EDMONTON RESIDENTS EVICTED BY FEDS FROM AFFORDABLE GRIESBACH RENTALS
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Rows on rows of aging red brick townhomes sit around a quiet grassy courtyard in a residential area of north Edmonton. Empty, lifeless.Until a few months ago this part of the Griesbach neighbourhood was bustling with activity: groups of children playing and roaming the vast green space, birds singing, adults walking dogs after work.
One of these townhouses was Laidler’s home for more than a decade.Hers and 173 other families were evicted by their landlord, federal Crown corporation Canada Lands Company, by the end of March. They had about two years’ notice to leave.“Now it’s just nothing.”A few blocks away there is still life, for now, closer to the neighbourhood’s northeastern edge. Families there rent duplexes, bungalows and townhouses in a sprawling 1950s-era suburbSoon they’ll have to leave, too.
Bulldozers are set to raze to the ground a total of 518 homes, many of which were originally constructed as military housing units for a Canadian Forces base and later rented to the public at below-market rates.
Canada Lands is making the final push to complete its award-winning urban village in Griesbach. It plans to sell these lands primarily to private homebuilders, hoping to have 2,150 new homes built in this corner of the neighbourhood within the next few years. The federal government reaps all the profits from the land sales.
This redevelopment comes as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government embarks on plans to build homes on “every possible” site of public land in Canada to improve housing supply and affordability.
Canada Lands is meant to build 29,200 new homes in the next five years across its properties, nationwide, with new direction from the federal government in the last year to have at least 20 per cent “affordable housing” for rental or purchase.But completing this vision for Griesbach comes at a cost. About 2,000 people will have lost their homes in the end, demovicted — or evicted for a demolition. A working-class community and its history risk being forgotten.The story of Griesbach can be seen as one of gentrification where people with lower incomes or minority groups are displaced in the process of neighbourhood revitalization.To the displaced families, the plan exposes gaps in the federal government’s response to the housing crisis. It raises questions about the best use of public lands and illustrates what happens when increasing the future supply of homes the middle class and families with higher incomes can afford to buy is prioritized over preserving existing homes less wealthy Canadians can afford to rent.
‘Uprooting a family’
Laidler cried for two hours the day she moved out in January. Two weeks later, it still hadn’t sunk in that she had been forced to leave her home of 12 years.
“If I was driving home from work, I had to physically set my GPS to take me home properly or I would drive to the old place,” she says. “And then you realize you’re on the wrong turn, and you feel sad. You’re not living there anymore.“It’s a major loss of who you are — your home is a major part of who you are. It’s uprooting a family.”Standing outside her old three-bedroom townhome months later, she remarks how similar — and how different — it feels to be back.For the most part, the buildings look the same, though they’re empty. Curtains or wooden boards cover ground-floor windows now. Gone is the mailbox, and the tree in her front yard where the family would watch blue jays nesting every year. The tiny sapling that grew two storeys through a grate by her back door has been cut down.“It’s very jarring to see,” she says.
A wave of mixed feelings washes over her as she looks at chalk drawings on the back patio fence — a smiley face, a tree, and rainbows scrawled by her young “rainbow-obsessed” daughter. She misses the community, the green space, the school within walking distance, the affordable rent.
“Everyone looks out for one another — there’s notices about crime or potential crime, notices about someone needing a bike for their daughter,” she says. “There were always groups of children playing together all over the place.”
Old and new Griesbach
The lookout atop the hill of Griesbach Park is a window onto the past and future and a neighbourhood divided by class.
To the south and west, smoothly paved roads and sidewalks cross through a clean, well-maintained contemporary neighbourhood. It’s filled with hundreds of closely-spaced, two-storey homes with white trims, some row housing, and a handful of three-storey luxury homes that back onto the man-made Maple Leaf Pond. Most residents are homeowners.
As of late July, the average home sale price was $525,000, according to Liv Real Estate.
This is the multi-award-winning Village at Griesbach, a new, walkable urban village with a suburban feel, in which new homes have been mixed with some of the original — refurbished — military homes.
It’s a master-planned community developed in phases since the early 2000s. Monuments, street names and placards in parks commemorate the area’s military history throughout.
Named after First World War veteran and former Edmonton mayor Maj-Gen. William Antrobus Griesbach, the area began to host a Canadian Forces base in the 1950s. Four decades later, the National Department of Defence started relocating to other bases, eventually deeming the entire 250 hectares surplus and selling it to Canada Lands in 2003.By 2012, after several years of development, the Edmonton Journal found a “remarkable transformation” in the area, which had “blossomed into a modern urban community that is leading the way in innovative design and sustainability.”But it’s to the northeast where more of Griesbach’s past is still present.In this corner, among 65 hectares of public land, many of the original 1950s-era duplexes, bungalows and row houses remain amid swaths of large, grassy yards.Although they’re said to be in poor condition, hundreds of these former private military quarters (PMQ) and officer housing units — the majority with three or more bedrooms — have been rented to the public for more than 20 years. It’s a community of renters in a time capsule of a post-war suburb.
Whose history is preserved?
And yet, despite Canada Lands’ stated desire to preserve the neighbourhood’s legacy, the stories of its more recent tenants will likely be forgotten when the area is redeveloped.
“They want you to know about the history of this land, and they want you to know about who was here before you. Unless you’ve lived in these,” Laidler says, referring to the townhomes set for demolition. “This community had such a life beyond when it stopped being used for military housing. And we’re just being erased from that.”
Zowie Zielinski, another former tenant, shares some of Laidler’s feelings of affection for the community, and of loss. For her, when she moved out of her three-bedroom townhouse on March 15, she left behind the home where she built a life with her daughter for nine years.
“I was really sad because my daughter, we had so many memories there. And they just killed it. Just so they can make money so they can build fancy homes.”
Redeveloping the northeast corner of Griesbach is the last stage of fulfilling Canada Lands’ vision for the community. The final push has three phases. The first could begin as early as this year, displacing 174 families from that section.
Families living in the second and third construction phases await their own eviction notices. They have two to four years to find somewhere else to go.Although some renters insist the structures can be repaired and salvaged, the Crown corporation’s report to parliament last year declared that the housing stock had “reached its useful life.” The report said the Crown corporation is committed to replacing 518 units at “similarly affordable/attainable rates.”Canada Lands spokesperson Manon Lapensee declined to elaborate on what’s wrong with those homes, only saying they require “constant investment and effort to maintain” and the 70-year-old underground water and sewer systems need to be replaced.The displaced renters don’t have any guarantees they can return.
Panicked search for a home
Tenants forced to leave Griesbach were encouraged to reach out to a “transition coordinator” for help finding alternative housing, provided by Westcorp Property Management Inc. which operates Canada Lands’ rentals.
But even so, those who spoke with Postmedia couldn’t find anywhere else to rent for the same price.
Laidler says the transition coordinator wasn’t helpful — she was given a “laundry list off the internet” which didn’t clarify which homes had three bedrooms and were pet-friendly.So she started searching on her own. Every listing seemed to be snapped up before she could tour it. Laidler wondered what she would have to give up — location, quality, or cost — to find a home.“You can feel that you are one of hundreds of people looking for something, and everybody’s trying to find the cheapest thing the fastest,” she says. “Until we got the keys to our new place, there was that feeling of, ‘What if something happens? What if this gets rented out from under us?’“People shouldn’t have to feel that panic.”Zielinski, like Laidler, was also initially optimistic about the transition coordinator but ended up disappointed. She wanted to be put on a waitlist to move into a home in a later phase of Griesbach’s redevelopment but says she never heard back. A single mother with a disability, Zielinski found the search especially difficult because of her pets — two dogs, two cats and a rabbit.
Housing costs for both families ultimately went up substantially after they were demovicted.Laidler now pays $1,525 monthly for her townhouse in Carlisle, up from $975 in Griesbach. Zielinski pays $1,600 to rent a townhouse in Clareview, up from $1,100 in Griesbach including pet fees — and she had to give up her rabbit.Of the 174 families who occupied the red brick townhomes, 80 moved into other Griesbach rentals to be demolished in later phases, says Wanda Bone, Westcorp’s director for residential property.Canada Lands acknowledges rents in northeast corner are “low end of market” in the 2023 report: on average $1,340, $1,105 and $1,150 for four-, three-, and two-bedroom units, respectively, as of April 2023.
Low-cost rentals lost
There are few, if any, publicly-available rental homes as affordable in Edmonton as those in Griesbach facing demolition.
Postmedia reviewed six rental-listing websites and could not find any four-bedroom homes available for similar rates. In the entire city, there were just two similar homes with three bedrooms available.
In many cases, renters in the northeast corner are paying less than rents that can be charged in new “affordable” rental housing funded by federal dollars.Canada Lands says the supply of affordable homes will increase over time — a target of 1,250 for the entire Griebach neighbourhood, including 430 in the northeast corner.However, how many new homes will be built to reach that target, and how affordability is defined, are questions that still linger.
The Crown corporation claims to have already “enabled” 600 affordable units in Griesbach. Postmedia could verify only 234 homes with any affordability component: some CMHC-funded units up to 80 per cent of median market rent, while others are more deeply subsidized. The other existing “affordable” homes were supported with CMHC’s MLI Select loan program, but CMHC and Canada Lands did not provide details.
In addition, more land has been made available for a 45-unit rental townhouse complex with at least half the units deemed “affordable.”
Gentrification on public lands
How changes in Griesbach are unfolding, and the impact on renters, isn’t a surprise to urban planner Christian Parr.
He studied Canada Lands’ Garrison Crossing redevelopment in Chilliwack, B.C. and thinks Edmonton is facing similar gentrification because of work by the federal housing developer.
Canada Lands began developing Garrison Crossing into an urban village in the mid-2000s which, like the Village at Griesbach, won many awards for its high-quality homes and neighbourhood design. Former military homes were rented to the public before tenants were demovicted.
Parr found that by 2016, compared with the renters living there before redevelopment, Garrison Crossing’s newer residents typically earned more money and had higher levels of education than typical for Chilliwack — characteristics of “state-led gentrification efforts and gentrified neighbourhoods,” he wrote for in his 2024 masters thesis for Simon Fraser University.
While he thinks Garrison Crossing is “one of the best” planned neighbourhoods in Canada, he considers it a failure. “If you built something beautiful, but you excluded so many people from it, then you failed.”
Canada Lands is creating “gateless gated communities” because of its mandate to make money for the federal government through land sales, says Parr. His own family, too, was displaced through the Garrison Crossing redevelopment, and he thinks the Crown corporation should be held to a higher standard.
“I don’t want people to be kicked out of their homes where they’ve made their lives so that the federal government can get an extra couple of bucks. That’s not acceptable for me,” he says. “As an agent of the federal government, they should give a crap about the people that live there first.”
Protecting renters as displacement increases
University of Alberta professor Joshua Evans, who runs the school’s housing solutions lab, expects renters will be displaced more frequently in Edmonton as the number of “naturally occurring” affordable rental homes disappear.
Much of what’s being demolished in Griesbach is the so-called “missing middle” housing, which is “so coveted” in Edmonton, Evans says.
Ironically, one reason the city revamped its zoning bylaw last fall was to encourage more of this type of housing to be built. But Evans says that bylaw, along with Edmonton’s stock of rental buildings aging, could make displacing renters through demovictions more common.
He considers Griesbach an “important test case” and an opportunity for Canada Lands to be innovative in how they ensure tenants’ rights are respected.
“I think it’s going to be revealing about what kinds of protections exist in our province, how seriously all levels of government take this kind of redevelopment and its impact on residents, and what kinds of changes might proceed.”Evans doesn’t think giving renters notice of eviction is enough, particularly with rents increasing.“In a human rights-based framework, (Canada Lands) has a responsibility here, as does the federal government, to ensure that these kinds of projects don’t displace people into worse situations or homelessness.”What’s happening in Griesbach highlights “major gaps” in legal protections for renters in Alberta, he says, such as a lack of a right to return if a building is renovated or rebuilt, and no limits on rent increases.
Average Edmonton rent up 14 per cent
In fact, rents in Edmonton are rising faster than any other large Canadian city for six months in a row as of June.
Rentals.ca found rents went up an average of 14 per cent in the last year. The average rent in August was $1,996 for a three-bedroom unit, $1,762 for two bedrooms, and $1,424 for one bedroom — hundreds more than the average rents in the northeast quadrant. Vacancy rates around Griesbach are also extremely low at 0.3 per cent for the Castle Downs area, according to CMHC’s most recent data for that zone.
Jim Gurnett, an advocate with Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, agrees with Evans that more “fairness” is needed to balance the rights of landlords and renters. He thinks Canada Lands should ensure the people being displaced are given somewhere to live for the same price.“Housing has to be seen as a shared obligation of all of us,” he says.Gurnett thinks the plan for Griesbach is a “backwards approach” that he might expect from a for-profit company, but not from the public sector on public lands.“We should be demanding that a federal government that can be so bold as to pass legislation saying ‘we believe in the human right to adequate housing’ — we should not tolerate it going into an area of housing it owns and developing it in a way that contradicts that.”Public Services Minister Jean-Yves Duclos says Canada Lands assured him there will, in the end, be more affordable homes in the neighbourhood than existed previously.
“This cannot be funding of luxurious condos.”
The 2019 National Housing Act declares adequate housing a fundamental human right. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this year promised a renters’ bill of rights and funding to help renters fight evictions.
Asked if the federal government is then hypocritical with its treatment of renters in Griesbach, Duclos says he expects Canada Lands’ housing coordinator to work with Edmonton agencies to help evicted renters.They need to be treated with the “compassion and care and support that they deserve,” he says, adding “I’ll be there to make sure that (Canada Lands) is not only understanding it, but also implementing it.”As to why the federal government doesn’t require Canada Lands to ensure equivalent rentals are offered to evicted renters, Duclos insists “that’s what (Canada Lands) is intending to do” by collaborating with other agencies.
Farewell to a rental community
Mike McGinnis and his partner Roxy Doctor plan to stay in their detached single-family red brick house, in the former officer’s quarters, for as long as they can in northeast Griesbach. Their home is in “stage three” of the redevelopment area.
Moving back to the neighbourhood in 2018, McGinnis felt like he was coming home. A self-described “base brat,” he lived in Griesbach for a time as child and wanted a similar experience for his family.
“There was a sense of familiarity,” he says, speaking about his return. “We got to know the neighbours, much like as if it were still a PMQ within months of coming in.”Their home is old, but inside the hardwood floors and interior appear to be mostly well-maintained, and well-decorated. It’s warm, inviting, and spacious: three bedrooms, a den, a large basement and backyard, with a long driveway. Rent is $1,715 per month.
Doctor beams as she describes her love for their home and the community, the neighbourhood’s “free-range children” as she calls them, who roam the neighbourhood in groups on summer evenings and after school.
“I have never, in any community I have ever lived in, met nicer folks.”
McGinnis doesn’t think Canada Lands realizes what they created when they opened up military housing to the public over the last two decades.
“I don’t think they understand that they set up a permanent rental community. I think to them, it was just a transition project … In the meantime, it’s been 10 to 15 years now that this has been a rental community.“When people have built lives here, I think that they probably should have invested more, and … (focused on) smooth transitions — some sort of an equivalent offering in a new place — even if it was going to be more expensive, even if was going to be different.”But the couple is realistic about the future.McGinnis, a contractor, knows despite having built homes in the newer part of Griesbach, he can’t afford to live in any of them.Renting an apartment somewhere else in Edmonton is likely in their future, but it’s not ideal. For McGinnis, leaving Griesbach will mean losing a way of life.
“What we represent is kind of like a disappearing lifestyle in the rental market. There’s a really American Dream feeling about renting and living on this street with my neighbours,” he says.
“I feel this was my taste, in my life, as to what that’s like.”
Story by: Edmonton Journal
