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.

 

[jhappy77]

My main issue with housing first is there is a significant chunk of the homeless population is unwilling or uncapable of following basic rules, leading to chaos for everyone nearby. Here in Vancouver, some druggies were starting fires in the SROs every couple weeks (via genius moves like using a blowtorch to do meth indoors, or creating a jerry rigged charging system for their stolen ebike collection). This closed down nearby businesses and in general many people started to avoid Granville Street. If this type of person is getting free housing, free food, free everything on the taxpayer dime, then we should do the rest of society a favor and move them somewhere far outside the city where they aren't going to harm everyone else along the way.

As a society, we've become unwilling to enforce any sort of lasting consequences for the subset of homeless people who are anti-social "agents of chaos". All compassion and no toughness is just called foolishness. We need to be both compassionate for those who need help and tough to those who are abusing the system. And if we can reduce the anti-social behavior that's harming communities, there will be more support and acceptance for programs giving housing and help for people who need it and appreciate it.

 

[The Familia]

We have a winner! Thank you jhappy77 I couldn’t agree more with your statement. I’m all for assisting the people who need it most and want/willing to be helped. Those that are agents of chaos and do not want any assistance should be forcibly removed from our streets and exiled as would have been the case in years gone by. No time or patience for these types of people anymore.

 

[Surrealplaces]

My main issue with housing first is there is a significant chunk of the homeless population is unwilling or uncapable of following basic rules, leading to chaos for everyone nearby. Here in Vancouver, some druggies were starting fires in the SROs every couple weeks (via genius moves like using a blowtorch to do meth indoors, or creating a jerry rigged charging system for their stolen ebike collection). This closed down nearby businesses and in general many people started to avoid Granville Street. If this type of person is getting free housing, free food, free everything on the taxpayer dime, then we should do the rest of society a favor and move them somewhere far outside the city where they aren't going to harm everyone else along the way.

As a society, we've become unwilling to enforce any sort of lasting consequences for the subset of homeless people who are anti-social "agents of chaos". All compassion and no toughness is just called foolishness. We need to be both compassionate for those who need help and tough to those who are abusing the system. And if we can reduce the anti-social behavior that's harming communities, there will be more support and acceptance for programs giving housing and help for people who need it and appreciate it.

I think the trick would be to do as good of a screening process as you can when to decide who moves in. There's no question, not all homeless people can be helped, by housing, or any method really, but if we can get the ones who can be helped into housing and separated from the rest, it's a good start.
Of course it's all easier said than done. I'm not sure what has been done in Vancouver. Maybe they tried to screen people before housing them as well?