Three on the tree. Shifter on the steering column, three gears, no synchro to catch you if you fumble second on a grade. Nobody sets out to learn that anymore. Plenty of Albertans learned it anyway, because that was the truck sitting in the yard and there was work to do.
Getting a house approved in Calgary has taken on some of that character. Not impossible. Just awkward in ways nobody sat down and intended, and everyone has stopped complaining about because complaining did not seem to move it.
What the City’s Own Numbers Say
Calgary publishes its approval targets, and they are worth reading. A multi-disciplinary development permit decision carries a 120 day target from receipt of application. A land use amendment, what most people call a rezoning, carries 180 days. Residential infill decisions target 90. Those are targets, not deadlines, and the distinction matters to anyone carrying financing while they wait.
The appeal side tells its own story. Following the citywide rezoning decision, appeals to the Subdivision and Development Appeal Board climbed sharply, with 85 filed by the end of June 2025 and the bulk of them attached to discretionary use approvals. The average gap between an appeal notice and a merit hearing ran 68 days. Industry estimates put carrying costs around $500 a day per property, which works out to roughly $34,000 over that average wait, before a single decision is rendered.
None of This Was Standard Once
Six months to reach a yes protects no one, and the courts have now confirmed councils own these calls. Red tape rarely arrives in one piece. It accumulates, each layer defensible the day it was added, none of them ever revisited. Nobody drew up a system where a builder waits half a year for permission to start something that takes four months to finish. It assembled itself.
Calgary is still the large Canadian city where a working family has the best shot at a first home, even as condo prices absorb the correction, and that advantage is real. It is also not permanent. Every month added to an approval timeline lands eventually in a purchase price, because carrying costs do not evaporate, they get passed along to whoever signs at the end.
Targets Are Not Deadlines
The fix is not complicated, which is different from saying it is easy. Hard decision deadlines instead of soft targets would force the system to either meet them or explain itself. Alberta has already moved this direction at the provincial level with a 120 day approval standard on its own files. Municipalities could match it.
A city that wants housing supply has to treat approval speed as part of the supply, not as an administrative detail that happens somewhere else. Otherwise the whole thing is just teaching people to drive stick on a hill they never chose.
Should Calgary set hard deadlines on development permit decisions instead of targets?
