When Calgary’s main water feeder line broke for the second time in two years, Nathan Hawryluk decided he needed to get more involved. He already had an unusual view of the city’s finances as a planning commissioner, where questions about new neighborhoods and the infrastructure needed to support them regularly cross his desk. Norm talks with Nathan about the “bad Goldilocks spot” behind those numbers, where the city’s obligations and the revenue available to meet them have drifted apart. As Nathan puts it, “Our taxes are too high for people to pay comfortably and too low to actually do the job.”
Hello and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts, where we take a look within the Strong Towns movement at individuals who are taking action in their community to create places that are safer, more livable, more inviting, and have a core financial base for lasting prosperity. Someone who really comes to mind in terms of striving for all of those things is Nathan Hawryluk. Nathan is a resident of Calgary, Alberta. He is on the planning commission and has been a member of Strong Towns for many years. He is also one of the leaders of Strong Towns Calgary, a Local Conversation group that is helping to shift and improve the conversations taking place about Calgary's lasting prosperity and the opportunities ahead. Nathan, welcome to Bottom Up Shorts.
You are also at the top of the leaderboard in the Strong Towns Commons, which is a particularly special place for Strong Towns members to connect, have discussions, share insights, and pass those things along. You also have a really important responsibility as a planning commissioner to think carefully and over the long term about many of the decisions being made about the built environment. Do you want to share about that work as a planning commissioner and some of the ways in which being a Strong Towns advocate has woven its way into the questions you ask, as well as the ways in which you lead those discussions?
Sure. I've been on the planning commission since 2021. It's an appointed role, not elected. Planning commissions vary from city to city. In Calgary, it's a technical review board. It's largely industry-based. I'm in my fifth year, so I will be done by the end of 2027.
Most of the time, what we do is review individual applications. Typically, it's a land-use change. Somebody wants to make a change to what they can do, and here's the application. Administration looks at it and recommends whether we approve it or refuse it, and then we make our own recommendation. Then it goes to council. They are the ultimate deciders of what happens with land uses.
We're authorized to approve outline plans, so where the roads are in new neighborhoods, and also specific development permits. For example, a couple of years ago, we got to review the arena that's being built for the Flames. We spent a couple of weeks reviewing that one and then spent three hours discussing it in a public meeting.
I think the most interesting part is when we get to deal with policy discussions. Unlike some places, we can have closed meetings and sit down and say, "Here's a proposal that's coming in. There's talk of doing this sort of policy change. What would that look like? What would be the advantages and disadvantages?" I find those are the most interesting parts. The applications are the price to pay to be involved in those policy discussions.
Within that context, I think one of the things that stands out in your work, especially the two articles that you wrote for Strong Towns a while ago, is around the question of productive land uses. Your first piece was on how to do the math for non-math majors, and then you wrote about doing the math in Calgary in particular. It's about making it possible for more land within the community to be used more intensively, not just because it needs to be built up, but because it needs to be put to much more productive uses.
Do you want to share how that work on figuring out the ratio of private to public investment in our community also factors into really important decisions around land use and creating opportunities for housing?
I came in and was very excited about that sort of discussion. Pretty early on, I sent an email to an applicant and got the response, "No, that's already been dealt with." Typically, when a new neighborhood comes in, it's council that decides that financial discussion. But it has been useful a couple of times.
There was one proposal a few years ago to add an LRT station along an existing LRT line. It was an industrial-commercial area with one landowner, so we got to talk about real numbers in that case. I got to ask, well, how much infrastructure would you have to spend to build a new station and then run it, and how much private investment would follow with that? Their numbers ultimately were 32 to 132 times as much private investment as infrastructure, compared to our 2.9-to-one in Calgary. That would be pretty good. Even if the infrastructure cost twice as much and they built half as much stuff, that would bring it down to, what, eight to one, which is much better than our just under three.
There have been cases where that has been helpful, but most of the time I find myself turning back to something that John Reuter suggested a couple of years ago, where he talked about how to know when the NIMBYs are right. Picture who would actually use this and who we've heard from in the discussion. Is it the same people who have been heard from for the last 30 years? Then maybe take that with a grain of salt.
Although I'll admit, sometimes it's not just, are the neighbors right or wrong? Sometimes it's, is administration right? Have they made some mistakes or done things that I think don't align with good practices for solid financial resilience?
The way that you put it in your intro in the Commons is, "I'm a stay-at-home dad who loves his town, even when it's infuriating." Do you want to shed some light on your story and what has given you this platform, but also this responsibility where you live?
About 10 years ago, I looked around and said, "I have a little bit of time in the evening," and I joined my community association, a neighborhood group. I ended up being the traffic and transportation person for a little bit, and then the planning person. I don't remember if that's when I stumbled on Strong Towns or which came first.
I like to think of myself as landing in that missing middle group between the founders and the Not Just Bikes people who met Orangeburg and arrived all at the same time. Probably about 2017, I stumbled on Strong Towns and went, "Oh, okay, this explains a lot of things. This explains why things are falling apart in the neighborhood and why we never have enough money to do the things that we would like." It also explained it well enough that I could talk to residents, staff from the city, and almost anybody else in a way that made sense and could raise some useful questions. Have we built a city that we can't afford? And if so, then what?
Strong Towns Calgary has been trying to help adjust expectations and realign mindsets. Do you want to share some of what that work as a Local Conversation leader has meant for you? I think maybe the wisdom-giving opportunity here is around navigating a prominent public responsibility as a planning commissioner while also knowing that the public needs what Strong Towns Calgary can provide.
How do you navigate that? Can you share a little bit about helping and equipping some of your co-leaders to really be the front of Strong Towns Calgary?
Sure. I have been reluctant to get too involved in leading Strong Towns Calgary, but I'll admit, the second time our feeder main broke in two years, which was just a few months ago, I said, "I should probably get more involved with this." It's a good group. We've been doing a bunch of activities. You came out and spoke to Calgarians a few years ago. We did the finance decoder, and then there was an election last year, and we passed on copies of Michelle Durand Woods' "You'll Pay for This" book to everybody who was elected.
I've tried to communicate that there are moments where I will speak for myself in public settings. I have raised the finance decoder in the past, and then one of the councillors talked to the finance team, and they added those indicators to the annual financial report. Sure, it's one page in a 150-some-odd-page document, but I think that's some degree of success. It means that somebody else can look at those numbers and show we're not wrong on that.
I think it's been helpful to remember no one can do this alone. We need lots of people to get involved, so having other people involved is good, and encouraging them to step up. In the last year, somebody came along and said, "I've just recently retired, and I'm looking for something to do. What should I do that would be useful?" It's been really great to be able to say, "You are experienced, and when you show up in a public meeting and say, 'Hi, I used to work in oil and gas,' that gets people's attention in Calgary. People listen." We need a bunch of different people, and it can't just be people like me.
There's an element of coaching people to come off the sidelines in a way that they don't feel like they then got smoked by a Mack truck, but instead that there's a graduated process. I don't know if you've ever tried rock climbing, but it's sort of assuring people, "I've got you on belay. You won't plummet." Yet there's that nervousness that this is new or uncharted territory. I think that's where the Local Conversation is such a key part of normalizing our participation in civic activities that otherwise feel alienating or just become where you go to oppose things. It's about how we create a real hunger and interest in doing things that are really good.
Calgary, to its credit, for those who are less familiar with it, is often defined by sprawling out into the hinterlands. For the first time, I believe last year, the city of Calgary had more building activity take place within the core of the community, or within the inner rings, than at the outskirts. That was a step in the right direction. There have been some regressions and other policy changes that I think are going to make it a little harder to continue to build on that, but at least that dam is being breached in important ways.
If you think of how an avalanche forms, sometimes it actually is just that last little snowflake that lands and causes things to start to come apart. We don't want our cities to come apart, so maybe it's a bad analogy. What we do want is that paradigm shift to occur. Do you have any suggestions? Is there any advice that helped you that you'd love to pass on to others trying to do this work too?
I think it's really easy for people who consider themselves urbanists, and I wouldn't call myself an urbanist. I'm just a person who lives in a city and loves it. But I think it's easy to look for urbanist groups, and sometimes I wonder, especially, why start our own urbanist group? That's sort of a Calgary thing. Every group and everybody wants their own special thing, and sometimes it's useful to look around and say, who's already doing something?
I think Strong Towns' advantage is that it comes at it from the numbers, the math side. When you understand the math, then that explains the interest in bikes, housing, safe streets, and whatnot. I think that can combine and unite other groups.
I also think, frankly, there are other groups that will be very helpful. There are social groups that should exist and will need support and good people to be involved. When somebody is involved, then it gives a chance to say, by the way, here's why things are falling apart, and I do have an answer for that. If you're only talking to fellow Strong Towns people, it's tough to make those connections.
That reminds me, I was reaching out on behalf of Delpop, our Local Conversation group, to realtors in my community because I said, "Look, you're so busy. You also have a lot of people in your office who are distraught because nothing meets their available resources compared to what is available on the market. If you have those people, instead of just sending them off with a lollipop and best wishes, send them to us and help them become advocates." We've not seen the uptake, but I feel that, to your point, there are a lot of unlikely allies in this who are coming at it from slightly different paths, but are realizing we really have to be responsible and grapple with this.
You mentioned water mains that have been very prominent in Calgary because they've been falling apart, and other responsibilities that are still needing to be addressed down the road. In that context, I always like to close with: What is it that gives you hope as you carry on being a Strong Towns advocate?
I think it's seeing people connect those dots. Maybe this isn't the best way to put it, but frankly, our taxes are too high for people to pay comfortably and too low to actually do the job. It's the bad Goldilocks spot.
Maybe when we admit that, it gives us a chance to say, so what? What are we going to do? In the last year, as we've seen more people get involved with Strong Towns Calgary, work together, and be more consistent in what we're doing, there's real power in that. It encourages me to keep going, to know when I can bite my tongue and let somebody else speak, and also know when it's time for me to think as a planning commissioner.
I guess there are moments when it's useful to know whether you should work inside the system or outside of it. At the moment, I have that opportunity to do a little bit of both, but my focus really should be on working in that system to try and improve the discussions that nobody else can have.
That's fantastic, and it really does capture the spirit of why we wanted to do Bottom Up Shorts: to profile individuals who are seeking, humbly, to observe what's going on in their community and take action inspired by ideas of lasting value.
If you are interested in connecting with Nathan, he is very generous with his time and thoughts in the Strong Towns Commons. Commons.strongtowns.org is a fantastic place to connect and to be encouraged by Nathan's contributions there. As always, if you're in the Calgary area or you want to take inspiration from it, check out what Strong Towns Calgary is doing in its work and continued advocacy within the community.
Nathan, thank you for coming on Bottom Up Shorts today. I always say Bottom Up Shorts is how you put on shorts from the bottom up, but shirt doesn't work that way. Great to have you on.
Awesome stuff. Well, folks, take care of your places and continue building those connections. I love Nathan's point about the bad Goldilocks effect: our taxes aren't covering what they need to cover and also feel like they are more than we can manage. In that context, we know there is a path forward. With that, take care and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.