Infill teardown prices

The argument examined here does its work in a single sentence: a $350,000 house comes down and a $1,000,000 house goes up in its place. It arrives as an objection to the word affordable, and it packs two different assertions into one breath. The first is about a price relationship on a particular lot. The second is about whether the housing built there is affordable to the household the brief names, a hypothetical Edmonton household on the median income, buying.

The brief frozen before this panel ran split them, gave each its own proposition, and fixed the measures in advance. Both came back Not established. That is a statement about Edmonton’s public record, not a finding that the replacement housing is cheap.

What the record can show

Quite a lot, as long as you do not need the two halves joined. The City counts the redevelopment. Its infill annual reports track how the detached stock changes where redevelopment happens: 294 of those houses lost on net in 2024, the losses made up in other forms, and 387 single-detached houses among the 524 dwellings demolished the year before. Both counts sit in the claim record below. Neither report puts a dollar figure against a single property, and neither is built on the permit cohort the frame names.

The City also counts what gets built, though never against what came down. Administration reviewed Zoning Bylaw 20001 after its first year and counted 16,511 units approved across the city in 2024, up 30 percent, two in five of them inside the redeveloping area, much of the multi-dwelling total arriving as eight-unit row housing in the RS zone. That is approvals and a product mix: nothing matched lot by lot, no money figure of any kind. Eight row houses can be worth more together than the bungalow they replaced and less apiece, which is how a per-lot reading and a per-dwelling reading come apart on the same street. That comes from one seat’s reconstruction, which the other two seats contested.

Why matched teardown prices are not published

The failure is a join, not a gap in any one dataset.

• One seat’s tabulation of the open general building permit records has most house demolitions disappearing after 2018, which is why it treated the ten-year permit cohort the brief froze, 2016 through 2025, as beyond rebuilding out of that stream; another seat documented in round two that this reading of the permit records is not established. The development permit stream opens in 2019 and reaches only part of the same window.
• The historical assessment roll carries an account, a year, an address, a legal description, coordinates, the year built, the lot size and one total value. What it withholds is the land and improvement split, how many dwellings sit inside a title, and whether a dwelling is separately titled, three of the fields the valuation rules turn on.
• The two sides of the comparison are different kinds of number. An assessed value, the City says, is a mass appraisal of market value struck on a date the statute fixes, not a price anyone paid. Alberta’s land-title registry hands over a single title at a time, ordered from SPIN2, ARLO or a registry agent, never as an open dataset.
• The run found no published join by its freeze date, 2026-09-01. In August 2026 there was a live request for the City to study how infill bears on property values, and a request is all that source establishes. By its freeze date the run had turned up no matched comparison in print, which is where the search ended rather than proof that none was ever made.

The mature-neighbourhood half of the question has its own problem: there is no boundary in force to draw. The Overlay that once set one lived in Zoning Bylaw 12800, reaching RF1 to RF5 sites inside a mapped appendix under section 814.2, and that bylaw was repealed at the start of 2024. What survives is the City’s open layer of the 111 neighbourhoods the Overlay defined, a list of neighbourhoods rather than the parcel-by-parcel zoning test the office consolidationA convenience copy of a bylaw with all its later amendments merged into one document. The original bylaws on file with the City Clerk govern if the two ever differ. actually wrote down.

The one reconstruction, and why it did not settle anything

One reviewer built the matched set itself rather than report that nothing existed. Working from the assessment rolls instead of the permits, it puts 62.0 percent of 6,603 classified replacement units above the value of the house that stood there before, at a median ratio of 1.222 once both sides are in constant dollars, with the classification inferred from permit counts rather than read off a published field. Read by undivided title the same set gives 93.2 percent, and by lot 99.6 percent, both stronger than the per-dwelling reading.

It did not carry the verdict, for a reason the brief had fixed before anyone saw a result. Some 3,000 of the recent units were never confirmed complete, so the seat’s bounds open out to 42.6 and 73.8 percent, on a denominator the brief’s own discrete-unit rule does not admit. A range that straddles 50 percent is neither Supported nor Contradicted, and the reviewer that produced it said so itself. The other two seats went further in cross-reviewA second round in which each model sees the combined evidence and the other two sets of findings, and is asked to find their errors and its own. Nothing said there can move the finding.More in the methodology, documenting that the reconstruction swaps the permit frame for assessment-detected candidates, infers which dwellings sit on which title, and reports fractional dwelling units, which a self-contained dwelling cannot be. The closest published lot-level work, an independent 2026 analysis of 1,242 lots with a median gross uplift near $1.7 million per lot on 67 rowhouse lots, measures lot totals on a different cohort and cannot be converted into the per-dwelling share the proposition asks for.

The $350,000 to $1,000,000 example was never tested. No address, no source, no property, nothing in the record on how widely it is repeated, and the round numbers were not treated as thresholds.

The affordability test, and where the panel split

The second claim is a model, and the brief says so in as many words: what would it cost a household on the City median income to buy one of these dwellings, at 20 percent down over 25 years, with property tax and a fixed utility allowance on top. It is not what anyone actually paid.

Most inputs to that model are published. Statistics Canada supplies the 30 percent classification, the Bank of Canada the posted five-year rate, the City its residential mill rates, and Statistics Canada an annual household spending table on provincial geography, from which the run read the $377.67 monthly utility allowance. Three inputs are missing. The income figure, a declared $90,000 median household income that puts the line at $2,250 a month, was cited to two Census Profile pages that returned a File not found body when the run archived them, so it rests on the run’s fetch report and on the City’s own affordability report in the registry, which states the same figure. No first arm’s-length sale price could be retrieved for any dwelling in the cohort, and no condominium fee is published for any of them. The registry’s one later income estimate is on economic families rather than households, and it is the run, not Statistics Canada, that reports swapping it in would leave which dwelling types pass unchanged.

Run anyway, the model put 88.4 percent of 3,359 replacement dwellings the seat classed as separately titled at or over the line. One seat called that Supported. The other two in round one did not, on the ground that the denominator is inferred rather than established, that every price in it is an assessed value standing in for a sale price nobody could look up, and that about half the replacement dwellings in the set sit inside single-title buildings and are outside the test altogether. The panel is recorded as Split and the finding rests on round one, where the majority found the record silent.

Two things are worth keeping straight at the end. The City’s own affordability work exists and reaches a different question: on its method, a median-income household could afford benchmark row and apartment product in 2024 and could not afford the benchmark single and semi-detached price of $431,100. And the City’s affordable-housing program definition, set out in its guidebook, covers subsidised, income-tested units, which market infill is outside by construction. Neither one answers what was asked here, which is whether the housing that replaced the houses that came down would clear a 30 percent line. On the public record as it stands, that cannot be answered.