[Dion]

Klassen: Nenshi forgets it's his job to create affordable housing

Let's instead talk about what the city has done, or better yet, undone, on the affordable housing issue. It sold the Cecil Hotel, which - like it or not - was home to some 55 low-income rental units, to East Village developers who are further displacing an entire low-rental district that has nowhere else to go. Ask any agency trying to put up low-income housing and they will tell you how city permitting has ground to a halt, nearly paralyzing development of anything but the chi-chi kind. For ritzy development that serves its density agenda, the city will go to extraordinary lengths - like selling a public street in Eau Claire for the sake of yet another 1,000 schmancy "units."

Ask home builders what the city's policy of increasing urban development at the expense of suburban growth has done, and they'll tell you it's created the housing crunch they predicted long ago. No matter how much the city may try to force condo living on the masses, people will want yards. Without new development farther out, this increases the cost of the houses that already exist (or moves people to outlying areas where they don't pay for Calgary city services). This further puts lower income homeowners into the condo market, which takes away from the rental market, putting people into the Drop-In Centre.

Whose fault is that? That's a planning issue.

And then there's the Calgary Housing Company, our subsidized housing units, which constitute perhaps the most egregious policy abuse of all. Maybe Nenshi could focus his attention on how to turf the 837 families who live in subsidized housing we all pay for, who now make beyond (and some well beyond) the threshold of low-income earners it was meant to serve.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/busines...873/story.html