Small business owners and long-time residents of Glenora, two private landowners decided to initiate a rezoning process on their lot within a key corridor just west of downtown Edmonton.

The landowners owned a large lot in Glenora with a house built in 1913. Over 100 years old, the house was in very poor condition and would have been very costly to upgrade and maintain. They decided that the best and most affordable option would be to invest in redeveloping the site as row housing. 

Based on City Plan policy, which encourages higher density development along Stony Plain Road, Situate determined that rezoning the site from the RF1 (single detached residential) zone to the RF5 (row housing) zone would align well with the clients’ intentions for the lot. The RF5 zone would allow an increase in the maximum number of dwelling units on the site from four to eleven.  

A challenging aspect of this project was that the existing house was listed on the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources. The inventory is a list of heritage resources that merit conservation, but have not been formally designated as heritage resources. City Administration does not take into consideration the condition of a structure when making recommendations to Council regarding redevelopment  of buildings on the inventory. For this reason, Situate coordinated an assessment of the house that demonstrated that it could not be salvaged and to emphasize the importance of rezoning to allow for more density along a key LRT route.

Situate’s rezoning application was unanimously approved by Edmonton City Council on September 10, 2021 (see Item 3.34 in the meeting minutes).