Consumer Education
Consumer education involves empowering individuals with the knowledge and skills necessary to make informed decisions about real estate and their role as a homeowner, condo owner, landlord, tenant, or rural property owner.
Consumer Education
Consumer education involves empowering individuals with the knowledge and skills necessary to make informed decisions about real estate and their role as a homeowner, condo owner, landlord, tenant, or rural property owner.
The Alberta Land Institute (ALI), together with other stakeholders, will engaged in promoting scientific research, government policy, producer practices, and public education and outreach related to soil health. ALI will convene a stakeholders’ working group, conduct a scan (policy, regulatory, governance, and social action) in Alberta and across Canada, and compile a resource guide for policymakers and members of the public.
Rural Transportation: Knowledge Sharing for 2020 and Beyond – Access to transportation is a ubiquitous issue facing rural Albertans. In many cases, if a resident lacks access to a private vehicle, it is nearly impossible to live and work in a small Alberta community. To make matters worse, over the past several years, the few existing transportation services have begun to disappear. In collaboration with partners like Alberta Rural Development Network, Association for Life-wide Living (ALL) of Alberta will revitalize and reconnect Alberta’s rural transportation stakeholders to seek viable solutions to this every growing problem. Transportation options will help ensure that people can continue to live, work and thrive in rural Alberta.
Supporting Transformative Revitalization in Alberta’s Urban Development Sector Through Uncertain times – The Civic Commons Catalyst is a timely, creative, shared platform that brings together organizations and institutions to research, convene, evaluate, and develop public and private real estate opportunities in Alberta. The Catalyst is a solutions lab that will address the challenges facing the Alberta and Calgary urban development sector including the potential impacts of COVID-19 on the built environment, impacts of the downturn in the oil and gas sector and the vacancy and underutilization of assets in Calgary’s downtown core.
The COVID-19 pandemic and related public health have drawn people’s attention to how critically important their homes, neighbourhoods, and communities are to their health. Public health works proactively to create the conditions for long-term recovery by focusing not only on the disease, but on promoting the health of people. Healthy people are the foundation of a healthy economy.
This phase of the Condominium Law Education Project will update resources to reflect recent legislative changes while continuing to deliver credible and plain language materials to Albertans, staying up to date on condominium law developments and condo industry issues. This project currently reaches over 70,000 resource users per year, which include condominium buyers, owners, board members and real estate professionals.
THE CALGARY PROJECT: urban form / urban life (by Sandalack and Nicolai), was a national award-winning book published in 2006 by the University of Calgary Press. It is a richly-illustrated examination of urban development in Calgary up to 2005. Widely consulted and used by urban professionals, academics and students, it soon sold out its initial run of 1,000 copies and has not been updated. The goal of The Calgary Project 2.0 is to revise the 2006 book and update it so that it captures and reflects the past 14 years of Calgary’s development, in order to provide a resource to help guide the city into the next decades of the 21st century. The Calgary Project 2.0 will focus on the most recent chapter of the city’s history and discuss projections for its growth and development. It will add to the discussion about Calgary’s future and its urban quality, in order to aid citizens, developers, realtors, planners and design professionals, academics and policy makers in articulating a vision of the desirable future of the city.
Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) describes a shift away from personally-owned modes of transportation and towards mobility solutions that are consumed as a service. MaaS is being made possible by massive investments in the synthesis and integration of automation, connectivity, electrification and sharing in vehicles. Given the movement towards MaaS and its potential disruption of parking in Canada, it is important to be able to quantify the amount and value of the land that could be released for other uses, as well as the potential foregone capital and operating costs of providing and maintaining parking infrastructure. To address this need, CESAR will conduct the research and carry out the analyses needed to first provide an inventory of parking supply in Canada and in Alberta. These data will then be combined with estimated unit costs for the building and maintaining of that inventory. The report will end with a discussion of the potential implications of MaaS on the real estate sector in Alberta and across Canada.
This interdisciplinary project will study a new development solution based on anchor institutions to revitalize Calgary’s declining urban core. The economic downturn has brought considerable negative impacts on the urban core represented by the high vacancy rate of downtown’s Class-A office buildings and dilapidated housing and aging infrastructure in the urban core areas. To develop solutions to these challenges, the project will 1) conduct research on best practices of urban revitalization catalyzed by anchor institutions, 2) study supporting planning policies (e.g., financial incentives, development regulations), and 3) produce development scenarios through interdisciplinary studio courses.
Landowners have a number of concerns with abandoned (but not reclaimed), orphaned and/or inactive sites on their property. Backlogged oil and gas liabilities pose fiscal, environmental, and health risks. The recent Supreme Court ruling on the Redwater case means that operators must fulfill their environmental obligations before paying back creditors. However, when an operator goes bankrupt there is a strong likelihood that the revenues generated from liquidating assets will not cover cleanup costs —and the Orphan Well Association’s (OWA) inventory will continue to grow. The Landowners Guide will educate landowners on how to navigate the complex system of abandoned wells on their property.
During the past few decades, there has been increased research, practice and political interest in creating healthy, vibrant neighbourhoods. Despite interest from a broad range of stakeholders on this topic, the perspectives of real estate and community development professionals are often not represented. Using a qualitative research approach, this project will explore, compare, and contrast perceptions of “walkability”, “bike-ability”, “vibrancy”, “livability”, and “healthy” as they relate to neighbourhood design among urban residential Real Estate Professionals, current homebuyers, and developers with a view to developing a standardized language to describe these concepts in order to enhance communications, expectations and public satisfaction around quality of life lived in urban settings.
This City of Calgary is currently undertaking extensive policy reviews shifting how Calgary will grow and change in the future. By the end of 2020, most of the statutory planning documents will undergo review -incorporating new policies, processes and terminology! One of the most unique and valued aspects of the planning process in Calgary is the involvement of affected residents and their respective community associations in providing community feedback around context and character. To capture the extensive changes, and as a leader in supporting resident engagement and education, the Federation, working with industry and the City of Calgary, will complete a rewrite of the popular “Guide to the Planning Process” (and develop additional supportive tools) to assist residents, community associations, other non-profits and University of Calgary students as they learn to navigate the new planning processes in Calgary.
Contamination of water is a critical problem within Agriculture and Urban areas across Alberta and western Canada from nutrient loading. Although past research has proven that wetland plants are effective in capturing nutrients to effectively clean water while harvesting off the vegetation for other productive uses such as compost for soil remediation, there is a lack of critical information to successfully carry out water remediation using native wetland plants. This knowledge gap is related to the quantification and proof of concept of the hyperaccumulation capabilities of each of the various native wetland plant species and the specific nutrients for which each plant species is most effective. Phase 1 of this project provided the quantification data relating to the hyperaccumulation properties of native wetland plants. Phase 2 will confirm the actual performance of native wetland plants and provide proof of concept by: (1) using plant data and proven floating island technology acquired from Phase 1, and (2) subjecting the plants to feedlot runoff water to prove their efficiencies and capabilities in remediating the runoff water from livestock feedlots so that the water can safely be reused for irrigation and livestock drinking water.