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Student Housing Accelerator

IanO said:
Heard that there were 12+ submissions.
Click to expand...

Great news. I wish the city could double that $15 million incentive in one of two ways without putting further strain on city budget.

1. Have province step up. They gave $300 million to YYC dt/arena before last election and they haven't spent an equitable amount here even with their money to Northlands site and OEG/Ice District II. As Mandel just noted, we're not getting our fair share.

2. The city could spend $15 million less for OEG event centre and double this housing initiative fund - our number one priority is more residents downtown and obviously supporting 12+ projects would be a great investment.
 
TAS said:
Great news. I wish the city could double that $15 million incentive in one of two ways without putting further strain on city budget.

1. Have province step up. They gave $300 million to YYC dt/arena before last election and they haven't spent an equitable amount here even with their money to Northlands site and OEG/Ice District II. As Mandel just noted, we're not getting our fair share.

2. The city could spend $15 million less for OEG event centre and double this housing initiative fund - our number one priority is more residents downtown and obviously supporting 12+ projects would be a great investment.
Click to expand...
Double? Let’s quadruple it!

What I’m curious about is we’re also getting that Attainable Housing Incentive as part of the CRL. If we’re getting this kind of interest already, then that means that program should have a ton of applicants when it starts up.
 
Anyone know why we used the surplus school sites for federal housing money instead of getting all of it concentrated into downtown and the quarters?

Would have been a lot less controversy and most of those random neighborhoods aren’t struggling with “vibrancy”.

Selling some of that surplus land for market housing might have been less controversial and better financially too?
 
thommyjo said:
Anyone know why we used the surplus school sites for federal housing money instead of getting all of it concentrated into downtown and the quarters?

Would have been a lot less controversy and most of those random neighborhoods aren’t struggling with “vibrancy”.

Selling some of that surplus land for market housing might have been less controversial and better financially too?
Click to expand...
The sites have been earmarked for affordable housing since 2009, there just wasn't any money earmarked to service them until now. And the City Plan requires that a certain percentage (16%?) of the housing stock in each neighbourhood be affordable housing.

The Student Housing Accelerator uses HAF dollars as well (albiet, from the top-uo we got recently).
 
thommyjo said:
Anyone know why we used the surplus school sites for federal housing money instead of getting all of it concentrated into downtown and the quarters?

Would have been a lot less controversy and most of those random neighborhoods aren’t struggling with “vibrancy”.

Selling some of that surplus land for market housing might have been less controversial and better financially too?
Click to expand...

CplKlinger explained the actual reason behind this, but I'll add my perspective as well. Affordable and supportive housing buildings need to be spread throughout the city to ensure equitable access to housing where people need it, along with better integration into existing neighbourhoods and infrastructure. In my view, clustering these developments inside already struggling areas of the city is how we could end up with projects-like segregated areas that can easily fall into disrepair with changing governments and investment patterns. Having these developments in areas with market housing will make them more apparent and harder to neglect/steer funding away from.
 
Platinum107 said:
CplKlinger explained the actual reason behind this, but I'll add my perspective as well. Affordable and supportive housing buildings need to be spread throughout the city to ensure equitable access to housing where people need it, along with better integration into existing neighbourhoods and infrastructure. In my view, clustering these developments inside already struggling areas of the city is how we could end up with projects-like segregated areas that can easily fall into disrepair with changing governments and investment patterns. Having these developments in areas with market housing will make them more apparent and harder to neglect/steer funding away from.
Click to expand...
Sorry, are these affordable or supportive? That’s a big difference imo.

And here’s my issue with it. Housing is only one part of affordability. Transportation is the 2nd highest cost in most budgets, but the easiest to change (vs groceries for example). Transportation can basically be $0 with walkability, or say $500-1500 with transit or biking. But jumps to $5000+ for vehicles annually.

Building affordable housing in, for example, kiniski and wedgewood heights with no rapid transit makes no sense to me. These are car dependent suburbs. It’s like when they’d give struggling families massive homes on Extreme Home Makeover and then all these stories came out about people being forced to sell those homes cause they couldn’t afford the utilities and taxes.

And there’s basically no knock on effects of doing these projects this way. Whereas increasing the population centrally by another 500 people matters.

I don’t think this is concentrating poverty and disorder like if it was supportive housing. Doing 50mil for the student accelerator fund downtown would have given us better ROI. The downtown BIA was also very frustrated by the money being used for surplus sites and blatchford instead of downtown. I agree with them.
 
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