For many Calgary homebuyers, how they’re living and who they’re living with is changing. Shifts in Calgary’s housing market, demographics and culture are motivating many homebuyers to opt for multi-generational living.
This approach is a practical, and even preferred, solution for a growing number of Calgarians. Some buyers wrestle with affordability and changing family dynamics, while others find advantages in being all together under one roof.
Many different types of families are making the shift, including adult kids boomeranging back home, seniors moving in with their adult children and middle-aged homeowners caring for both children and elderly parents at the same time. Multi-generational households have special requirements, such as secondary suites, main-floor bedrooms, side entrances and flex rooms, and Calgary developers and city planners are busy working to evolve their offerings and policies to meet the needs of households spanning multiple stages of life.
“I’ve definitely noticed more of my clients looking to buy with family members,” says Sean Hasson, a realtor at CIR Realty. As Calgary home prices have steeply increased, Hasson’s noticed more clients, especially younger people, looking to buy places where they can live with their parents and even their extended family. “People moving here from other provinces are more used to it, because it’s just been a reality for them if they wanted to own a house in those markets. And even people who have lived here for a long time are choosing that option more,” Hasson says.
Hasson’s observation is supported by the most recent federal census, which revealed multi-generational households were the fastest-growing household type in Canada, increasing 50 per cent since 2001.
The biggest factor fuelling Calgarians’ decision to keep it all in the family is the considerable decline in housing affordability since the COVID-19 pandemic. Before 2020, Calgary was a real estate oasis in Canada — a big-city market where a family could afford a good-sized, single, detached home in one of the world’s most-livable cities.
“We’ve had it pretty good for a long time, where you could get into the market a lot easier than markets in B.C. and Ontario,” says Ann-Marie Lurie, chief economist at the Calgary Real Estate Board. “If you think about it, it was only two years ago you could get a home in the range of $500,000.” A rapid rise in interprovincial and international migration to Alberta has upset the balance of supply and demand for all types of housing in Calgary — apartment rentals, townhomes, condos and especially single-family homes, Lurie says.
Recent data on multi-generational housing in Calgary is scarce, says Lurie. The City of Calgary discontinued its civic census program in 2020 due to budget cuts, and now relies on the federal census, taken only every five years, to understand population demographics. The most recent data is from 2021; that census was contactless due to the pandemic and did not ask the same detailed questions on household makeup as the civic census.
What Lurie can track is Alberta and Calgary’s explosive population growth and shifting demographics. According to Statistics Canada, Alberta added 202,324 residents in 2023 — the largest annual increase in the province’s history — with 55,107 of those new residents attributed to net gains from interprovincial migration, a national record. Calgary’s population ballooned from 1.52 million in 2020 to an estimated 1.78 million in 2024. The proportion of Calgarians who are seniors has increased from 10 per cent in 2013 to 13 per cent in 2023, and that figure is projected to rise to 15.5 per cent by 2029.
“Part of the challenge we’ve had over the past two years is we’ve had so many people come here, and we just didn’t have the housing supply, which takes a long time to adjust,” Lurie says.
The adjustment is happening slowly. In 2024, Calgary led six major Canadian cities in total housing starts, and Alberta’s population boom began to stabilize.
But many Calgarians are choosing multi-generational living by preference rather than out of financial necessity. “Helping new or even first-generation Canadians find homes has really been eye-opening to me,” says Hasson. “We do seem to be one of the only cultures that put our parents in old folks’ homes and then just visit them occasionally.”
A 2019 United Nations report showed that living with a child or with extended family members was the most common living arrangement among seniors in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. In Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, by contrast, living with a spouse only was most common for seniors, followed by living alone. The 2021 federal census found that Canadian Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) with the highest concentration of newcomers had the highest proportion of multi-generational households (Abbotsford-Mission, B.C., at 22 per cent of households and Brampton, Ont., at 28 per cent of households, for example).
“We do extensive amounts of research in terms of the market and who the likely home buyer will be,” says Marvin Coronia, senior marketing manager at Hopewell Residential. Coronia says Hopewell’s analysis shows several communities in northeast Calgary are “winding down” when it comes to new home construction. That leaves an available market of South Asian buyers seeking multi-generational floor plans elsewhere in the city.
“We identified a huge opportunity in terms of a more diverse group of buyers than what we would traditionally have. South Asian purchasers are prominent in terms of multi-generational [homes],” Coronia says.
Hopewell has been attracting South Asian buyers to its southeast community of Hotchkiss, which opened in October 2022. The community, now in its fourth phase of construction, will welcome approximately 1,400 residents by the time it is complete.
“We’ve adapted some of our floor plans to accommodate multi-generational needs. Tweaks like adding main-floor suites with full bathrooms and four bedrooms within that space,” Coronia says. “But, on the upper floor, we’ll include a flex space to give the different generations separate spaces within the home where they can have time to themselves.”
Coronia notes that Hopewell is continually working to learn from customers in order to truly accommodate families of all types through design changes to its base plans. He points to the Tilsa floor plan — a 2,200-square-foot layout that can accommodate up to six bedrooms and has a front attached garage. “It has a ton of living spaces for different parts of a multi-generational family,” he says. “But we’ve had purchasers come in who have expressed different interests, like maybe they have a mother-in-law who’s moving in who has mobility challenges, and we need to create [a special] space within the home.”
Coronia says the flexibility of the detached layouts in Hotchkiss is attractive to many buyers looking for multi-gen housing. “Every home in Hotchkiss is developed with a side entrance as part of the home. So, there is the opportunity to develop a basement suite with a separate entrance. You can do a full kitchen suite in the basement and get the home up to code,” he says.
It’s not just builders embracing the development of multi-gen homes. Calgary was one of the first major cities in Canada to allow secondary suites, and city council has been pushing a progressive, and often-controversial, agenda to get them permitted and built for several years. In 2021, council decided to allow secondary suites as a discretionary use in all city districts. This removed the need for long and sometimes emotional council hearings to get a secondary suite permitted and approved. In 2023, The City of Calgary also introduced the Secondary Suite Incentive Program, which provides qualifying homeowners up to $10,000 to build and register a secondary suite on their property.
“Multi-generational housing is one example of people meeting their needs for housing in different ways,” says Stephen Pearce, senior planner with the City. “Part of our evolution as a city has been to provide flexibility in the type of housing that can be built and the ways that you can use that house.” Pearce says the City’s push for densification via secondary suites was initially met with backlash, mainly from inner-city homeowners, but has grown to become accepted, even valued.
“The option to create a space for your adult children or a grandparent makes sense for people as their lives change,” Pearce says. “Secondary suites provide a range of different ways of living together while still having their own privacy, and keeps caregivers close to their families.”
The City further increased homeowners’ ability to create secondary suites with the Rezoning for Housing Bylaw, which went into effect in August 2024. The bylaw allows homeowners to redevelop single-family detached homes into denser housing types, including row houses, duplexes or fourplexes, without having to obtain a land-use redesignation. It also permits both secondary and backyard suites on most residential properties in the city and removes parking requirements for secondary suites.
“It was a difficult policy decision and not popular, but it was super-important to the future of this city and adds a layer of adaptability and resilience in a housing system that is increasingly strained,” says Ward 12 Councillor Evan Spencer. Like Pearce, Spencer says the bylaw gives homeowners more options to add units to their properties and adapt their living situations as they age. He says he and his wife are currently whether to eventually add a secondary unit to their Mahogany property, with his two kids and retirement years in mind.
“Our kids are likely going to helicopter many times and take a long time to leave the nest,” Spencer says. “So, it makes sense to optimize the property for that and potentially last longer on this property as retirees if we’re getting a little bit of income off of it, as well.” Caregiving — either for an aging parent or for young children — is often a consideration for those opting for multi-generational living. The growing senior population (nearly one in five Canadians are 65 or older) can live at home longer than previous generations due to advances in medical care, home care and assistive technologies. Living with an adult child often gives both added comfort, as well as a different view on independence.
More than 80 per cent of COVID-19 deaths occurred at nursing homes or retirement communities in Canada. Years of media coverage stressing those numbers, as well as the isolation and the conditions that were exposed at some of these facilities, have increased societal anxiety about ending up in senior care. A 2022 Retirement and Savings Institute survey of Canadians ages 50-69 found that 72 per cent said they are less likely to use a nursing home post-pandemic.
Seniors being cared for at home is a significant family resource benefit of multi-gen homes. Just as beneficial is the inverse — seniors providing care for their grandchildren. “The child-care component of multi-generational homes is often a big financial benefit for the parents, but also for the grandparents and the kids to spend more time with each other is a big plus,” says Gillian Bell with AURA Real Estate Team. “It’s more of the village raising your kids, rather than the parents alone.”
Bell founded AURA in 2022 with friend and fellow realtor Ali Larsen. With a diploma in architectural technology and a decade as a realtor, Larsen knows what makes a multi-generational home purchase successful. She says it’s important for the two generations buying a home together to clearly communicate expectations and really understand each other’s lifestyles.
“It’s usually the nuclear family living upstairs with all the natural light, while the grandparents are in the basement,” Larsen says. “Understanding that the grandparents still want to entertain and have their own lives is important. Finding a home with a walkout then becomes more of a priority.”
As Calgary grows towards a city of two million, multi-generational homes will play an increasing role in the evolution of its housing mix. They provide cultural vibrancy and affordability, and enhance Calgary’s communities by nurturing the character that makes the city exceptional.
“Character is a concept that is so hard to define, but, ultimately, it’s the people that live there,” says Pearce. “It’s not the buildings. It’s not even how the block is laid out or anything like that. It’s the people living there that make the community what it is.”