FCC1982
Senior Member
I agree - it’s time - the current situation in the EV can’t be allowed to continue
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Urban Development and Proposals Discussion
- Thread starter Surrealplaces
- Start date
Albertasaurus
Active Member
Calgary has grown so much in the past 4 years that I'd argue that 2021 census data is practically obsolete (although, granted it's the best we have). We've pretty much added a Greater Victoria since then.Calgary has a community profile page where it breaks down the demographics for all its neighborhoods. It is a few years old now though as it's based on the 2021 Census.
Community Profiles
www.calgary.ca
At that time, the Downtown Core, Beltline, East Village and West End, and even the immediately surrounding communities (like Sunalta, Bankview, Mission) had a low percentage of student-age residents.
InfrastructureEnthusiast
Active Member
The solutions are out there... in fact they have been successfully implemented in another oil and gas city from a conservative corner of the world. We could easily do this in Calgary if A: we had a provincial government that actually gave a shit about solving the problem, instead of paying lip service to it and instead making moves so that the issue is downloaded onto municipalities they want to make life difficult for and B: if we moved past the mentality common in most English-speaking countries that someone who is homeless and suffering from addiction or mental health has to somehow prove their worthiness by either getting sober or getting on meds before we give them help with finding a home. We have a problem in North America where the homeless, renters and the working poor are viewed as somehow morally inferior to those who own homes and so therefore must continually prove their worth to society (see most NIMBYism).
What happened? In 2012, the city went all-in on a concept called "Housing First." Since then, homelessness is down 63% in the greater Houston area, and more than 30,000 people have been housed.
Housing First means spend money on getting the unhoused into their own apartments, subsidize their rent, then provide the services needed to stabilize their lives – not fix the person first; not just add more shelter beds.
"Our natural instinct when we see homelessness increasing is to hire more outreach workers and to build more shelter beds," said Mandy Chapman Semple, the architect of Houston's success story. She now advises other cities on how to replicate it, among them Dallas, New Orleans, and Oklahoma City. "The idea that if you have no permanent place to live, that you're also going to be able to transform and tackle complex mental health issues, addiction issues, complex financial issues? It's just unrealistic."
Inside Houston's successful strategy to reduce homelessness
Since 2012, the nation's fourth-largest city has reduced homelessness in the greater Houston area by 63%. Now other cities are looking to replicate this model.www.cbsnews.com
I agree, housing is a huge piece of the puzzle, didn't medicine hat come to a similar conclusion with their supportive housing initiative?
I'm pretty impressed with the atco/ahc projects in the west end. Modular construction is a huge game changer for those sorts of projects. I hope we see more of those pop up as fillers all over the city in the right TOD locations.
Golfing guy
Active Member
Could some of the office conversions be turned into social housing? Mustard Seed has built or converted a few buildings and they seem successful. Might be a start if a thousand units are converted this way. Not all homeless are drug users
Medicine Hat went all in on the housing first strategy, and it worked briefly, but unfortunately things kind of regressed back to the previous situation. There are more homeless people on the streets now in MH than there was before the housing initiative, but without the housing solution maybe that number is much higher today?
I'll always believe housing needs to be part of the strategy, but I also don't believe it's a full solution, given the substance addition issue. The best we can do is roll out a housing solution, give it some time and see who falls through the cracks and can't be helped. Then it's a different conversation for the remaining, forced rehab? I don't know.
If we got housing down 63% like Houston it means probably 37% fall into that category of un-helpable, or extremely difficult to help. 37% is still much better than 100%.
I'll always believe housing needs to be part of the strategy, but I also don't believe it's a full solution, given the substance addition issue. The best we can do is roll out a housing solution, give it some time and see who falls through the cracks and can't be helped. Then it's a different conversation for the remaining, forced rehab? I don't know.
If we got housing down 63% like Houston it means probably 37% fall into that category of un-helpable, or extremely difficult to help. 37% is still much better than 100%.
Mountain Man
Senior Member
We should definitely be doing something, currently it seems the approach is ignore the problem and hope it goes away.
Silence&Motion
Senior Member
Unfortunately, the Trump administration just put out an executive order banning federal funds for any "Housing First" program - even thought it was a Republican idea (one of a few good ones to come out of the Bush administration). I guess, like EVs and mRNA vaccines, they think it's not manly enough, or too woke.
It's not clear what exactly will replace Housing First, other than performative tough talk. I've often banged my head against the wall on this forum arguing that tough talk of "cracking down" and "being like China" is not a policy solution. If you want to get people off the street, you need actual plans for where they're going to go and how they're going to get there. Building specialized institutions to put them is extremely expensive, which is why conservatives typically favoured "Housing First", which made use of surplus rental units on the private market. Of course, that depends on housing being plentiful and cheap, which was more the case in the 1990s and 2000s, but less the case now. When there's a shortage of housing, the people living on the edge of homelessness are the ones who lose the game of musical chairs.
My fear is that "tough talk" and "cracking down" will just result in the de facto strategy of police "whack-a-mole" where patrol officers spend their entire shift driving from one complaint to the next, ripping down encampments, picking people up, dropping them off at shelters or jails, only to have them back on the street in a matter of hours (and at an extremely high cost to taxpayers to go through the whole, useless cycle). But, sure, media images of angry officers ripping down tents and throwing people into paddy wagons looks good for Trump's social media content.
It's not clear what exactly will replace Housing First, other than performative tough talk. I've often banged my head against the wall on this forum arguing that tough talk of "cracking down" and "being like China" is not a policy solution. If you want to get people off the street, you need actual plans for where they're going to go and how they're going to get there. Building specialized institutions to put them is extremely expensive, which is why conservatives typically favoured "Housing First", which made use of surplus rental units on the private market. Of course, that depends on housing being plentiful and cheap, which was more the case in the 1990s and 2000s, but less the case now. When there's a shortage of housing, the people living on the edge of homelessness are the ones who lose the game of musical chairs.
My fear is that "tough talk" and "cracking down" will just result in the de facto strategy of police "whack-a-mole" where patrol officers spend their entire shift driving from one complaint to the next, ripping down encampments, picking people up, dropping them off at shelters or jails, only to have them back on the street in a matter of hours (and at an extremely high cost to taxpayers to go through the whole, useless cycle). But, sure, media images of angry officers ripping down tents and throwing people into paddy wagons looks good for Trump's social media content.
boreal96
Active Member
Vancouver has plenty of subsidised housing and it's not exactly working out of them. I'm not sure how things operate Houston but I think their crisis is less severe than Canadian cities and West Coast American cities. It could also be that their homelessness is less linked to substance abuse than it is here.
Meanwhile, our downtowns can't afford more trials and errors. The situation is getting really dramatic and at this pace, some cities risk ending up with streets fully abandoned by normal people like Hastings. The Drop-in-Centre is unfair to all of the population of the East Village, Bridgeland, Chinatown and the surroundings. I know the Drop-In Centre center has been here for a while, before the E&V revitalisation, but it's greatly affecting the quality of life of 50K/100K people (not just the people living in the area but also shopping, working, transiting). Are there benefits to having the Drop-In Centre located downtown? Absolutely, it makes essential services more accessible to people in need. But should the needs and safety of 100,000 others also be part of the conversation? In my opinion, yes and it has not been the case at all, even though the Drop-In Centre is financed by the taxes of these 100.000.
I'm a EV resident, pay a significant amount of taxes and never had a say in the story.
Meanwhile, our downtowns can't afford more trials and errors. The situation is getting really dramatic and at this pace, some cities risk ending up with streets fully abandoned by normal people like Hastings. The Drop-in-Centre is unfair to all of the population of the East Village, Bridgeland, Chinatown and the surroundings. I know the Drop-In Centre center has been here for a while, before the E&V revitalisation, but it's greatly affecting the quality of life of 50K/100K people (not just the people living in the area but also shopping, working, transiting). Are there benefits to having the Drop-In Centre located downtown? Absolutely, it makes essential services more accessible to people in need. But should the needs and safety of 100,000 others also be part of the conversation? In my opinion, yes and it has not been the case at all, even though the Drop-In Centre is financed by the taxes of these 100.000.
I'm a EV resident, pay a significant amount of taxes and never had a say in the story.
trtcttc
Senior Member
2012 may seem recent but the drug market has changed so significantly. It's also why the Portugal examples people love to cite (including myself in the past), no longer work in today's context. This worked at a time when people were addicted to at worst, heroin, and many, even softer drugs. Now, people take so much fentanyl, there's permanent damage that's unlikely to reverse with any treatment. A homelessness problem is solvable, a drug crisis that is tens or hundreds times more severe than in the past, I don't think any city has successfully solved.The solutions are out there... in fact they have been successfully implemented in another oil and gas city from a conservative corner of the world. We could easily do this in Calgary if A: we had a provincial government that actually gave a shit about solving the problem, instead of paying lip service to it and instead making moves so that the issue is downloaded onto municipalities they want to make life difficult for and B: if we moved past the mentality common in most English-speaking countries that someone who is homeless and suffering from addiction or mental health has to somehow prove their worthiness by either getting sober or getting on meds before we give them help with finding a home. We have a problem in North America where the homeless, renters and the working poor are viewed as somehow morally inferior to those who own homes and so therefore must continually prove their worth to society (see most NIMBYism).
What happened? In 2012, the city went all-in on a concept called "Housing First." Since then, homelessness is down 63% in the greater Houston area, and more than 30,000 people have been housed.
Housing First means spend money on getting the unhoused into their own apartments, subsidize their rent, then provide the services needed to stabilize their lives – not fix the person first; not just add more shelter beds.
"Our natural instinct when we see homelessness increasing is to hire more outreach workers and to build more shelter beds," said Mandy Chapman Semple, the architect of Houston's success story. She now advises other cities on how to replicate it, among them Dallas, New Orleans, and Oklahoma City. "The idea that if you have no permanent place to live, that you're also going to be able to transform and tackle complex mental health issues, addiction issues, complex financial issues? It's just unrealistic."
Inside Houston's successful strategy to reduce homelessness
Since 2012, the nation's fourth-largest city has reduced homelessness in the greater Houston area by 63%. Now other cities are looking to replicate this model.
Aardappel
New Member
Portugal's decline is more nuanced than that. It isn't just a surge of worse drugs but also a general de-funding and placing responsibilities onto nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations which simply do not have the funds, capacity, or scale to make a long-term positive impact; leading to the worsening of the situation.
From the WAPO two years ago (archive.is link due to paywall):
I understand that Portugal got stereotyped to "just decriminalized drugs and solved addiction" over the course of it's decriminalization experiment, leading to disasters like the recent Oregon decriminalization disaster, but historically Portugal had a very well funded and well oiled government service that was able to support and force drug rehabilitation for its citizens. However, when funding dried up, so did the positive results.
The lesson from Portugal is that anti-drug addiction measures need to be well funded and well supported by their respective governments and if they are not, they simply will not work. Regardless, nearly any anti-homeless initiative needs government funding regardless of its model. For example, since 1984, Finland had decreasing number of homeless people in the country in large part thanks to its model of "Housing First"; making sure that homeless people had a safe and steady place to sleep before anything else. However, Finland has experienced it's first rise in homelessness in eighteen years this year. The reason why, of course, being rising rents due to a decrease in housing construction and availability along with the current right wing Finnish government slashing welfare and funding for Finland's anti-homelessness initiatives.
The point of it all is that any and all anti-poverty, anti-homelessness, and anti-addiction projects need good and consistent long-term funding else they simply fall apart. Hell, even actively criminalizing, punishing, prosecuting, and forcing rehab requires funding. Without funding of any kind of any program to deal with the homeless and drug addicts requires funding that these programs simply don't get, and without that funding the problem only grows. Even something like moving or just demolishing DIC and other central supportive housing requires funding they're not receiving. So unless governments pony up, and I have a feeling most right wing conservative governments won't these days, the issue will simply only worsen.
Best you can do is simply continue to focus on housing affordability/supply so people have less chances to slip through the cracks and into chronic homelessness.
trtcttc
Senior Member
There are cities in the US with extremely well funded programs on a per capita basis, whether they put the money to good use is another issue, but I don't think anywhere has successfully solved the current drug crisis severity. Fentanyl and other synthetic drugs haven't been as big of an issue in Europe and their still largely on the heroin supply.
Why are fentanyl deaths in Europe a fraction of those seen in North America?
Established supply chains, rules around prescribing and advertising opioids lead to less abuse
www.theglobeandmail.com
Red Star
Active Member
That's a great idea!
In fact, before the 1980's there used to be such facilities. Unfortunately, our society can't enforce vagrancy laws or use force to gather people up and get them help as it would hurt people's feelings and infringe on their charter of rights. As a result, our society ends up treating homeless people like cows in India. And that's why we can't have nice things like glass on the Peace Bridge or enjoy an evening meal in EV.
zzkwilliamcanada
Active Member
Developer aiming to resurrect residential highrise project on vacant Eau Claire parking lots
The last two surface parking lots in Eau Claire are slated for development, for a high rise dwelling in the heart of the downtown community.
calgaryherald.com
IceCreamMan
Active Member
Developer aiming to resurrect residential highrise project on vacant Eau Claire parking lots
Eight condo towers restaurants, cafes and convenience retail proposed for two downtown parking lotshttps://calgaryherald.com/news/deve...u-claire-surface-lot?itm_source=news&tbref=hp
