PAULA SIMONS,
It’s a classic urban-development challenge — and one with no obvious solutions
In 1929, as the Great Depression hit Alberta, the Rev. Harold Edwardson and his wife Hillie opened a small soup kitchen and homeless shelter just north of downtown Edmonton.
That original shelter had room for about 12 men who were down on their luck. But within a year, the Edwardsons were looking for more space to cope with the demand.
Even after the Second World War ended, they kept expanding. In 1954, the Hope Mission was granted a development permit to build a single men’s hostel on the site where the Herb Jamieson Centre now stands.
It was literally on the wrong side of the tracks, right behind the railway station. In a city flooded with immigrants, refugees and those who had come west to seek fortunes in the new oil boom, there was a desperate need for affordable temporary housing for single men.
But the poor we have always had with us. And the Herb Jamieson Centre became a homeless shelter, so full that Hope Mission had to bring in extra trailers, adding 51 beds to accommodate up to 400 people in the winter.
Now, the church group wants to tear down the aging, increasingly makeshift old building to put up a new 400-bed shelter, complete with rooftop garden and patio. It’s simply too expensive, they say, to try to retrofit the dilapidated building, which has been through decades of hard wear. They propose to build an attractive, pedestrian-friendly building with trees, landscaping, underground parking and an indoor ambulance bay — much less of an eyesore.
But the neighbourhood has changed a lot since 1954. It has change a lot since 2014.
The site’s new neighbours include Rogers Place and Ice District, and the elegant new Royal Alberta Museum. The Remand Centre has closed. So have many of the nearby taverns. Meanwhile, community leaders and entrepreneurs are trying to turn Chinatown and Little Italy into hip and vibrant retail, restaurant and residential districts. And developers have been buying up property to put up new hotels and condos.
And so, we have an absolutely classic urban planning quandary. What happens when the economic and social forces of gentrification conflict with the need to provide safe emergency housing for a city’s most vulnerable population?
Concentrating shelters and services for the homeless in one small area is unfair and counterproductive. I’m sure many residents and small business people hoped when the Jamieson Centre was no longer a viable building, it would simply close, creating more opportunity for redevelopment. Instead, they’re facing the prospect of a new $16-million homeless shelter in the same spot, which could normalize homelessness in the area and entrench it there indefinitely. That’s on top of the 350 beds in the main Hope Mission, another 44 transitional units in Immigration Hall and another 87 spaces in the next-door George Spady detox centre. That’s 881 beds in a tiny area.
Instead of saturating one neighbourhood, we should be building transitional housing and long-term supportive housing throughout the city. That way, no one community is overburdened, and clients coping with addiction and mental illness aren’t ghettoized, either.
But let’s not be naive. Forget all those starry-eyed promises by the province and the city to “end homelessness” in a decade. Sure, we can do much more to place people into supportive housing, to give them medical treatment and social assistance to get off the streets. But we will always have a core group who aren’t interested in giving up drugs or drinking, who aren’t interested in trading their freedom to live in a supportive community. And we will always have people who aren’t chronically homeless, but who need an emergency place to crash for a night or two. The need for a facility like the Herb Jamieson Centre isn’t going away.
It’s no surprise the city’s subdivision and development appeal board denied an effort by neighbours to quash the redevelopment. The site has long been zoned for just such a use. Yet how can we revitalize this critical area of the downtown if we turn these two or three blocks into a permanent homeless quarter?
No matter how fancy the new shelter looks in an artist’s rendering, a clash with neighbours such as Ice District, the museum and Chinatown seems inevitable.
And do I have a magic, easy answer?
Nope, I don’t.