Earlier this summer, Naomi Bell and Stephen James moved their young family into their newly built, 1,900-square-foot home in Alpine Park, a new greenfield community in southwest Calgary – but this wasn’t their first choice.
“We never thought we would move to a suburb, because we don’t appreciate car culture, which is really big in Calgary,” Ms. Bell says, emphasizing the importance of living within walking distance from shopping, restaurants and parks, as the family did in Calgary’s Beltline.
“We were living in a 1,100-square-foot condo with our two sons, who are now aged seven and five, so we were starting to think that we needed a little bit more space.”
With a budget of $750,000, Ms. Bell and her husband began the search for a larger home in the spring of 2023, when the benchmark price of a detached home in Calgary’s inner city was $806,200, an unattainable price-point for the couple.
“We weren’t sure about what to do, because we were priced out of the inner city,” says Ms. Bell, who works as a school teacher. “But then we found Alpine Park, and we started looking into the new-urbanist principles, and the fact that everything is only a six-minute walk from the lot that we chose: grocery, services and everything – that really appealed to us.”
With a master plan designed by Peter Calthorpe, a founding member of the Congress of New Urbanism in Chicago, the new neighbourhood’s layout and human-scaled streets favour walkability, connectivity and green open spaces, unlike a conventional suburb. Combined, these attributes can encourage social interaction, a decisive aspect for Ms. Bell and Mr. James.
“We moved here in June, but I feel like in such a short amount of time we’ve already met many people,” Mr. James says, pointing at how the location of their porched home, fronting into a park, has been essential to foster a sense of community.
“Every time you walk out the door, you run into somebody you know,” he says. “For me, that’s the best part of living here.”
When built-out, Alpine Park is expected to accommodate 10,000 residents in a variety of housing types that range from laned single-detached homes and townhouses, to condos in mixed-use buildings, reaching an estimated density of 27 dwellings per hectare, or seven units above the minimum required by the City of Calgary.
“You still need a car to get to our community,” explains Tara Steell, general manager of Calgary land at Dream Unlimited, the developer behind Alpine Park. “But the idea is that once you get to the community, we want you to leave your car in the garage, get out and walk.”
This new approach responds not only to municipal policy changes, but also to the shifting preferences of homebuyers. “We know people are saying that they don’t want the regular suburban community,” Ms. Steell says. “For those customers it’s really about front-porch living, and when we opened during COVID, we saw that people were desiring that. Our job, when we were putting together the community plan, was to ensure that we were fostering as many connections between the neighbours as we could.”
Alpine Park isn’t an isolated case in Alberta.
In response to updated policies, changing lifestyles and rising housing costs, greenfield development in the Prairie province is slowly shifting from a car-dependent, cookie-cutter model devoid of character, toward a more compact, people-centred form.
In St. Albert, a bedroom community northwest of Edmonton, another greenfield development has forgone the large homes with backyards and double-car garages to favour a stronger sense of community.
With a density of 80 dwellings per hectare, twice as many as required by the City of St. Albert, Midtown offers a variety of housing types and tenure choices that cater to a broader range of lifestyles than a typical suburb.
“A community requires a thoughtful mix of types of housing, so we have townhouses, stacked townhouses, all the way to mid-rise buildings,” says Paul Lanni, president and CEO of Averton, Midtown’s builder. “We also have different user groups: first-time buyers and young families, as well as empty nesters and seniors.”
Averton’s most recent venture not only strives to provide ready access to green space amidst a dense urban environment, it also aims to create a vibrant social scene by weaving in an assortment of parkettes and commercial areas throughout the neighbourhood.
“As more people start to live in the community, then the case gets made for commercial amenities, as well as future parks,” Mr. Lanni says. “We have plans for an off-leash dog area, trail connections, and even community gardens – that will really speak to the lifestyle that people are looking for right now.”
According to Mr. Lanni, buyer preferences in the Edmonton region are changing, and instead of a large house with a backyard, people want smaller, energy-efficient homes. For this reason, Midtown obtained BUILT GREEN® Community certification, a first in Canada, which requires new developments curb greenhouse gas emissions by introducing energy- and water-saving measures, increasing density, and reducing car dependence.
“It’s not just about energy efficiency,” Mr. Lanni says. “It’s also about the sharing of open spaces and the quality of life that we’re able to derive from the way we’ve developed a community, because we know that’s also part of what people are interested in.”
However, even if Alberta’s largest cities succeed in enabling the creation of dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods that foster walkability and social interaction, most residents continue to depend on their private vehicles to move around, and the environmental and fiscal costs remain high.
“Suburban growth is fundamentally unsustainable,” says David Gordon, a professor of planning at Queen’s University, adding that redeveloping existing neighbourhoods is the most responsible course of action.
But as cities scramble to accommodate a growing population, greenfield developments that follow new-urbanist principles are a better alternative to the conventional suburb. “A denser greenfield community, more walkable, with a better variety of units and a mix of land uses is better than comparable suburbs,” he says, because this helps reduce the number of car trips for nonwork related activities. “Schlepping the kids to soccer, driving them to school, to play dates – all those nonwork trips pollute just as badly as the journey to work.”