Halifax in 2001 (and some before/after shots)

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

Not until the projects are removed.

Even with them, maybe. One only has to look at Toronto or NYC, where gentrification has essentially hemmed in housing projects. Bigger cities, but the same principal. (One could also look at the so-far successful public-private rebuild of Toronto's Regent Park to get a sense of how Uniacke could be improved to be opened up to the surrounding community, while still providing the same amount of affordable housing.)

[someone123]

Actually in a lot of cities, Toronto and NYC included, the older housing projects have been demolished or rebuilt in a dramatically different way. Halifax is, as is often the case, clueless and behind the times.

I don't really believe that Gottingen is like the DTES in Vancouver, nor is it very accurate to say that Gottingen was ever the primary retail street in Halifax. Gottingen used to have larger, more successful businesses, but it was never more developed than Barrington. Gottingen's buildings are comparatively modest, whereas the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood and Hastings have Vancouver's grandest buildings from around 1910.

Another big difference is that violent crime rates are much worse around Gottingen, while property crime is worse around the DTES. The root social problems in the two neighbourhoods are not the same. The DTES is a magnet for people with addiction and mental health problems, while Gottingen has been harmed mostly by urban renewal and housing projects. In some ways Gottingen is worse off, but I think it would actually be easier and cheaper to fix, even when you take Halifax's smaller scale into account. The biggest hurdle unfortunately is political; public debate about the North End is stuck in 1970, and decisions there are made based on optics more than anything else.

[resetcbu1]

Originally Posted by Keith P.

Not until the projects are removed.

Agreed 100% .... as long as housing projects exist we will have pockets of saturated crime and poverty. Housing projects are one of the worst 20th century social programs ever implemented, as all they do is create a perpetual stigma of crime and poverty and everything else related to the ghetto, where people grow up thinking that this is normal.

It would make much more sense to build new developments with affordable housing or subsidized housing with in them where these people can remain anonymous, their children would grow up in a normal environment not being taught by the older thugs........ And by having the unfortunate underprivileged spread out amongst the neighborhoods we wouldn't have pockets of concentrated poverty and thus wouldn't really have bad neighborhoods like mulgrave park, Uniacke square, jellybean square etc... IMO

[teddifax]

Very well said!!!

[Hali87]

Originally Posted by someone123

The DTES is a magnet for people with addiction and mental health problems,

In terms of the Halifax region though (and probably the Maritimes as a whole to some degree) Gottingen is exactly that. That's not its most obvious defining feature, but I would be very surprised if addiction or mental health problems are more prevalent in any other part of HRM. One of the root causes of this (or maybe even the singular root cause) is the legacy of poorly thought out urban renewal projects, which put the street at a sudden commercial disadvantage, by, among other things, levelling half the buildings in the neighbourhood to create parking lots. The concentration of homeless shelters and related services, plus the relative ease of finding and using hard drugs (or, from a dealer's perspective, the relative ease of finding customers) is what makes the area a magnet for the poor, homeless, addicted, mentally ill, and criminal. As local agencies adapt to these realities and things like the needle exchange and the methadone clinic emerge, the "magnetism" is further reinforced. I would imagine that the "general mood" of living in a place like Uniacke Square also contributes significantly to rates of addiction, mental illness and crime. I guess what I meant is that the area serves many of the same purposes as the DTES.

(How) does Vancouver address public/affordable housing?

I suppose I should add the (hopefully obvious) disclaimer that I'm not saying that everyone in that part of the city is poor, homeless, addicted, mentally ill, or criminal, far from it. Just, some are. And more than in other places.

[Hali87]

Originally Posted by resetcbu1

It would make much more sense to build new developments with affordable housing or subsidized housing with in them where these people can remain anonymous, their children would grow up in a normal environment not being taught by the older thugs........ And by having the unfortunate underprivileged spread out amongst the neighborhoods we wouldn't have pockets of concentrated poverty and thus wouldn't really have bad neighborhoods like mulgrave park, Uniacke square, jellybean square etc... IMO

I agree with this 100%. I'm not convinced that the affordable housing policies in HRM by Design will accomplish this without some tweaking though. See the Sister Sites for a case study...