implementing the City Plan. The City needs to explore options for allowing competitive tendering for infrastructure upgrades and hook-ups, and we need to rethink the way we charge for those upgrades. I believe that charging flat fees for developments that go to a general fund would more evenly distribute costs, rather than requiring the first developer in an infill area to make massive upgrades to the city’s deficient infrastructure.

We also need to do a better job of understanding what our capacity requirements are, which is work that both the City Plan and the second Infill Roadmap have identified as necessary. When I worked at the City, I advocated for many years to update the Volume 4 standards, which clearly aren’t reflective of our actual infrastructure needs because the Infill Fire Protection Assessment process so often lessens the requirements. A comprehensive review of our actual infrastructure capacity and needs should be a priority moving forward.

Do you support the goals of the Community Energy Transition Strategy? How do you envision the City of Edmonton achieving these goals?

I am a huge champion of the Energy Transition Strategy and believe it’s vital for us to achieve our goals as a city. The most direct levers the City has to pull in order to achieve those goals are land use and transportation. As mentioned above, enabling more compact development through infill, as well as thoughtful suburban development that includes creating true transit oriented neighbourhoods can help us get there.

The Community Energy Transition Strategy gives us the opportunity to champion a new way of evaluating land use decisions. I’m excited by City Plan policy 5.3.3.3 which states that we should implement Edmonton’s carbon budget through ongoing development decisions, and would love to work with industry and other stakeholders to figure out how we best do this. I believe we need to continue to invest in transit, cycling and walking infrastructure and ensure land use supports this through mixed use districts.

We can also work toward achieving the goals of the Community Energy Transition Strategy through our procurement and assets. We need to speed up the greening of our fleets and use our buildings to prototype deep energy retrofit work. Combined with advocacy work, this will help us inspire all the other investments needed from the rest of Edmontonians to transition to a low carbon future.

Is there anything about your platform that you think CHBA-ER members should know?

Anne has the knowledge and experience needed to make transformative change that will allow us to build communities that are more resilient, efficient, and inclusive. She has direct experience in residential development through her work with Right at Home and a keen understanding of how Edmonton's regulatory system needs to be optimized to create better outcomes for residents, industry, and the City.