Julie McLaughlin

Proclaiming a need for more safe, clean affordable housing in Calgary, city council launched its secondary suites grant program in 2009 and later changed land use codes to allow secondary suites (typically basement suites) in most neighbourhoods. But as Gerry Baxter of the Calgary Residential Rental Association says, so what?

There’s no doubt Calgary needs more affordable housing. Statistics Canada has found that the city has some of the highest rents in Canada, averaging $1,040 monthly for a two-bedroom apartment in 2011, and among the lowest apartment vacancy rates (3.4 per cent, down from 5.3 per cent in 2010). While $1,040 is the lowest it has been since 2007, it is still high for the 38,610 households that Calgary’s planning and development office estimates spend more than 30 per cent of their income on housing. City reports warn that if the economy recovers, thousands of new workers are expected to move into the city, increasing the strain on an already tight market.

Secondary suites have always been legal in the areas they were zoned for. However, it’s long been an open secret that they exist city-wide in areas that aren’t zoned for them as well. They were generally tolerated because they are difficult to monitor and they broaden the affordable housing market. Nobody knows how many illegal suites there are in Calgary today, though the city estimates it to be around 40,000.

Trying to convince council to legalize suites across the city was an arduous task. Issues of parking, tenant noise and property devaluation dissuaded many residents from supporting such an initiative in their neighbourhoods. Yet in addition to landlords and potential renters, the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, Calgary Real Estate Board, Calgary Residential Rental Association, Canadian Home Builders’ Association, the commercial real estate development association NAIOP and the Urban Development Institute banded together to pressure council to recognize the benefits of secondary suites and ultimately change the rules.

Council fell short of legalizing suites throughout the city, but in July 2010 council did change the land-use bylaw to allow suites in 11 low-density multi-residential districts that city administrators believed already contained suites.

Conditions inside the properties were secondary, and therein lies the problem. As most renters discover, bylaws and provincial legislation provide little oversight for rented homes. Because the process is complaint-driven, what regulations do exist are not stringently enforced. Despite the pressure to change the land-use bylaw, concerns were focused on how split residences would affect the neighbours, not on how rezoning would affect the livability of a unit.

Baxter says the question has been on his mind since the legalization discussion began.

“Even if you make them legal, all you’ve done is change the zoning.... How does that make my secondary suite safe and clean for tenants?” he asks.

Legalization “will fix the city’s problem, so they don’t have to go out and enforce the illegal suites. But it’s not going to make them any safer than what they are,” he says. Despite how seemingly obvious Baxter believes this point to be, he says it never came up in discussions between the city and stakeholders.

There are certainly rules governing legal suites: smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, a 35-centimetre window in each bedroom, two-metre ceilings, a private entrance, private outdoor space and, controversially, a resident landlord are among the list of requirements a suite must meet to fulfil building and fire codes.

The secondary suite grant program is one means of luring landlords out of the shadows to bring their suites up to code. Grants of up to $25,000 are intended to cover 70 per cent of the cost of developing or upgrading a suite.

An applicant only receives the money once they obtain building and development permits for new suites. An occupancy permit and the final five per cent of the grant is disbursed following city sign-off on electric, gas and plumbing inspections. However, applying for a grant — even if it is to upgrade an existing suite and even if it is denied — doesn’t trigger an inspection. The only way the city can discover a suite is if it receives a formal complaint.

Gail Sokolan, the city’s affordable housing co-ordinator, says the program is a great way to encourage property owners to bring their suite up to current standards. However, her department has received only 161 grant applications to date; not much considering the suspected 40,000 suites in town. It may be a moot point come January if city council refuses to continue the grant program once it expires at the end of the year. The office of land servicing and housing has requested $4 million in the proposed budget to sustain the program past 2012.

Marc Halat, the city’s manager of compliance services, says the workload for following up on complaints is extremely high. Of the 1,075 complaints his office received last year, only about 400 have been addressed. He says the safety of a suite, legal or not, is his office’s primary concern, and he agrees rezoning does nothing to ensure compliance.

“I went into one, the suite was actually lawful, they were allowed to have a secondary suite, but it was so unsafe that despite the fact that it’s allowed in this residential neighbourhood, people living here are not safe. I went down the rail going down the stairwell into the basement; it was falling off. The door was falling off its hinges; broken windows,” says Halat.

Halat says the landlord brought that suite up to code, as do most homeowners when the city comes knocking. Still, he can do nothing about the suites the city doesn’t know about.

Although finding some (certainly not all) illegal suites is as easy as typing “illegal” as the keyword in a search of Kijiji’s real estate listings, regulatory bodies don’t have the resources to inspect rental housing of any kind on a proactive basis.

“If people want to ramp up our resources to address these problems, someone has to pay,” says Halat.

“I had this discussion once with someone from the city,” confirms Baxter. “The response was for the city to be able to try and go out and do that would take longer than the lifetime of the people we already have working here.”

Even the complaint process is flawed, as complaints usually do not come from those familiar with their living conditions. Baxter says a tenant who simply needs an affordable place to live will often put up with a substandard suite rather than make a complaint and risk losing a home.

Currently, both the city and organizations like Baxter’s are banking on education to improve suites and rental homes in general. The Calgary Residential Rental Association offers a regular workshop called Residential Tenancies in Alberta, to teach landlords about housing legislation and best practices. About 300 people have participated in the program since its launch in 2007. Baxter says his office receives fewer calls from confused landlords thanks to the course.

Failing education, Halat believes it’s worth looking at ways to make a landlord pay for the property inspection if they want to stay on the rental market. “That’s a very good deterrent: compliance won’t cost you money, non-compliance will,” he says.