By Murtaza Haider, Executive Director of Cities Institute
There is something peculiar about the way we exchange knowledge.
Academics mostly attend conferences with other academics, while industry professionals gather with practitioners and public-sector decision makers hold separate meetings. Commercial real estate conferences are even more specialized, dividing housing from commercial property and segmenting it into offices, retail, industrial, investment, and other niches.
There are good reasons for specialization. Complex problems require specialized knowledge. But specialization can also create silos, and silos become a problem when the issues we are trying to solve do not respect the boundaries we have created around our professions.
Housing is not merely a housing problem. It is also a question of infrastructure, municipal finance, transportation, labour markets, construction productivity, interest rates, demographics and land economics. A data centre is not simply a technology investment. It raises questions about land, electricity generation, transmission, water, taxation, employment, infrastructure and environmental impacts. A bridge is not simply civil infrastructure. When a bridge suddenly becomes unavailable or collapses, the resulting changes in travel patterns can tell us a great deal about the economic value of connectivity itself.
That is the thinking behind the inaugural Regional Economic Development Summit, or REDS, being held at the Matrix Hotel in downtown Edmonton on October 15.
Hosted jointly by the University of Alberta's Cities Institute and CREDA Edmonton Region, the summit is deliberately designed to bring academics, business leaders, real estate professionals, public-sector decision makers and community builders into the same room. More importantly, it is designed to have them engage with the same problems rather than retreating into their respective areas of expertise.
This year's focus is The Next Economy, and that framing matters.
The Canadian economy is operating through an unusually uncertain period. Tariffs and changing trade relationships are affecting industries differently. Interest rates and financing costs continue to shape investment decisions. Artificial intelligence is changing how businesses operate. Housing affordability remains a major constraint on households and employers. At the same time, Alberta is experiencing significant population growth (population forecasted to grow by 46 percent by 2050) and attracting unusually large investments in energy-intensive sectors such as data centres.
These issues intersect. We should therefore examine them together. The diversity of the summit's three keynote speakers reflects this approach.
The opening keynote will be delivered by Professor Atif Mian of Princeton University, one of the world's leading scholars on the relationship between finance, household debt and the macroeconomy. Alongside Amir Sufi, he co-authored House of Debt, the highly acclaimed 2014 book that helped reshape the discussion of household indebtedness and the Great Recession. His research showed how excessive household debt and weak risk sharing between borrowers and creditors could turn financial distress into a broader collapse in aggregate demand.
Professor Mian's more recent work examines another important imbalance in modern economies, the "saving glut of the rich." His research with Ludwig Straub and Amir Sufi asks what happens when income becomes increasingly concentrated among households with high savings rates, creating large pools of savings without a corresponding rise in productive investment. These questions about savings, debt, investment and economic stability are especially relevant as governments and businesses navigate geopolitical and trade uncertainty.
Catherine Rothrock, Chief Economist for the Government of Alberta, will provide the provincial perspective. She leads the economic and revenue forecasting work that informs provincial budgeting and fiscal planning. Alberta's economy has significant advantages, but it also faces uncertainty involving energy prices, tariffs, labour markets, population growth and rapidly changing capital requirements. Her contribution will help connect the broader economic discussion directly to the decisions Alberta businesses and governments will have to make over the next several months and years.
Our closing keynote will come from Mathieu Laberge, Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of Housing Insights at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) Société canadienne d'hypothèques et de logement(SCHL). Few institutions currently have a larger role in Canadian housing finance than CMHC, and its financing and mortgage-insurance programs have become extraordinarily important to purpose-built rental construction.
The scale of that intervention is remarkable. CMHC's own analysis shows that in 2024, units associated with the Apartment Construction Loan Program and multi-unit mortgage insurance accounted for 88.4 per cent of rental apartment starts, with much of the recent increase linked to MLI Select. CMHC specifically identifies MLI Select, introduced in 2022, as an important contributor to growth in insured rental construction. Consequently, purpose-built rental housing has become an increasingly important source of new housing supply in several Canadian markets.
The same effort to connect data, research and decision-making will continue throughout the day.
Nader Shureih, Senior Vice-President at Environics Analytics, will discuss how organizations can move beyond the information contained within their own proprietary databases. Environics Analytics combines demographic, geographic, consumer and behavioural information drawn from numerous sources, allowing businesses and governments to better understand communities, customers and markets. Proprietary information collected by individual companies has enormous value, but linking it to broader socioeconomic and spatial data adds even more.
Another distinctive component of REDS is the Alberta Real Estate Foundation's involvement. The Foundation has long supported research, education and other initiatives to strengthen Alberta's real estate industry and improve the province's built environment. Rather than simply funding research and leaving completed reports on websites, AREF and REDS will provide researchers supported by the Foundation with an opportunity to discuss their work directly with practitioners, students and decision-makers through what we are calling the Living Library.
Perhaps nowhere is the value of this exchange more apparent than in the discussion about data centres.
Professor Lyndsey Rolheiser of York University's Schulich School of Business and Alexander Carlo recently developed what York describes as the first comprehensive map of Canada's data-centre landscape. Their findings are striking. Alberta accounts for more than 90 per cent of Canada's planned data-centre capacity, according to their analysis. The pipeline of proposed capacity nationally is almost ten times the existing footprint.
That turns what might initially appear to be a technology-sector story into an Alberta economic-development story, an electricity story, a land-use story, an infrastructure story and an environmental-policy story.
The issue has become even more tangible since Meta announced and broke ground in July on its first Canadian data centre in Sturgeon County. Meta describes the project as a 1-gigawatt AI-optimized data centre representing more than $13 billion in investment, with approximately 3,000 construction workers at peak construction and more than 300 operational jobs once completed.
At REDS, Rolheiser will be joined by Matt Sexton (Matt S.) of Meta, Mark Morrissey of Sturgeon County, and Professor Andrew Leach of the University of Alberta . That combination illustrates precisely what we are trying to accomplish. A researcher studying where data centres are locating, the company making the investment, the municipality experiencing that investment and an economist specializing in energy and environmental policy will examine the same issue from different positions. Bronwyn Scrivens - Industrial Real Estate of JLL will help navigate this as moderator.
No single participant possesses the complete answer because no single discipline owns the problem.
The same principle applies to another REDS session examining artificial intelligence and the future of construction .
Canada desperately needs more housing and infrastructure, but simply adding more workers has not solved the production problem. Research I recently co-authored for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute found a long-term deterioration in physical measures of residential construction productivity. Canada now employs more than 650,000 residential construction workers but produces fewer homes per worker than in earlier periods. If Canada wants substantially more housing, adding labour alone will not be enough. We must also change how we build.
That is why the construction discussion at REDS is not confined to economists measuring productivity after the fact. Meghna Singh PhD, ICD.D, CEO of Edmonton-based BuildBase, will bring the perspective of a technology company working directly with builders. Mike Kluh of the City of Edmonton will discuss how technology and AI can affect planning and development processes, while Marius Veldtman of PRAXA Projects will bring the project-delivery perspective. One of CREDA Edmonton's Developing Leaders, Lucas Khalaf, CET, LEED GA of JEN COL Construction will moderate this multi-faceted discussion.
Another group of researchers will examine cities themselves. Their work ranges from gentrification and ethnic neighbourhoods to restaurants, density and infrastructure.
One particularly interesting contribution comes from Jay Hyun, PhD of the Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta, whose research uses sudden bridge collapses to understand the economic value created by transportation infrastructure. That is an excellent example of why the real estate conversation cannot stop at the property line. Buildings derive much of their value from the networks connecting them to workers, customers, suppliers and the rest of the city.
Jay Hyun is joined by colleagues at ASB, integrating specialized research areas into one conversation about The Growth Equation. James Macek discusses gentrification in Chicago, historical parcels in Toronto; Nathan Schiff explores restaurants and population density; and Tianran Dai shares perspectives on ethnic neighbourhoods and gentrification using US census. The conversation is bridged with industry by moderator Adil Kodian, President and COO of Rohit Group.
Rounding out the conversations at REDS is a panel session exploring the factors influencing investment and development decisions across the region. How do policy, infrastructure, and market conditions shape investment decisions?
The discussion will focus on the intersection of policy, development economics and capital deployment, with the perspective of professionals that see these decisions playing out day-today: Scott Argent, Vice President, Regional Leader, Prairies & Territories at Stantec; Raka Josan, President & CEO of Josan Properties; Mike Saunders, Senior Vice President of Qualico Properties; and moderated by Jeremy Deeks, Senior Vice President at CBRE.
And that brings us back to the purpose of the summit.
Academics alone will not build the next economy. It will not be built by developers alone. Nor will governments, municipalities, consultants, technology companies or financial institutions build it independently. The challenges are simply too interconnected.
Real estate depends on infrastructure. Infrastructure depends on public finance. Housing depends on construction productivity and financing. Data centres depend on electricity and land. Economic development depends on labour markets, transportation and housing. Artificial intelligence increasingly intersects with all of them.
Thinking in silos allows us to become very knowledgeable about individual pieces of the puzzle. It does not necessarily help us understand the big picture when those pieces come together.
That is what we hope REDS will do differently.
On October 15, researchers, industry professionals, policymakers, nonprofit leaders, funders and community builders will gather at the Matrix Hotel in Edmonton. Breakfast begins at 7:30 a.m., and the conversations will continue through the afternoon.
The objective is not for academia to lecture industry, or for industry to tell academics what they have missed. It is to create opportunities for both sides, together with government and community leaders, to question their assumptions, compare evidence and understand problems through lenses other than their own.
If we continue to think and act in silos, we will inevitably miss opportunities for better and more synergistic outcomes.
The next economy requires us to do the opposite.
