In this episode, I'm joined by Toms Lumsden and Young (development manager and urban planner, respectively) to explore Blatchford, an ambitious sustainable community being built on the grounds of a former municipal airport in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada’s most conservative province). We dig into how this city-led, mixed-use development is creating a carbon-neutral community with pedestrian-first streets, a variety of housing forms, and a district energy system, right in the heart of oil country.
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David Roberts
Okay, hello everyone, this is Volts for March 19, 2025, "Canada's largest sustainable community takes shape." I'm your host, David Roberts. The city of Edmonton is in the Canadian province of Alberta, so associated with fossil fuels and fossil fuel politics that it is sometimes referred to as "the Texas of Canada." The city is known as a staging point for oil sands projects and for its concentration of oil money. Its hockey team is literally called the Oilers.
So, it might not be the first place you'd look for a sustainable, walkable community that’s working toward net zero emissions. But, you would find one nonetheless!
On roughly one square mile of centrally located land, once occupied by a municipal airport, lies Blatchford, a planned sustainable neighborhood that is meant to eventually house 30,000 Edmontonians, with a density three to four times greater than the surrounding suburbs and a goal of net-zero emissions.
The plan for Blatchford was approved by the Edmonton City Council in 2014, the year the airport closed, and in 2015 the city began clearing the land and installing basic infrastructure. The first residents moved into townhomes in 2020. If and when it reaches its ambitious goals, it will be heated and cooled by a sophisticated district energy system, filled with parks and green space, and served by two light rail stops.
Pretty cool stuff for the heart of oil country. I love big, ambitious projects like this, despite their inevitable controversies and delays. And, given everything going on, I dunno, now just seems like a good time for some pro-Canadian content.
So, let's find out how it's going. I'm thrilled to be joined today by a couple of Toms from up that way. Tom Lumsden, who works for the city of Edmonton as Blatchford's development manager, and Tom Young, an urban planner at a firm called Stantec who was closely involved in Blatchford's origins. We're going to talk all about what it's like to carve out a sustainable neighborhood in a car-centric, oil-soaked city.
All right then, with no further ado, Tom Lumsden and Tom Young, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Tom Lumsden
Thanks for having us.
Tom Young
Yeah, very glad to be here.
David Roberts
Tom Young, I want to start with you and talk about a little history here. The history actually goes back a little farther than 2014 and it was sort of interesting to me to read that the original plan here was very, very starry-eyed and it's actually a little bit of a stripped-down plan that got approved in 2014. So, I'm just curious to start with, what did get cut out in 2014?
Tom Young
Okay, well, let me reel back a little further just to talk to you about sort of where this came from in the first place. Like what the political origin was, because that feeds into the whole master planning principles document that became the launching point for the master plan. Okay, way back in 1997.
David Roberts
Whoa.
Tom Young
Yeah, yeah. Way, way back. Which I think is when you briefly lived in Edmonton as well, correct?
David Roberts
I live. Yes, I lived in Edmonton for one year in, I want to say, 1998, I think.
Tom Young
Okay. Well, a year before that, I mean, you probably would have flown into the International Airport because 1997 was the year that the city of Edmonton decided to move all their scheduled airline flights to the International. Previously, it had been kind of a split between the two airports. So that turned the city center airport into basically a hobby airport. Right. It was for, you know, people with Cessnas. It was for private jets, helicopter maintenance, and there were a few, like aviation-related businesses that had been there for a long time and sort of stayed at the airport.
But it drastically changed the economic viability of the airport. So, moving forward to 10 years later, it becomes an election issue. The mayor at the time, Stephen Mandel, was aware that in order to keep operating the airport, they were going to have to spend a few tens of millions of dollars to just keep it operational and functional. It had been built for a much different sort of level of service than it had. So, they were kind of like sunk costs that they couldn't get around if they wanted to keep it open. So, he was very financially driven and he's like, "We gotta close this thing."
"It's dead to me," sort of thing. You know, it was an airfield from 1925, I think it was the first municipally owned airfield in Canada. It had been used in the 40s as a training ground for World War II pilots. You know, it had a long history, but the city had grown up around it. It's in the midst of an urban area. So that was another reason to consider closing it. Now, Mandel wasn't really a green mayor in any significant way. He was sort of a business-driven mayor. He did have an interest in improving the quality of development in Edmonton, however.
And obviously, he wasn't the only person on council. There was also a sort of coalition of progressive councillors on council who said, "Hey, Stephen, we'll totally support you in the closing of this, but we've got some expectations around it." And they had ambitions. Like, yes, you said Alberta's Canadian oil country. Absolutely, it is. It is Canada's most conservative province by far, but Edmonton's a little different. It's like — no place is a monolith, obviously — but Edmonton's always also been a little bit politically contrarian. So this wasn't totally out of left field in terms of, you know, members of Edmonton City Council wanting to be progressive.
David Roberts
Well, I mean, it's also the case almost everywhere that cities are more progressive than their surroundings.
Tom Young
For sure. So that's the origin, that's the genesis of it in terms of the decision to close it and why some of the goals were so ambitious. After the decision was made to close it, the city of Edmonton moved forward with preparing, like, a project charter. I think they called it the master plan guidelines, something along those lines. And that became — it was kind of like a grab bag of all the best possible, most idealistic ideas that you could possibly plow into a document like that. From the perspective of urban planning, best practice and smart growth was a big idea at the time, and Transit Oriented Development was sort of becoming a really big driver in urban planning directions and policy at the time, and just like social and environmental sustainability.
So it was there that the idea of "Maybe we could do district energy, maybe they should have direct transit access for light rail" also sorts of other ideas were plowed into that, and they came up with some ideas that were actually approved by council originally, but that ultimately were not that practical. Like, there was a concept to do a pneumatic garbage collection system.
David Roberts
Yes, Tom, this was the whole reason I asked this question, because I love an excuse to talk about a pneumatic trash system.
Tom Young
Which, I mean, hey, super cool.
David Roberts
Yeah, I've seen them in operation. They are very cool.
Tom Young
Very, very cool. But, you know, sort of incremental environmental advantages. I think, like, it basically just means garbage trucks don't have to rumble around a neighborhood.
David Roberts
Yeah, well, there was going to be a biomass plant, too, right? Where all that stuff was going to get burned.
Tom Young
So, the district energy concept had a number of possible ideas, and one of them was biomass. One of them was deep geothermal. Which, you know, Alberta is really good at drilling, but when you have to drill down three kilometers, more than two miles to get to any heat, it's probably not practical.
David Roberts
Deep geothermal has come a long way in the last 15 years. I wonder if that calculation would still be the same if you approached it today.
Tom Young
Perhaps not. But, like, just from a cost perspective, I mean, the city here is the developer, and that's not a new thing for the city of Edmonton, you know, the city's been active in the development market as a master developer assembling land, selling it off to individuals and small builders — and part of the rationale for that is to make it more affordable. But the opportunity there is also to try new ideas. And Blatchford became a place for that to be a testing ground for ideas for infrastructure and sustainability.
David Roberts
Right. So, Tom Lumsden. So, you know, as the other Tom said, this is city-owned. So maybe you can talk about sort of like what all the city is doing here. What are the types of things the city is involved in? It's got to, for one thing, clear the land. What is the city's role?
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, the city, as Tom Young alluded to, is acting as the developer and specifically the land developer. So, we're creating parcels, we're servicing the land, we're creating the open spaces, and we're selling parcels to builders who will build homes for people to live in. So, we came in in 2014, the year after the airport closed, started demolishing the airport, taking down the buildings, ripping up runways, and then started putting in servicing for the properties.
David Roberts
While we're on that subject, talk a little bit about disassembling the old airport. You didn't just throw all that stuff away.
Tom Lumsden
No. Yeah. A big component again, being a sustainable community. So the official vision — and you alluded to it strongly — for the community is 30,000 people living a sustainable lifestyle, carbon neutral, using renewables. So part of our objective when we did demolish some of the buildings was to keep it out of the landfill. And our objective was to keep 80% of the materials of those old hangars and buildings out of the landfill. And we actually achieved about 93% when it was done.
David Roberts
93 diverted from landfill?
Tom Lumsden
Correct. So, these buildings were being, the materials were being repurposed for some reason, and somewhere. And then, on the other side of that, the runways were crushed and we used them for the base of the roads. So, we've been taking the airport apart and using it as best we can. There's a major highway project right adjacent to the property and they're using some of our runway as well because we have access.
David Roberts
Interesting. And I want to get into some of the urbanism and principles involved here, but let's talk just a little bit about the current reality of the thing. So, how many homes are built and occupied on site at the moment?
Tom Lumsden
So, the best number, again, our role is to sell property to builders and they will build the homes. So, we do have our district energy system, which you have kind of talked about a little bit. But, we have 134 customers right now connected to that system.
David Roberts
134 homes?
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, and some of those homes have a basement suite, garage suite. So, one of the 134 could be up to three different families living on one property.
David Roberts
Right. And so, you know, there's been some controversy. The original plan, I think, was to be doing something like 500 residential units a year starting in 2018. Obviously, you're not hitting that target. Why has it been slower than people expected to get really rolling?
Tom Lumsden
The biggest thing is the original business plan was approved in 2014, and like you said, it said people would be living there in the next couple of years. Our district energy system took a minute to figure out and decide what we wanted to do. So, the project was actually paused in 2016 to decide on our ambient loop system. To create a sustainable community, we were creating it kind of from the beginning, meaning where we're custom designing our roads, not specifically following the standards that the city of Edmonton approves. Now, while I work for the city, I still am treated as if I didn't.
And I go through the approval process. So instead of a 100-day approval process for our roads, it was two years to convince them that we could still fit a fire truck, a bus, everything down the road because we made them as narrow as we could and the sidewalks as wide as we could to encourage people to be out of their car and walking. Now, the other side of the story, so 2013, the last plane took off, 2020, the first people moved in. So it was seven years from an active airport to somebody living there.
A suburban development, I know some around Edmonton that could take up to a decade to get from a farmer's field to a community where people are actually moving into. So, it really isn't long. It was long compared to what the business plan suggested. The real estate market too. And again, everything's driven, we have to sell property, we have to sell homes. In 2014, the real estate market really took a hit. So when we got our approval, we were probably more optimistic than we would be today, and in hindsight. But really, in the grand scheme of things, we're actually going quite well.
David Roberts
So, but like the ultimate targets are still the same. Like the plan hasn't changed, it's just rolling out a little slower.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, we're still planning to have 30,000 Edmontonians living a sustainable lifestyle. We have, like I said, we have 134 connected, but we have 270 homes either constructed or under construction and another property sold that will house 400 more. So, we are starting to hit our stride and most new communities take a year or two to get kind of that momentum going.
David Roberts
So obviously, one of the big principles here is, you know, for any good urbanism is mixed forms, mixed use, and mixed housing types. One of the things I've heard is that what's been built so far is mostly single-family homes and townhomes, and the apartment buildings and towers that would really concentrate people have not shown up yet. Is the balance of homes that developers are going for what you expected?
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, I think at the beginning — and just to correct you, there are no single-family homes. Our zoning doesn't allow that. The biggest thing is like a triplex.
Tom Young
The smallest thing is a triplex.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, sorry, the smallest thing. So, as we had probably anticipated, that's what sold first and that's what we're having trouble keeping ahead of the market, actually. Like, our builders are waiting for us to bring on more lots.
David Roberts
Oh, for the townhomes?
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, we have sold other parcels that are townhouse zoned, but they're condo style, so they would be multifamily. So again, more density on the same amount of land. We have seven to ten of these simple townhomes. We have 15 on one lot, we have 26 on another one, and we have 90 on another one. So, townhouse style, but much more dense because it's a shared common property.
Tom Young
Yeah, and that was always the strategy, even from when the plan was approved in 2014. We started in the west district, the west side of the neighborhood, partly because the environmental cleanup of the ground had been mostly completed because servicing connections were already there, but also because that was the area furthest away from the planned light rail extension. So that was intended to be the most, like, relatively low-density part of the community. And lower density stuff always gets taken up by the market faster. It's just easier to build a townhouse than it is to build a high rise.
And it's really not that low density. Like, it's not a high rise in what we've seen so far, but as Tom mentioned, the zoning doesn't allow anything smaller than a triplex. The row house zoning allows a minimum of three units. But even within those three units, we also pioneered. The city of Edmonton zoning bylaw has leapfrogged beyond this. They're incredibly progressive now, but at the time when we first got the zoning approved, that was customized for Blatchford.
David Roberts
I wanted to ask about this specifically, so maybe you can expand on this. Like, I'm a bit of a zoning nerd these days. And obviously, I'm guessing, especially in 2014, there was no preset zoning category that would have allowed this. So, what was the process for zoning?
Tom Young
At the time, the Edmonton zoning bylaw — Edmonton had gone through decades of fairly typical suburban greenfield growth. That was the focus.
David Roberts
I remember being there in 1998. And my impression was like, big, wide streets, you know, like Denver style. If anybody's been to Denver, it's a little bit like that. And like weirdly few people. My impression over and over again was like, it's like a giant big city that oil built and like all the people haven't really shown up yet. But it was very sprawly. Like that was, you know, that stuck in my head.
Tom Young
There were decades of fairly low-density suburban development. And that is the majority of the city because that was happening through the biggest boom years. But that's changed significantly in the last two decades. Like when I started being a planner, I was excited to go work for the city of Edmonton because they were, you know, trying to innovate and pioneer new things. And that has finally come to fruition, I would say, in the new zoning bylaw. It's incredibly progressive.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Tom Young
Actually, American listeners who are interested in urban planning should really look at what Edmonton has done in the last couple of years. You know, there's no longer any minimum parking requirements anymore. Which is huge. It's happening in some other places. But I think Edmonton might be the biggest place that has enacted that. And they've completely overhauled the entire zoning process. There is no such thing as single-family zoning in Edmonton. I mean, you can still build single-family homes, but all zones allow a certain amount of density.
David Roberts
So, is it the case now that Blatchford fits with current Edmonton zoning? Like, you wouldn't have to get a special exemption. Like, if you were going to build Blatchford starting today, you wouldn't have to get a special exemption?
Tom Young
Yeah, I would say that they have caught up and probably gone further than what we put in place ten years ago now. And it's very urban. The urban design implications of the zoning bylaw are about a very urban form. Not like massive front yards and all the other setback things.
David Roberts
I want to get into that in just one second, but just for the other Tom, one final question about this. I've been reading articles from sort of over the years and I know people are always impatient with projects like this. They always take longer than people think they're going to do. And there has been some pressure, I think, from, you know, I saw the mayor mention this. I saw some city councilor mention this, saying if they would just loosen the standards a little bit, things would go faster and they would build faster.
Has there been a lot of pressure on that or do you think, like, there's enough commitment to these standards in the city council to hold them steady through this?
Tom Lumsden
So far, the experience has been exactly what you said. There have been comments about things like making those kinds of changes, but generally, as working for the city of Edmonton, we're looking for direction from the council of course. They've maintained and always voted in favor of keeping the course. So, it's pretty impressive that since 2010 they have maintained that kind of net-zero carbon neutral. And the plan and the way we're carrying it out.
David Roberts
A lot has happened since then. We haven't even mentioned Covid, but I'm sure that was not helpful to the project.
Tom Lumsden
Wasn't a friend.
David Roberts
Well, let's talk a little bit about those standards then. So, I love thinking about stuff like this. So, when we just think about streets, like, is there some master document somewhere with a list of sort of things that streets have to do or is it a loose category? So, like Tom Young, maybe you could address this. So, like, what is a good — I'm guessing one thing you don't have anywhere in Blatchford is a big four-lane stroad, which is mostly what we get here in Seattle. But what are the street design sort of guidelines?
Tom Young
No, there are no four-lane — I think in the future, you know, there will be some slightly wider portions at the edges of the neighborhood where Blatchford streets connect with the surrounding roadway network and adjacent roads to the southeast and southwest are stroady, I would say. And hopefully in the long term that can be tamed somewhat as those roads are reconstructed through periodic maintenance.
Tom Lumsden
The plan is to not have more than one lane of traffic in each direction for any of the roads in Blatchford.
David Roberts
Any interior road. Oh, interesting.
Tom Young
So, it would only be at the edges that you might have turning lanes.
Tom Lumsden
And specifically, yeah, coming off of the arterial roads that are adjacent coming in. But the only reason there'd be four lanes is two of them are for parking.
David Roberts
And you made them as narrow as possible. How narrow did they get? And how narrow would it, you know, like, how narrow would you like in a perfect world?
Tom Young
Now, we have to convert to feet and inches.
David Roberts
Oh, right. Oh, goodness.
Tom Young
Yeah, I don't know if I can do that on the fly.
Tom Lumsden
I know the experience I had, the lived experience, was being on the bus that tried to navigate. We have a traffic circle kind of at the end of our first stage, and they had to see if the bus would fit around it, and it did. The only comment the driver said was, "Maybe move the signs back a little bit" because it was tight. We did make it as tight as possible, but the bus can still go. The garbage trucks still come, still accommodates them, but it's not a place that you're going to speed through for sure.
David Roberts
Are there traffic calming features or is it just the narrowness that's doing that work?
Tom Lumsden
Well, the narrowness does it. But we have the bump outs, like I mentioned, like if there's four lanes, two of them are literally for street parking. And then we have the bump outs that narrow it down kind of at crosswalks or intersections to where the cars will actually travel. So those act as well. And we have boulevards everywhere, so there's never going to be a monowalk, meaning a walkway right onto the road. We have boulevards with trees everywhere. So again, the idea is people first, trying to make it comfortable for people to walk, ride their bike, scooter, choose that over getting in their car and driving away.
Tom Young
There are lanes planned for all of the townhouse stages. So, you don't have front drive garages everywhere. It is a grid, generally speaking, in terms of the street layout, which makes it very connected. And people can take lots of routes to get to where they're going. But at the same time, they're not necessarily as direct for people driving as they are for people walking. So, we've got walkways identified that allow people to go in a straight line, but that somewhat reduce the ability for people to shortcut or speed through spaces. So that's part of it as well. And cycle tracks and bike facilities from day one, like the first large road — and it's not particularly large, it's still just two lanes, one lane of traffic in each direction.
But Alpha Boulevard was built with a cycle track that will, once fully completed, permanently connect directly to the light rail station that's now been constructed as of last year.
David Roberts
Oh, very cool.
Tom Lumsden
And actually, two. One in each direction. So, one on each side of the road and again, a boulevard between where the cars will be and where the bikes will be. So, riding your bike through Blatchford's quite enjoyable.
David Roberts
Talk a little bit about the standards for the buildings themselves, the homes themselves, and how, you know, going back to 2014, how different were those standards from the sort of existing Edmonton municipal standards?
Tom Lumsden
So, we have two components. I guess as the developer, we have an architectural control. So, it's very wide open. The builders can look at what kind of inspires them to achieve what we want to do in Blatchford. And then we, as the developer, through our contracts, agree to what they're going to build. But the second part is we have what we call a green building code. So, that was developed after 2014, obviously, because we weren't set to sell lots. So, 2018 was really when it was finalized. And the simple one is more insulation in the roof, more insulation in the walls, triple pane windows, low flow everything.
It's just very prescriptive, very directive as to how they're going to build the home so they use less energy. Now, we have gone beyond that and made it so they can then model our prescriptive code and then, if they can create it a different way, they're allowed to. So, we're trying to make it adaptable. The one thing I can tell you, we do get questions around the architecture because it's not as straightforward as say it would be in a suburban community, which I used to work for a suburban developer. And those are very straightforward as to here's the four different styles.
David Roberts
Right. None of which are very inspiring.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, pick one of these. Well, they're still nice communities, but our green building code, zero pushback. So, I think builders are doing a lot of this stuff already, but we're just making sure they're doing it. And we're also making sure they're bringing it to the level that we want to see in Blatchford.
David Roberts
Does it hit like Passive House standards? Are these like zero energy homes?
Tom Lumsden
No, but they're much closer than they would be in a standard kind of building code. In Canada, there are new tiering levels, tier one through five. And the base minimum if you build a home in Canada is tier one. We are approaching tier five. I think I was told the other day we're about tier three or four. So no, it's not Passive House, but it wasn't meant to be that. We still need to sell lots. We still want people to do this. I'm hoping people take what they learn in Blatchford and put it elsewhere. Well, we want people to live in Blatchford, but we also want to see the learnings transferred across.
David Roberts
Yeah, I was going to ask about the architecture. So, one of the complaints a lot of urbanists have here in Seattle is that we have this design review board which has to examine every proposed building. Even after the building hits code, is legal, you know what I mean? Like, hits all the requirements, still we have this design review board full of architects who just like to pick at it. The facade and the color of the bricks and all this kind of thing which ends up with two things: one, years of delay for every friggin' building, but also a kind of sameness and blandness to the resulting buildings.
And this is something I hear a lot about these sort of planned communities, or at least this is a worry people have when they hear something about a planned community. They worry about a kind of uniformity of architecture and a uniformity of look. How are you thinking about just the aesthetics of the buildings?
Tom Lumsden
Well, like you said, ours is kind of wide open. It's the inspiration of the builder that comes. And if you drove through our first, we're up to stage six now, you'll see very different buildings being built and approved. And we are, like I said, we're learning, we're adjusting as we go. But the builders are really, they have a pretty loose rein as to what they're allowed to build. We do have like no vinyl. We have certain rules material-wise; we want some brick or stone on the buildings. But other than that, like I said, if you drove through stage one, there's quite a variety in the homes that are being built already.
Tom Young
Yeah, so I was, as the consultant, leading the development of the design and architectural guidelines. And I would say it's not prescriptive in terms of style, it is more prescriptive in terms of urban performance. Like, it's not focused on the carbon, but it is focused on, you know, the street relationship. It's focused on, you know, how are you connecting with the surrounding urban environment, the public infrastructure. It's trying to make well-mannered buildings, but it's not trying to make cookie-cutter buildings.
David Roberts
Right, right. And you say in relation to the street. This one of the great principles here is there are no giant front yards here. There are porches. People are sort of close to the street. The idea is to activate the street.
Tom Young
Yeah, and we've even got some streets that aren't streets. Like, we've got townhouses that orient towards a public walkway that's meant as a muse type space so people can walk and bike through, but they're not looking at a field of parked cars.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, one of my favorite stories to share is one of the families that live on that mews. Specifically, they have a 10-year-old. The dad's like, "Yeah, I open the door, he goes out and he plays with all the kids on the street," like on the walkway. He has no concerns. He sits back down, probably reads a book. And then he follows up with like, "I'm living a lifestyle I've only read about. This is pretty cool."
David Roberts
That's the dream. The idea that your kids can be safe outside and you don't have to be holding their hand constantly. What about solar on homes? Are you requiring it? Is it allowed? Does it work all the way up there?
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, it does work all the way up here. We get lots of sunlight in the summertime. In the winter, not so much. In our first round of green building code, we asked for, if they built a flat-roofed house, it would be able to support solar. In the second round of our green building code, we said put enough solar on to offset the major appliances. So, we are taking steps in the direction of kind of conquering the carbon neutrality of the power side of our equation too with that.
David Roberts
So, let's talk a little bit about the transit situation. Obviously, it's Transit Oriented Development. Transit's a big deal. Initially, there was talk about two light rail stations. One has been built, one is still in planning. What's the current transit connectivity?
Tom Lumsden
They both were built. They extend from the south part of Blatchford all the way to the north edge. The first station opened; the second station is built, but it hasn't been opened because we haven't developed up there. The first station actually just had its first anniversary, so it was a year ahead of schedule, which is a true success for LRT construction anywhere.
David Roberts
Not something you hear a lot from transit systems in North America.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, so we were a year ahead. It replaced a temporary station. There's a polytechnical institute, NAIT, right next to our property, which actually they're going to build into Blatchford. So that NAIT station closed and this one opened and it actually has more ridership at the new station than it had at the old station. So it's an active LRT station. People are coming. One of my team actually did a little video, put it on Instagram, of walking from the existing homes to that LRT station. And it was like a 10-minute stroll. So it's there and accessible for the residents.
David Roberts
And the more northern one will open once there are more homes built up there.
Tom Lumsden
Yep. Hoping in the next kind of five, six years.
David Roberts
And just like, pardon my ignorance, I didn't really dig into this much, but like, how extensive is Edmonton's light rail?
Tom Lumsden
Well, it's growing. It was built in the 70s, late 70s, for the Commonwealth Games, which were here in '78. We did a lot of underground tunneling, so expensive type of LRT. The new LRT is more above ground. It's extending all the way to the west end of the city right now. It should be open in the next three or four years. The reason, and I kind of talked about the new LRT station in Blatchford being busier than the previous temporary one, is that there was a line from the center of the city all the way to the southeast that just opened as well.
So now, people in the southeast can live in the southeast. Take the LRT all the way to NAIT. So, it's part of the reason that it's become more active than the previous station.
Tom Young
The light rail system is currently about 23 miles long with multiple branches, but there are plans to basically double that.
David Roberts
So, it's popular, got public backing. People aren't nickel and diming them?
Tom Young
Very well used. I think the main line has — well, I don't know what the numbers are now, to be honest, but shortly before COVID, they were seeing 140,000 riders a day, which in the North American context is very high for a light rail system.
Tom Lumsden
I know from the news I've heard, it's exceeded pre-Covid numbers.
David Roberts
Oh, that's awesome.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, so it's come back and been successful.
David Roberts
So, when I think about a sustainable community or sort of an eco-district, I guess they're sometimes called, I mean, one of the big things, you know, you think about sort of like sustainable building standards, you think about good streets. Then, like the other big thing that you want just for pleasantness, is amenities. So, like markets, places to buy your groceries, shops, commercial activity, green space, schools, daycare. All the kind of stuff you need to live life. And as I understand it, thus far, there's mostly homes, like what amenities are in and what is on the way.
Tom Lumsden
So, I guess as the developer, we're not building the buildings and renting space, so we're creating parcels and we're working with builders to build the homes. And ultimately, the whole south end of our community is going to be what we're calling Blatchford Market, which is where that LRT station is located. So that's going to be where the concentration of commercial will be. But we do have our four to six-story zoning which allows mixed use. So, main floor commercial on those buildings. The cool thing, and we didn't really set the context, it's a municipal airport. It's basically a 10-minute jaunt from the center of the city.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's very centrally located.
Tom Lumsden
Oh yeah. There are developed communities all around it. Superstore is a major grocery store. It's a five-minute walk from my residents who live in stage one. There's a Starbucks in the parking lot. There are amenities everywhere adjacent to the property. Now, 30,000 people, of course, will support — it's the size of a city, a small city. So once we get more people in the community, the market will start to enhance that. But in stage one, with the developer, the things we can control, we built a beautiful linear park space that has community gardens, a playground, plazas. Of course, there were buildings across the road that were full of businesses that supported the airport activity. Those businesses of course are gone. The one that I always talk about is there's a microbrewery right at the end of stage one. Like literally, you walk to the end of the street, you cross that one road, which is a quiet road and there's a microbrewery there that is very successful. There's a daycare next to it in another one of the bays and a convenience store there too. Now, while they're officially outside of Blatchford, they're still amenities that the people in Blatchford can access.
David Roberts
But in terms of commercial buildings inside Blatchford proper, you just haven't reached that stage of things?
Tom Lumsden
Correct. Yeah, in the next couple of years, I plan to bring on the first stage of the market area. And I have had lots of inquiries from developers who do commercial development. So we're planning to see some success in the near future with that aspect.
Tom Young
Most of the market district would be like proper mixed-use buildings, you know, mixing office, residential, and retail. I mean, in various combinations. But that is the vision. Not that it would be a bunch of like, there's no surface parking served, you know, strip development plan.
David Roberts
Yeah, of course. No, this is all mixed as God intended cities to be. When I toss this out into social media, one of the immediate responses from everybody, and this is a huge sensitive subject down here in the US, which is in the US because there are so few nice areas, because there are so few livable, even parts of cities, if you make one, everybody wants to live there. They drive the prices up. You end up with only rich people there. And then the surrounding community gets the idea that like, "Oh, these things are for rich people."
You're just building a community for rich people to have a nice little gated community in the middle of your city. So, I mean, obviously, you know, I have this argument a zillion times. I keep saying, like, "Well, if you just build more of them, more people could get one." But so, all of which is getting around to the subject of affordability: What are you, are there provisions? Are there set asides for low-income housing? How are you approaching this whole topic of affordability?
Tom Lumsden
Two aspects. The one, like the townhouses that people are living in, they're centrally located, brand new built, beautiful. They have a garage, they have landscaping. The market is the market, right? That's what people will pay. People say it's expensive. If you compare it to a suburban area, yeah, it's more expensive, but it's also centrally located. You can have one car. It's a different lifestyle. So the next phase, like I mentioned, there's townhouse developments on multi-sites. Their pricing is a little bit lower because it's more efficiently built. We do have plans or we've actually sold, I think, three of our four to six-story sites.
The first one's going to start digging in the next month. So, they will have a different product coming to market which is more apartment style in a condo situation. So, the affordability from a market perspective will be addressed that way. But the other thing, because we are a city, I work for the city and the city has a 16% objective for affordable housing in new communities. We will achieve that objective.
David Roberts
You said 16%?
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, 16%. And affordable housing could mean everything from near market to supportive. Right. So we have a couple of parcels in our first few stages that we've designated for affordable housing. We're working with the group at the city that looks after affordable housing in the city to find builders for those sites that will bring an affordable housing aspect. Actually, the first one's going to be more of a supportive housing with a provider for that. So there's that objective. But from a market affordability, like I said, it's going to be a diverse kind of product.
It's a central location still, like I said, if you're in the center of Seattle, I'm sure it's more expensive than being on the edge. So, it's definitely not a gated community. It's definitely not turning its back on the rest. In fact, the way we've designed it is it sides onto the kind of surrounding streets so people feel comfortable coming to it. The amenities, we have a huge park we're going to build in the middle of the community. It's meant to be city accessible.
David Roberts
A big city park.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, we want people to come and use it.
David Roberts
When you say big park, what do we, what do we mean by big? There's big and there's big.
Tom Lumsden
80 acres of open space with their two storm ponds and in the park. So, it's huge.
David Roberts
Nice. Okay, so let's talk about district energy. Like, this is sort of how this came to my attention. So, you know, Volt's listeners by now are familiar with various and sundry heating options. So, it sounds like initially the thought was maybe let's have a geothermal plant and then a network, but instead, you opted for something which I've now done two pods on, which is a geo exchange system. I don't know, like, I don't know if there's official terminology for these things yet. It sort of drives me crazy. But, you have a series of deep boreholes and then water circulating in pipes throughout the community.
And so, basically, you're sharing heat. So, like, excess heat from one building can go into the network and another building that needs heat can draw heat out of the network. It's all very cool. Talk a little bit about how you decided on that. Because, you know, now there's several of those pilot projects going up in various American cities, like now that area is hopping. But back in 2014, as far as I know, like, you were one of the very first to do this. So maybe talk a little bit about how it settled out the way it did.
Tom Lumsden
Tom Young might be able to speak to the comparison between the different ones. Like I said, in 2016, I know the project was paused so they could make this decision because obviously it was a big decision. They decided on this ambient loop district energy system. As you mentioned, we have 570 boreholes, 150 meters deep. One of my favorite things when I give tours around the community is explaining it's not geothermal, it's geo-exchange. And I try to give them fun facts. So you can correct your friends when they call it geothermal. And they immediately say, "Well, okay, so the geothermal system..."
And I'm like, "Okay, that went in one ear, out the other."
David Roberts
Well, geothermal has fuzzy — I mean, even among experts, it's somewhat fuzzy what the boundaries of that category are anyway.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, so when we are done, we will be the largest district energy system in North America for sure. 536 acres is how much land we have. So, like you said, it brings the energy up from about 10 degrees all year round at 150 meters deep. We bring that up, we upgrade it to 10 to 20 degrees, transfer it to water pipes. Every parcel has a connection to the water pipe and then they use it and then they expel, depending on what they need, heating or cooling. Because the heat pumps work in both ways.
So, it's the cool thing — ha ha. It provides cooling as well. So both hot and cold, it works. So we've had some pretty hot summers. We've had some pretty cold winters, and we're in our fifth season and it's worked perfectly for all of them.
David Roberts
Awesome. I remember that cold winter. I don't think I'll ever forget it.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, well, and the hot summers have gotten hotter and, of course, you know, the smoke and everything else is apparent and gives us more reason to keep doing what we're doing here because things need to change.
David Roberts
Yeah, Tom Young, maybe you can weigh in on what were sort of the considerations back then in 2016 when you were deciding on a heating system.
Tom Young
I don't know that my memory fully explains it.
David Roberts
These are all a long time ago.
Tom Young
Well, partly it's a long time ago and partly I wasn't personally directly involved in that. But I know that Stantec did some feasibility analysis of a variety of different potential approaches. But then there was also a — and here's where my memory fails me again — there was another specialized district energy consultant that was brought on board to make final recommendations and do a prototype design or a conceptual design to sort of prove the concept at a neighborhood scale. And yeah, I wish I could give a shout out to that company, but I can't remember who they were.
Tom Lumsden
I think the high level, too, the biomass, the material, like we're in the center of the city. There's not an abundant supply of wood chips or whatever it was we were going to use to bring. So, you're going to burn gas to bring this to the community? It didn't make a lot of sense. Geothermal, well, they've had, like you said, it's progressed a lot over time. It would have been an industrial facility in the middle of this residential community. So, those are the two things that I've been told. We're kind of like, it doesn't work as well in this situation.
And the ambient loop does. It's worked for five hot summers.
David Roberts
You guys were incredibly early to it. I guess one of the criticisms I've heard is that building the initial system is quite expensive. And, you know, one of the cool things about a system like this is like, the initial building is expensive, but every new home you connect to it, in a sense, reduces that expense, amortizes it a little bit more so it gets kind of cheaper and cheaper over time. Are you finding that to be true as you build out?
Tom Lumsden
So right now, we have Energy Center 1, we have a cool name for it, and it supports the first six stages of development so far. We're going to have, at the end of the day, probably four of them. One of the future ones which we're going to build in the next five years is a sewer heat exchange. So our intention is to go and harvest the heat — I always say harvest the heat, not the smell from. There's 200-year-old sewers that run under the Blatchford property. And we'll use that. I think it produces about a third of the energy we need for the overall community.
David Roberts
So, these are existing sewer pipes that are already going beneath the community. You just have to tap into the heat.
Tom Young
Yeah. There's also smaller stuff too, like the light rail, for instance. Their utility building or tracks and station is, you know, it's designed to harvest heat and feed that back into the system. Isn't that correct, John?
Tom Lumsden
That would be more minor. I think we have talked about potential — what's the... it's not a call center.
David Roberts
Oh, data center.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, data center, that's the word. So, we've talked about that. And if it fits in the community or not, because it really is not a big person driver, but it's definitely a heat producer. So, with the sharing system, like you said, if I like heat and Tom Young likes cool, I'm expelling my cool or dragging the heat out of the system. He's expelling his heat. We're sharing at the end of the day, I would suggest, and you know, this, you know, during the very cold days, we need to go to the source, which in stage one is under the storm pond.
But in seasons where the temperature is not with the way the houses are built, the sharing of the energy back and forth almost makes it neutral.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's very cool. The perfect balance, basically. No new energy required.
Tom Young
I guess my point with the LRT, sure it's minor, but you're trying to use multiple sources where an opportunity exists. We're making the connections to link in and improve the system.
David Roberts
Commercial or industrial building is going to have some waste heat. Almost, almost any, you know, sort of industrial type facility. So, as long as you're hooked up to this network, you know, might as well use it.
Tom Young
Do you want to talk about the utility as well, Tom? Because that's unique to the Blatchford thing.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, so you talked about it being expensive to build. You're correct. Like we have, like I said, we have 134 customers and we've spent quite a bit of money building stage one. But as a utility, the intention is to break even. It's not to, you know, make money ultimately, but right now, as the city owning the utility, the intention is to, over a 50-year business plan where we'll have 12,000 to 15,000 customers when we're done. The input and output is equivalent. So with early days, there's an investment which, as the city, we're doing that.
We actually just got a big grant from the federal government to offset some of our costs. But that part's a challenge. I remember one of the guys who was working at it at the beginning. "What was Thomas Edison thinking when he started the power company?"
David Roberts
Wait, so you're acting as your own utility? There's a Blatchford utility that is administering this district energy.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, we got the cool name BRE, Blatchford Renewable Energy. That's our utility. Our customers get a utility bill. There is a fiscal policy, too much information, but the city council has agreed to it. They won't pay more in Blatchford than they would outside of Blatchford. So, people are getting an energy bill from our utility, which they know when they come. It's part of the process.
David Roberts
Have you thought about, I mean, once you have the utility established and it has sort of open lines of communication with all the residents, are there other things you're thinking about doing with your utility? Like utilities can organize a lot of cool stuff?
Tom Lumsden
Well, not so much as the utility, but as the developer and the city, we're planning to look at community engagement, like kind of doing sustainability, I guess, workshops and things like that so they can embrace all the aspects that Blatchford has to offer and how they can add to it.
David Roberts
I mean, maybe there's no precise way to measure this, but are the people who are buying these initial homes, are they just sort of like ordinary townhome buyers? Or do you feel like people, especially the early residents, are coming specifically for the larger community and the larger plan in the future?
Tom Lumsden
I would say the first residents were definitely early adopters. They were excited by it. The density, the lifestyle, the built for them, the fact that it's going to be this carbon-neutral community. But we have, like we say the adage, location, location, location. We're literally 10 minutes from the center of the city. I'd say it's one or two LRT rides to the new hockey rink, which is where our beloved Oilers play. It's a great spot. And you know, I worked for a private developer who did suburban development. Always knew new families, right. In suburbia, typically.
So, in Blatchford, the big question was, "Well, who's your target?" And you think it would be more of a sustainable person. But we have young families, like, there's lots of young families who are in these townhomes so it's still a brand new community. There are schools in the neighboring — like we don't have a school within Blatchford. We do have two sites that they're designated. But early days, one day maybe the school will be there. But there are schools in the neighboring communities that I know the one family walks. So, it is a place that you can raise a family too.
David Roberts
Very cool. One last question about the energy thing before I move on from it. So, I was reading it, it said Blatchford homes will release about 75% less greenhouse gases than a typical Edmonton home. So, some of that is heating and cooling now has been taken over by the district energy system running by these ground source heat pumps which are very low power consumption. So, that remaining 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, is that just from the city's electricity mix?
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, Alberta is — we've come a long way. We were coal burning. Now we're natural gas. I think in the last couple of years, the last coal burning plant was shut down. So, natural gas is much cleaner than that. But we don't have the luxury of the hydro that other provinces do or other states, I guess, too.
David Roberts
So, you're basically dependent on the city on the Alberta electricity. There's no plan to sort of generate enough of your own electricity to eliminate that last 25%.
Tom Lumsden
We are working on it. We haven't gotten there yet. The 70% that you're talking about, 75% is strictly from, like traditionally in Edmonton, you have a gas furnace. So you don't have that in Blatchford. You can't, literally can't have that. That's the big thing. The one thing we can't control as the city is where people get their power from. There are kind of clean energy power suppliers that you can buy. I have solar panels on my house that — I mean, in the summer of course, emits back to the grid and in the winter I draw out of the grid.
David Roberts
What about community solar? What about a little solar field somewhere on site? Have you ever thought about that?
Tom Lumsden
We're going down that path, trying to look at what we can do. It is tough, though, because there are certain rules in Alberta about how the power is looked after.
David Roberts
So, there are lots of these kinds of ecodistrict projects happening in North America. Toronto has an abandoned airport it's redeveloping. Denver has an abandoned airport it is redeveloping. It's sort of funny that when a city has this brand new open chunk of land and they turn to their urban planners and architects and say, "What should we put here?" The answer is always the same. Narrow streets, low setbacks, renewable energy, walkable, lots of paths, lots of green space. So, when we build something new, we all want that. So, why are the cities around these areas not doing that? Do you know what I mean? Like, how do we reconcile the fact that clearly there's a consensus that this is the best way to build urban communities?
And yet the urban communities that they're in the middle of are not built like this? Like, what is the disconnect? Is it just a matter of they were built a long time ago? I mean, is that all there is to it?
Tom Young
Sorry, when you say the cities around, you mean...?
David Roberts
Like Edmonton, proper is not built along these. You know, it doesn't have narrow streets, it doesn't have mixed use. Like all these things that clearly urban planners have decided are the way to go.
Tom Young
Well, I mean, when you're talking about planning at a city scale, it's, you know, that's a beast, right? Like, that's a big ship to try to turn. And, you know, I was referencing some of the incredibly progressive things that Edmonton has done in recent years. One of those things is, you know, a completely new set of design standards for streets.
David Roberts
Oh, interesting.
Tom Young
Which I was once again fortunate enough to work on in the early part of the process. And that, you know, that has really shifted all the big, ugly streets that you saw when you were briefly living in Edmonton. I mean, a lot of those still exist because it takes a long time to change a city. But the new standards are much more progressive, much narrower.
David Roberts
So, not just for new streets, but you're rehabbing these older streets.
Tom Young
Yes, exactly. As older streets get reconstructed, you know, they have like 20 to 30-year lifespans and then they need to get redesigned and reconstructed. They're being redesigned with wider sidewalks, with narrower lanes, with more active transportation facilities like cycle tracks and that sort of thing. And so, like, Edmonton's spending $100 million over a period of four years on cycling investments. And that's part of the mix as well. But it takes a long time. Building a city is like, when you build infrastructure, it's like 100 years. Right. Like, even though you can go back and change a street, you know, 30 years later, there's just a lot of inertia in the way cities are built.
So, we really should be building them right off the bat.
David Roberts
Indeed.
Tom Young
But there are also so many players in this type of process, right? Like, Blatchford is unique in that the city controls almost everything.
David Roberts
Yeah, that is a big advantage.
Tom Young
But out on the edge of the city, in new neighborhoods, it's a lot harder. You've got a lot more actors, a lot of private investment. Everything's in negotiation. And Blatchford, you know, is thought of as kind of an exception, an exceptional opportunity. And I don't think the mindset is quite the same when we're talking about newer neighborhoods on the edge. Now, that said, planning in neighborhoods has changed dramatically in the last 20 years.
David Roberts
Even these new suburban neighborhoods?
Tom Young
Absolutely. They're much denser than they used to be. There's a lot more focus on active transportation. I would say, generally speaking, public transit is better than it used to be and is being provided earlier than it used to be. But new neighborhoods still have the challenge that even if they are built better, they're still on the edge of the city. And there's all this old development that's not good in between them and the center of the city. Right. So, it's a complex thing that takes a long time to shift.
David Roberts
It's cool to hear, though, that Edmonton is moving in the right direction. Maybe as a way, just by wrapping up Tom Lumsden, you could say, I imagine when Blatchford was originally being sort of imagined and proposed, etc., like one of the things that Edmonton wanted out of it is to learn, learn some things from it, try some things and learn some things. So, do you see — I mean, it's still, as we say, kind of early in the Blatchford process. I don't think I mentioned this, but I think you guys have a 2042 date. And that's when like all 30,000 people will be there?
Tom Lumsden
Yep. That's the target in our business plan. That's what it shows.
David Roberts
And that's not — I mean, it could go faster than that in theory?
Tom Lumsden
But like I said, it's market dependent. Like Tom Young talked about, we started on the west side. I plan to go to the east side and the market area in the next couple of years. So, three different programs. I believe that once we get our first four to six-story building in there, then things will really start to take off.
David Roberts
Yeah, is the city of Edmonton learning from this experience, do you feel? Like, is there a good sort of exchange of views? Is this proving fertile for the larger community?
Tom Lumsden
I think so. I know, like in our first stage, it took two years to get our drawings approved because the approving group had to wrap their head around what we were trying to do. So now, the next stage took eight months. Like, it's getting quicker, faster. We're doing things like we have a lot of low impact development features like bioswales and things like that in our community that sometimes the utility doesn't love because it's a new thing that they have to figure out how to look after. In Blatchford, we're doing it and they'll have those learnings and some of my developer friends on the private side will be able to take these and see, "Yeah, it has worked."
Tweak it a little bit to work in their community, or, you know, understand what we've done. So, we have been sharing, we will continue to share, and we'll continue to push the envelope to try to improve new things.
David Roberts
Tom Young, any concluding words you want to share?
Tom Young
Yeah, I would say, like you mentioned, you know, the other eco-districts or large site redevelopments happening in North America, and there are lots of them, whether it's, you know, former military bases being redeveloped or former airports, like Blatchford and Stapleton. But I don't think any of those projects that I'm aware of at least are going as far and as comprehensive in their sustainability philosophy as Blatchford is. So, I think that's something that the city of Edmonton should be really proud of and I think it's absolutely something that I personally am very proud of my involvement over more than a decade of work. So yeah, thanks for letting us tell your listeners all about it.
David Roberts
Very cool. Well, nothing is as helpful as real, tangible, touchable steel in the ground, as they say.
Tom Young
Absolutely.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, exactly.
David Roberts
Toms, this has been fascinating. I love these, I love these kind of projects and thank you for coming on and sharing your experience.
Tom Lumsden
Well, if you ever venture back to Edmonton.
David Roberts
Yeah, I would love to come see, come see how much has changed. Everything I hear is that it's like, you know, night and day from the last time I was there.
Tom Lumsden
Yeah, I have keys to the tower, and that's my most endearing feature.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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