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Calgary's Beltline

I don't know what it was about this Stampede, but I almost had to beat the shit out of multiple homophobes in three separate incidents, got nose to nose with one of pieces of garbage before his buddies pulled him away. I haven't personally experienced homophobia randomly on the street ever in my 10 years here, and have only seen it and dealt with it directed at others a handful of times. Then on Sunday night, I got hit by a car at 1 Street and 12 Avenue sw. Gonna be bedridden for weeks because of some piece of shit. Absolutely f*cking mental shitshow of a week.

Anyone else experience unprecedented craziness during this Stampede?
 
Sorry to hear about your awful experience in what we should be calling 'our fair city'. Like you, I live downtown and I did notice more loud obnoxious behavior but not to the degree of seeing anyone being assaulted.
Unfortunately, the Stampede also brings out the 'inner redneck' in a lot of people. Two years of pent up hostility did not help either.
 
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I observed two biking incidents over Stampede. One where a woman (clearly intoxicated) was riding on the sidewalk around a corner of a building at a high speed, and had to swerve to miss a pedestrian. The pavement was slick because of the rain and she crashed and hit her head on a pole and the sidewalk. I tried to help her but she was so intoxicated and refused to be helped. She was definitely a local and I don’t think it was related to stampede, but then while she was lying on the ground, a group of drunk idiots clearly in Town for Stampede got on her bike and were riding it ringing the bell, before they got off and continued on their way, leaving the bike on the ground next to the woman.

The other incident also involved someone biking intoxicated. They fully ran into the back of a car stopped at a red light at ful speed. And it wasn’t like the car had just stopped. It had been sitting there for a good 10 seconds. Again, I don’t think it was related to Stampede as this seemed like a local substance abuse issue, but it coincided with Stampede.

Also sorry to hear about your experience! I was hoping that this year’s Stampede was making improvements to be more inclusive (e.g., drag brunch on the grounds), but even if organizers try to make it more inclusive, there are still bigots that will make people feel unwelcome/marginalized (or will straight up assault them).
 
The incidents themselves may not be related to the Stampede however I do believe the number of people intoxicated and the level of intoxication goes go up because of the Stampede. For some people, the Stampede is an excuse or a license to drink well beyond their limits. Combine that with other substance abuse issues and it is a dangerous mix.
Something that was clearly noticeable to me over the 10 days and particularly on the two weekends was the frequency of sirens ... ambulance, fire trucks or police ... going in every direction to or from downtown. It was easily three times the frequency of a normal weekend. Last Saturday in particular, it seemed like every 15-20 minutes, for hours on end, there was an EMS vehicle going somewhere.
 
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Sorry to hear about your negative events UW. That really sucks.

I observed both positive and negative sides of things during Stampede week, but this year there seemed to be more craziness than in past years.

Positive things:
Generally speaking the core of the city was very busy, and alive. Restos were packed, with lots of people seemingly having a good time.

Negative things:
On two different occasions saw guys in trucks cat calling women who were walking down the sidewalk.
I got bumped into by a lady on a scooter. She had clearly had a few drinks...luckily it was a fairly minor bump. About a minute later her boyfriend wiped out after hitting a bike rack.
Not necessarily Stampede related, but I witnessed a fight at the Ctrain station. One of the guys was totally high on something. The platform was really crowded due to Stampede volume and may have been part of it IDK.
 
Sorry to hear that UW, hope you aren't out of action for too long from the car collision.

Here's my love-hate Stampede rant:

Having lived here most my life and in the inner city - often well within the Stampede's annual blast radius - Stampede 100% is the route cause in the annual spike of many problems related to bigotry, chaos, violence, drunk/reckless driving, and the general increase in enabling jerk behaviour in the city centre. Of course, it does have real positives too in tourism, vibrancy and lots of fun activities every night throughout the city as @Surrealplaces highlights. But it would be disingenuous to pretend it's not Stampede and the surrounding culture of it that triggers the annual, completely predictable social problems.

Individual "bad actors" are the issue, but they only can act the way they do thanks to decades of cultural encouragement and a total lack of enforcement on dangerous or threatening behaviour. Calgary has a fairly weak regulatory and enforcement culture for nuisance bylaws (noise for example) at the best of times, particularly in the inner city, even less during Stampede week where even heighten enforcement is typically overwhelmed by many multiple more issues.

A core challenge I have with Stampede is it's quasi-governmental status and that gives it unique advantages/privileges over other stakeholders. Stampede-specific exemptions are written right into our noise bylaws for example:

1658512955474.png

All the spill-over events and tents formally part of Stampede are fun but also seek these exemptions and increase the noise and chaos zone well beyond the grounds themselves and into the residential areas of the Beltline. From personal memory over the years - in both roles as a happy attendee and a local annoyed by the noise and chaos - I haven't seen many tents close down right on time at midnight, have heard lots kick-off loudly at 7am to blast music into 15,000 apartments nearby. I have also seen several of the hand-shake deals with bylaw officers and police who happily turn the other way when they should be closing things down or moderating dangerous behaviour.

So it's love-hate - Stampede is a good thing for the economy and boosts inner city vibrancy, but is also demonstrably a pretty toxic way to do so by making lots of the Beltline and general inner city really unpleasant to live in for 10 days a year. It clearly encourages and enables all manner of jerk behaviour. And in order to support those 10 days, we have 60 hectares of inner city land paved for largely empty parking lots the other 355 days a year adding nothing to the inner city community or vibrancy.

I'd like to see a better neighbour relationship between Stampede and the Beltline and some more efforts to acknowledge that there's 25,000 people living next door. Stronger enforcement of the rules that already exist, closing down some streets to take out the drunk-driving and drag racing components out of the area while freeing up space for drunk scooter tourists, and noise bylaws with better rules (e.g. a 9am start rather than 7am for outdoor music) would go a long way.

But who knows, perhaps I am just getting old and cranky :)
 
CBBarnett said:
Having lived here most my life and in the inner city - often well within the Stampede's annual blast radius - Stampede 100% is the route cause in the annual spike of many problems related to bigotry, chaos, violence, drunk/reckless driving, and the general increase in enabling jerk behaviour in the city centre. Of course, it does have real positives too in tourism, vibrancy and lots of fun activities every night throughout the city as @Surrealplaces highlights. But it would be disingenuous to pretend it's not Stampede and the surrounding culture of it that triggers the annual, completely predictable social problems.
Click to expand...

One of the things your comment made me wonder about (as another long term blast radius resident) is that the Stampede provides a lot of benefits (to the whole city) and has a lot of costs (mostly borne by the neighbours). But the Stampede is not a monolith. It's a parade, a rodeo, midway rides, carny games of chance, lotteries, mini donuts and other fair food, a grandstand show, a fireworks display, an ag festival, a huckster fair, corporate promotions, an arts and crafts show, an indigenous cultural exhibition, multiple live music stages and concerts, specialty shows (like super dogs and BMX), and Nashville North to list some of the key elements. It's also a city-wide phenomenon with dress, decor, breakfasts, an increasing range of multicultural activities (like the Ismaili's StampEid breakfast), concerts and megatents.

I think i just listed over 20 things, and while the whole Stampede is greater than the sum of its' parts, I wonder how each of them contributes to both the benefits and costs of the festival. In addtion to tourism, vibrancy and fun activities, -- and acknowledging that the bigots also come out to play -- there's a sense of inclusion that I like; spend $30 and put on a hat and a shirt and you're now Stampeding; you're a Calgarian regardless of your identity or background, to me at least.

But looking at that big list of 20+ things, it seems to me that about three of them cause 95% of the disruption to the communities that host the Stampede. The parade causes maybe 10% of the disruption -- it ties up downtown one morning, but it's also attended by 300,000 people which could plausibly be 10% of Stampede positive impact. (More people are actually in the parade marching than are in Nashville North at any one time.) Do Nashville North and the megatents drive so much of the tourism or vibrancy benefits that they are justified? Or would scaling them back cut the Stampede's community impact by 50% and reduce the tourism/vibrancy/fun benefits of Stampede by 1%? If the drinking tents were shut down at 11, that would reduce the noise from the sound system (I was kept up by Nash North, living a kilometre away from it), would mean that the drunken yahoos are passing through the community yelling before midnight, rather than at 3 AM, and would mean that they are three hours less drunk.

I honestly don't know, since I've lived here all my life, but does how much of our tourism benefit comes from people who are coming to the drinking tents? People travel to music festivals, but that's like Coachella and Glastonbury, who do a little better than 54/50, The Reklaws and Flo Rida for headliners.
 
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There is no question that the overindulgence and substance abuse is the root cause to most of the negative effects of Stampede. Not sure how 'drinking your face off' night after night compliments all of the other activities and enjoyment that Stampede has to offer.

Solution: Move the mass drinking halls/tents to an industrial park like Foothills :D
 
It’s nice to see the Beltline named as the number one neighborhood, even though it is an opinion piece by the look of it.
 
I’d say it’s pretty much no-contest that Beltline is the most livable. Only others that come close/arguably better are Kensington BRZ and Mission. Marda Loop could be considered a contender. Bridgeland and Inglewood would be included if they had a full service grocery store in walking distance.
 
Inglewood frankly needs too much population growth to draw a grocery store. Much easier to retain one (Marda Loop many years ago) than gain one. And as soon as you gain one, you're likely to gain a second. It is a threshold problem-there isn't a good equilibrium to support a single store, you need to be able to support two. Based on 15 minute city work I did in 2021.
 
darwink said:
Inglewood frankly needs too much population growth to draw a grocery store. Much easier to retain one (Marda Loop many years ago) than gain one. And as soon as you gain one, you're likely to gain a second. It is a threshold problem-there isn't a good equilibrium to support a single store, you need to be able to support two. Based on 15 minute city work I did in 2021.
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Interesting way to think about it - why is that the case that a single grocery store gain is unlikely to stop there? Does each grocery store require so much population that if a community has grown to be able to handle one, it's likely to be able support another already anyways?

I am trying to think through how many net-new grocery stores have been added in the inner city, in the past 20 or so years as Calgary really started upping it's urban growth game. Of the net-new larger footprint ones, here's what I recall off the top of my head, very Beltline focused:
  • Co-op Midtown (Beltline) - or was this just a relocation? I forget if a Co-op existing previously in the Beltline.
  • Urban Fare (Beltline)
  • Sunterra (Beltline)
  • Superstore (East Village)
  • Plus a bunch of niche grocers like H Mart (Beltline), Blush Lane (Bridgeland, Marda Loop)
About Inglewood - I love the area but I have always thought of it in a different tier than the other inner city communities because of how surprisingly small and spread out it's local population actually is. As a result it's retail and amenities are far more dependent/catering to visitors outside the community compared to other areas. Inglewood maintains a much higher proportion of destination bars, breweries and restaurants compared to other retail day-to-day basics like a shoppers and grocery that require a far larger local population to sustain themselves.

Inglewood will keep growing with the Greenline and other redevelopment, but I think it's got a long way to go before hitting a critical mass of local population to see a shift to more local-focused retail. Huge growth is required - like a tripling or quadrupling of population kind of growth, far beyond the positive, but largely incremental growth so far.
 
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