| Jim Irwin has lived in a Victoria Park rooming house for 26 years. He spends his days picking bottles to supplement the meager amount of money he makes on social assistance. Although it’s not easy, he says he "gets by."
But now Irwin is starting to worry about ending up homeless because the city is expropriating the 24 remaining buildings in an eight-block area of Victoria Park in order to make way for Stampede expansion.
Many of the properties – located between 12th Avenue and 14th Avenue S.E., and Macleod Trail and the Elbow River – are rooming houses occupied by single people with low incomes.
When asked where he’ll go when his building is knocked down, Irwin says, "I haven’t got a clue."
Irwin currently pays $350 a month for his one-bedroom apartment and he knows it will be next to impossible to find anything that cheap anywhere else in the city.
"I don’t want to end up like the people sleeping on the street," he says. "I’ve been telling everybody around here, when they bulldoze my house they’ll bulldoze it with me in it."
Another local resident, who asked not to be identified, wants to know what the city has planned for all the low-income residents who will be displaced.
"What are you going to do? Send them all down to the river with a tent?" he asks.
Donna Brown, co-ordinator of acquisitions with the city’s land division, says the city decided to expropriate the remaining buildings because they ran out of other options. She says the Stampede has been negotiating with landowners for years and managed to buy more than 200 properties, but the last holdouts in the area won’t budget.
"There was no end to this…. All avenues have been exhausted and these owners are not moving at any price," she says. "We’ve looked at it as a municipal need for the greater good of the City of Calgary and so that’s why we’re in expropriation mode."
Don Delaney is pastor of Victory Outreach Centre, a church that ministers to the homeless and other low-income residents in the area. He says he accepts the Stampede expansion, but "it’s a question of doing it with as much integrity as possible" and making sure that the needs of the people aren’t ignored.
"What we really need is some real affordable housing for people that have just come off the street. Victoria Park was a place where a guy could come off the street and get an apartment. It could be a dump but it would be a start," says Delaney. "At least they had an address to go get a job. At least they had a shower…. Now where do they go?"
Ald. Madeleine King says the city has adopted a new affordable housing action plan and has committed to building 200 new affordable housing units each year. But 1,850 people are currently on the Calgary Housing Company waiting list, and King says the city recognizes that’s much too long. She says she’s in favour of the city allowing homeowners to rent out secondary suites in their houses as a way to create more affordable housing.
"I certainly am trying to do all that I can to ensure that our inner-city communities continue to offer a range of housing choices," she says.
Low-income residents in Victoria Park say they’d welcome more affordable housing options. Many who spoke to Fast Forward on condition of anonymity describe their rooming-house owners as "slum landlords." James Shaw, a former Victoria Park rooming-house resident, says people are afraid to stand up to their landlords because they can’t afford to live anywhere else if they get kicked out.
Shaw says in the last rooming house he lived in, his stove and fridge didn’t work and the hot water was intermittent. As well, there were broken windows that had been replaced by plastic sheeting or garbage bags. On the day Fast Forward was talking to residents of Victoria Park, there was a fire in one of the rooming houses and it was boarded up by the fire department. The fire department also condemned another rooming house in the area this spring because it was deemed a fire hazard.
"I agree with the slumlord term," says Shaw, adding that some rooming house owners are "milking every dime" they can out of low-income residents before expropriation.
But Wayne Gleason, a building manager for one of the rooming houses in the area, says, "I think it’s been hard for the people to take interest in maintaining the properties with the threat of expropriation forever lurking."
Gleason says building owners also feel they’re not getting a fair offer from the Stampede.
"Fair market value doesn’t exist. The Stampede has manipulated the market for so many years with threats of expropriation," says Gleason.
However, Lindsay Galloway, a spokesperson for the Stampede, says his organization has given "fair and equitable offers" that are "better than independently appraised market value."
Galloway adds the Stampede has helped to relocate low-income residents whose buildings have been demolished, and although it has concerns about the lack of affordable housing options for low-income residents, "It’s not what we do. That’s not our business." |
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