Urban Development and Proposals Discussion

[Nimbus]

Gotta love this line from the Eau Claire community association: "However, the community association expressed concern about the size of the condo units. Its letter urged the city to establish guardrails to ensure minimum unit sizes are upheld to avoid the creation of “tiny condos,” which have become prevalent in Toronto and Vancouver."

LOL, no poor people in Eau Claire please. We have standards to uphold here.

 

[Surrealplaces]

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.

I'm not sure how Calgary would compare to Houston or Vancouver. I suspect the issue differs somewhat for all three cities, but I think we need to at least take a run at a housing solution as the first step. The housing could be dispersed into smaller clusters and spread out in different areas. I also think the housing would be better away from the DIC, and in that case should in theory provide some immediate relief to EV. Nobody knows how successful the housing program would be, but we won't know until we try it. We know housing won't solve the issue for all homeless, but it'll give us a clear picture of how many are in the range of extremely difficult to impossible to help. The step for those people is a more difficult solution and another conversation.

I get your frustration. I don't live in EV, but have a friend who lives in Evolution and have heard the frustrating stories, and understand not wanting to spend time experimenting, but IMO, housing would at least get the ball rolling, and would provide some fairly quick relief to EV residents.

 

[CBBarnett]

While not everything is a housing problem, a sufficiently affordable housing supply is a pre-requisite for any other solution to be effective.

Tough or soft approaches to policing, relocating facilities etc. none of that will be meaningfully impactful if there's always a poverty pipeline - exacerbated by a lack of housing access - for people on the margins.