A council that sometimes faces hours of community protests over basement suites, child-care facilities or apartment projects received virtually no opposition Monday to the 6,000-home inner-city project to which it gave unanimous approval Monday.

The West Campus development, which surrounds Alberta Children’s hospital and directly borders University Heights and Varsity, envisions large clusters of townhouses and higher-density housing, along with retail and 1.5 million square feet of office space that could eventually employ about 10,000 people.

Located on University of Calgary property, the project should take 15 to 20 years to be fully built out but, with Monday’s approval, construction could start next summer, said West Campus Development Trust CEO James Robertson.

Councillors lined up Monday to praise the project’s not-for-profit development agency for the way it worked since 2012 to involve the community in the planning process. The five nearby community associations, brought into discussions early, jointly wrote a letter to praise the “higher standard” of the project engagement.

“You took their input into consideration and that’s why it worked so well,” Coun. Ward Sutherland said.

Each community’s own letter cited minor recommended tweaks — an off-leash dog park, said one; more lower-income housing, said another — but nobody from the associations attended council Monday to speak against the project. No one else did, either.

Two letters of opposition were submitted to council for West Campus. By contrast, about 200 letters came in against a bottle depot in the deep south suburb of Walden, though council voted in favour of it anyway.

Early feedback sessions for West Campus urged lower-density housing closest to existing community and ample cycling paths along the sloped area, before the trust developed its plan. “Not everyone gets what they want, everyone at least got input in a meaningful fashion, so that they understood why the plan is what it is,” said Robertson, a former city land and housing executive.

“I didn’t use the word ‘collaborate’ or ‘engage.’ We just sat down and chatted with people.”

It’s an inner-city development comparable in size perhaps only to East Village, also being built by a not-for-profit corporation. Mayor Naheed Nenshi said the city could learn from the way officials got neighbourhood buy-in. He said West Campus would “change the face of the city forever.”

Other major redevelopment projects within the city, such as Quarry Park and Garrison Woods, aren’t quite the same, the mayor said. Both have stand-alone houses, while West Campus has nothing less compact than townhouses, and will likely cater to university and hospital staff, as well as students.

“Creating a campus district around the hospitals and the campus will really change the character of that piece of the heart of northwest Calgary — and it’s nice. It’s good quality stuff,” Nenshi said.