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When it comes to urban planning and densification, Edmonton is quickly garnering a reputation as one of the most progressive in North America, especially as it relates to missing middle types of housing. At the beginning of 2024, comprehensive new zoning bylaws were launched allowing for plenty of change and diversification in the housing landscape.
“Edmonton is very progressive in terms of policy and regulations, but we didn’t get here overnight. It happened slowly and incrementally over time,” says Chelsey Jersak, an Edmonton-based urban planner and founder and principal at Situate Inc. She’s also president of the board of the Infill Development in Edmonton Association (IDEA), an organization that promotes and advocates for high quality infill development.
“In this case, we are talking about the broader context of the term infill — not a skinny house,” says Jersak, who works with developers, homeowners and real estate professionals to educate and guide them through the process of development.
She describes the term “infill” as referring to the process of developing vacant or under-used land within existing urban areas and creating people-centric communities.
The missing middle is a relatively recent buzz term in the urban planning and development world, yet it’s generating plenty of interest.
“Missing middle can mean many, many different things,” Jersak says. “There is a spectrum. It could be ground-oriented — a duplex or a rowhouse. Most specifically, we are seeing what I call an Edmonton special, a row of four townhomes with basement suites.”
Other forms include apartment style three- or four-storey walk-up buildings, live-work options and even medium-height option like an eight-storey housing type — “but, that would be the highest and most intense form,” says Jersak.
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FCX Developments transformed this corner lot in Highpark, Edmonton, with a fourplex. Each has a secondary suite, making for eight units total. Photo by Supplied /Postmedia
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FCX Developments transformed this corner lot in Grovenor, 10363 149th St., replacing a single family home with a triplex. Here, there is a secondary suite attached to each unit. Photo by Supplied /Postmedia
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Alkarim Devani, an educator, developer, guest lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary, studying the missing middle housing type says that within the Alberta context, missing middle housing refers to a gentle, low-density form that exists alongside the single-family home.
These house-scale building options meld seamlessly into existing inner-city residential neighbourhoods and support walkability, locally serving retail and public transportation options.
Contextually and historically, middle housing is not a new building form.
“It just went missing when we saw policy changes in the early 1920s and ’30s that were rooted in socioeconomic and racial segregation,” says Devani. “At that time, most people who were affluent and not of colour could afford to live in single-family homes. By introducing this whole concept of a single-family zone, which was quite foreign at the time, it was a way to keep people apart. Add that to suburban growth, the rise of the automobile and people coming back from the war requiring housing at scale and you have this perfect storm.”
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In Edmonton, conversations around missing middle housing began long before the new zoning bylaws were even contemplated. In 2019, the City of Edmonton set the stage when it launched its Missing Middle Infill Competition, a competition that invited teams to create a multi-unit housing project that embraced the tenants of missing middle design. The city received 30 creative entries with the award going to The Goodweather, a collaboration between Gravity Architecture, Part & Parcel and Studio North.
“These kinds of competitions are excellent for garnering awareness and public interest,“ says Christopher Lemke, founder at Alloy Homes and partner at Part & Parcel, part of the winning team of collaborators. Alloy Homes is a developer and builder in both the Edmonton and Calgary markets and is currently developing an eight-plex type of missing middle row housing project across from Confederation Park in Calgary. Lemke notes that incorporating green space into these type of housing structures is important for good quality of life.
Mauricio Ochoa, founder of FCX Developments in Edmonton and also a board member at IDEA would agree. He is currently developing missing middle housing in some of Edmonton’s most sought-after neighbourhoods. He founded FCX Developments in 2022, and has been developing small parcels of land in Edmonton’s inner-city (Grovenor and High Park), creating purpose built rental projects: four-plex two storey, two-bedroom townhome developments with four additional lower level one-bedroom apartments, for a total of eight units.
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“We’ve chosen to build close to transportation, to LRT stations or future LRT stations and to bike lanes. We’ve had over 60,000 people come to our city in the past year, many who are immigrants and most immigrants can’t afford a car. It takes time to figure it all out in a new country,” says Ochoa, speaking from experience — he immigrated from Columbia 14 years ago.
“Even though we are tackling affordability, we really care about the tenants. There is this misconception that affordable means low-end. Our focus in on the long-term, the materials, the location. We want our tenants to be proud of where they live,” he says. To that end, FCX’s designs are magazine-worthy with Modern Farmhouse exteriors and open-concept interior spaces with plenty of light and good flow.
Jersak says that missing middle housing, in addition to growing in established and mature neighbourhoods, is also clustering around nodes: like NAIT, University of Alberta and the city’s downtown core. Areas like Bonnie Doon, Garneau, Strathcona and North Glenora are really taking off, as are communities along the new west LRT line.
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The impetus behind Edmonton’s rezoning came from its forward-facing vision: to be able to accommodate two million people (almost double the current population) without expanding the city limits, with 50 per cent of that growth occurring in mature neighbourhoods.
“We’re still a long way off,” says Jersak, noting that much of the media attention around infill is controversial. “Often what really gets lost in the conversation is that infill (in the broader sense of the term) is an important solution to some of the problems that we’re facing in terms of where do live, how do we keep housing affordable, how do we ensure that people who live in the neighbourhood can stay there as they age. There are a lot of issues that we are facing and infill does play a really important role.”
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