The Main — August 10: A Painful Story in Calgary
City development can be hard to accept when you see the human cost
In April, Calgary went into a Blizzard about a Dairy Queen, the family that owned it and the peculiarities of zoning. This week the story got darker and the soft-serve puns should stop.
At the centre of the story is the Shim family, who bought the Dairy Queen franchise in 2013. In October 2019, the Shims watched the restaurant they’d invested every penny in burn down. Then, this April, the Shims became news as they came up against what was framed by some as a heartless city bureaucracy and a zealous councillor.
In April, readers learned the Shims had submitted a development permit to build a new one-storey Dairy Queen where the old one-storey restaurant had stood — only for the city to deny it because it didn’t fit policies aimed at increasing density in the neighbourhood. As Calgary Herald columnist Licia Corbella suggested in April, Coun. Druh Farrell had intervened by writing to the city’s planning department to push for the permit to be denied because of its lack of urban features (it had a drive-thru and parking, similar but not identical to the original building) on a piece of land that’s close to a future LRT line. Corbella painted it all as a David versus Goliath story with an urban elite twist, evoking the standard nouns for such tales — lattes and gelato.
Our missive on the story was that everyone had a hot take — this is Calgary politics, after all — but nobody’s take had it quite right. Indeed, we talked with one development expert who walked Rage through the error in the reactions and why, when you got into the weeds, the city was going to lose the Shims’ appeal. And we were right. In May, the city lost and the Shims won.
One would assume this meant the Shims could rebuild their Dairy Queen and all would be right again. But that’s not where the story ends. The wrinkle is that the Shims own the Dairy Queen but not the land it sits on. And this week, after all that media attention and social media outraging, the Herald reports that the land where the restaurant once stood is now up for sale, listed at $3 million.
Corbella reported in her April column that the owner of the land is Don Gordon, and that the Gordon family at the time had expressed that they had no interest in being land developers, but merely wanted insurance money to rebuild what was lost previously. The area the land sits on is in Tuxedo Park, which is redeveloping and has seen Calgary focus efforts to build transit-oriented development there. This is a result of a future station for the Green Line at 16 Avenue. The implied subtext is that a developer could see a multi-storey, multi-use building on this parcel of land as a profitable investment.
The hardest part of redevelopment within the established city is that it can price out the mom-and-pop businesses (or residents) that have made our inner cities so diverse and cultured all along. Both Calgary and Edmonton are working to enable denser, more walkable development within the mature city — though some mayoral and council candidates in October’s election believe this is wrong-headed. But as we’ve seen several times in Edmonton, for just one example, the very businesses we think of when we say ‘walkable neighbourhoods’ can end up being shut down once urban redevelopment actually takes hold, thanks to all sorts of factors, cost being a huge one.
It’s sad the Shims appear to have lost their Dairy Queen business. In near every conversation about planning and development, there are people and livelihoods at stake. Policies have a real effect on people. That’s the story that matters. But on the flip side, cities, too, have to redevelop more sustainably for any of us to have a liveable planet in the future. If you want to understand how municipalities can matter when it comes to climate change it’s all about how they use land.
Cities, it seems, are tough places to get right. And it’s only getting tougher.