Homelessness to worsen as political failure continues
It’s fair to wonder what these youth think of adults in positions of power not enacting the change they claim is possible. Luckily, that question was answered earlier in the meeting by outgoing Youth Poet Laureate Dáminí Awóyígà when she read the poem Wonder to councillors.
Wonder By Dáminí Awóyígà
Wonder…
Wonder is a childish thing, isn’t it?
The wide-set eyes of a child observing in awe
Seeing for the first time with fresh eyes
We are young at heart and young in stride
Hopeful still
Ardent still
Some may call us unknowing and naive
But our hearts have seen
Our eyes have felt
We rise from every part of these lands
From a war-torn world
Our hands intertwined, teary eyes watching God
We are the seeds of generations
The fruit and the hope of those before
We are watered by waters of the past
And fed the dew of the future
We hold all your shortcomings in the air that we breathe
We are the youth of your generation
We are survivors, protesters and visionaries
Hopeful still
Ardent still
Full of wonder
We wonder about homeless people
How they manage to survive outside on the street
We wonder about encampments
We wonder where they go
When they close
Wonder, what more can be done
We are infinite youth and sparkling sky
Hopeful still
Ardent still
We wonder if we will be able to afford the houses
We dream of living in
If we will be stuck living at home
Or if we will be trapped in crowded apartments
With roommates because the cost of housing is too high
We are pounding hearts and lashing tongues
Hopeful still
Ardent still
We wonder about those who don’t choose to fast
But rather they must because of a lack of access to food
We wonder when food will be secure
We wonder about the world you will leave for us
Whether the air will still be breathable
When we are old enough to watch our kids ride bikes
Or if fires and rainy summers will be the normalcy
We are persistent feet and gentle leading hands
Hopeful still
Ardent still
We wonder when empty promises
Will stop being placed on discrimination and racism complaints
Wonder when the bodies of Black men
Will no longer bleed on paved streets
We wonder when street checks
and the brutality of police will cease
We wonder when our countries will finally
Take a stand for what they know is right
We wonder when the bombs will stop
The killing too
Matt Stickland
Outgoing Youth Poet Laureate Dáminí Awóyígà with deputy mayor Cathy Deagle Gammon and councillor Iona Stoddard
We want peace to reign
CEASEFIRE NOW
We are the voices that will still be heard
When a new day dons
Hopeful still
Ardent still
Currently filled with wonder
There will come a day
When we are no longer filled with just
Wonder
But rather knowledge and action
And on that day may the world
Hear us
Because there will be powerful change
Wonder…
Wonder is a childish thing, isn’t it?
The wide-set eyes of a child observing in awe
Seeing for the first time with fresh eyes
Things that passed
Councillors considered some deferred business off the top, starting with a first reading of selling some of the former lands of Africville to the Africville Heritage Trust for $1. This moves to a public hearing.
The long-awaited public engagement strategy came back to council after being deferred last meeting due to the Housing Accelerator fund debates. During this debate, councillor Patty Cuttell wanted to delay this public consultation strategy to get some public consultation on the public consultation plan. One vote in an 8-7 decision to move forward with the unamended plan defeated her amendment. Deputy mayor Deagle Gammon joined Cuttell, and councillors Becky Kent, Trish Purdy, Kathryn Morse, and Lisa Blackburn voted for the amendment. Still, Mayor Mike Savage, councillors David Hendsbee, Sam Austin, Tony Mancini, Waye Mason, Lindell Smith, Shawn Cleary and Iona Stoddard outnumbered the ayes and killed the amendment. Councillors Pam Lovelace and Tim Outhit were absent for the vote.
There’s more on this in the notable debates section below, but in brief, the amendment failed because of what this strategy is and why it was created in the first place. For many years, the city has been (rightly) accused of having absolute garbage public engagement. For some people, it’s hard to provide feedback to the city, and even when people take time off work to come to city hall and say their piece, there’s no indication that their feedback has been listened to or used. Often, the city formally empowers people only when it’s time to provide public feedback at meetings. People get five minutes to speak at a meeting where there’s usually already a motion to approve the thing they are providing feedback on the agenda. Which almost always gets passed without their concerns being addressed. At its core, the new engagement strategy is supposed to add transparency and rebuild eroded public trust. Tuesday’s vote to approve this new strategic plan (Cuttell was the sole nay vote, Lovelace was still absent, but Outhit returned to vote yea) means phase one of the new strategic plan is now underway. Staff will come back to council Soon™ with ways to adapt existing engagement policies and municipal resources to council’s new strategic plan.
As more people become unhoused due to the ongoing failure of all three levels of government, councillor Sam Austin asked for an update to be brought to council and boy, is it bleak. In homelessness slow months, meaning winter, the by-name list in the HRM is growing by about 4% a month and hit 1,239 people in April. This isn’t going to stop anytime soon because the people with power who can fix things just aren’t doing it. The high cost of living, the high cost of rentals, fixed-term leases, and an overall lack of mental health and addiction support means that people are becoming homeless at an alarming rate. The city’s director of housing and homelessness, Max Chauvin, told councillors that most of the new homeless just can’t afford rent so they sleep in their cars. Because of the high cost of rent, people are also staying in abusive relationships, choosing to continue suffering abuse instead of becoming unhoused. More on this is also in the notable debates section below.
Volunteers will continue to run the Beaver Bank Kinsac Community Centre because this agreement was renewed on the consent agenda.
Dexter Construction has a spot on Lake Loon Road, where it has stored clean fill for the past 20 years and has to renew its application yearly. This was taken off the consent agenda by the CAO, and was the subject of much debate due to councillor Purdy. This property has been under a variance (special permission to break a bylaw) from the Grade Alteration By-law. But this bylaw is supposed to be used if people need to change land for construction, but not to allow land to be used in perpetuity as a commercial fill site. This is an issue for the residents of Lake Loon Road, who live on a road where the main traffic in front of their houses is loud, lethal dump trucks trundling up the road, shedding dust and debris. And if this company is allowed to abuse a bylaw loophole to make life worse for HRM residents, shouldn’t that loophole be closed? Most likely! This is getting a staff report, and staff will come back with some options for councillors in June(ish).
The African Descent Advisory Committee wants the mayor to write a letter to the province asking for charter changes to support the Community Benefit Agreements. Don’t know what those are? Richard Woodbury wrote a story about ‘em for the CBC back in May 2022. This was deferred at the request of councillor Smith due to some new information and a provincial response to a previous letter.
1735 Henry St. might become a heritage building; the council approved scheduling a hearing.
Councillor Tim Outhit got back on the Community Planning and Economic Development committee.
The Housing Accelerator Fund public hearing has been scheduled for May 21, 2024. Any written submissions need to be provided to the clerks’ office by 10am on the morning of the 21st. Anyone who wishes to speak can also sign up via the clerks, and there will be as much time given to this hearing as needed. Some cities have had these public hearings last days, and in the HRM the public feedback will continue until everyone who wants to has spoken.
Councillor Kathryn Morse wants to know if the city should hire an architect with money made available by the Housing Accelerator Fund; this will get a report.
Morse also asked for a report to see what the options are to decrease the risk of wildfire in the HRM by banning open fires from March 15 to October 15. This received a lot of pushback from other councillors who pointed out that full bans, like the HRM’s smoking ban, don’t work. Councillor Cuttell pointed out that in her district, people were having unsafe fires in parks, so instead of trying to force people not to have fires, the city built safe fire pits instead. For her part, when presented with new information, Morse decided to withdraw the motion and do some more work on it. Behold the banality of good governance in action.
Notable debates
Shanty town rules
During the homelessness update debate, there was, as always, a lot of finger-pointing at other orders of government. It is fair to point fingers at the federal government, who are importing workers to undercut Canadian wages while also not doing enough to regulate Canada’s monopolistic corporate overlords, who are driving up the cost of living. It is also fair, more than fair even, to point fingers at the provincial government, which has not done things like increase the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of living, build public housing, or end fixed-term leases, which would do a lot to help prevent homelessness.
But this debate also had a striking quote from Mayor Savage, who said:
“We can’t allow homelessness to be normalized. We just can’t allow ourselves to get to a point where we say, ‘Well, there’s a certain number of people living in the street, and that level is ok.’ It shouldn’t be okay, there’s no need for it to be okay. It shouldn’t be okay. There’s no need for it to be okay. We shouldn’t accept it. We should fight it. We should do everything we can to support people who are homeless in our community.”
This is striking for two reasons. The first is that the city regularly normalizes horrendous things exactly as Savage described. For example, last October, our road safety standard switched from zero people should die to a certain number of people will die, and that’s okay if we measure it per capita. Then, city staff proposed that we keep the same lowered safety standard for the new Strategic Road Safety Framework when they presented it to the transportation standing committee last month. It is quite easy to believe that Halifax, a city that has normalized the preventable deaths of children, will have no problem continuing to normalize homelessness.
The second is that this city council could do much more if it wanted to fight homelessness. The city often grapples with the fact that, in many ways, it’s on the front line of the housing crisis, for the simple fact that from libraries to public parks, municipal resources are going towards helping unhoused people. The city wants to be able to do more, but it can’t because it’s broke, and it’s broke because of suburban sprawl. In 2017, Tristan Cleveland and Paul Dec broke the city up into census areas and for each area, they added up all of the property taxes and then subtracted just the cost of roads. Large swaths of the HRM, when just accounting for roads—no other municipal services—were costing the HRM up to $3.5 million a year.
Since that study was done, the cost of maintaining roads has gone up; the city took over a whole bunch of roads from the province, so the cost of road maintenance is way higher than it was in 2017. But while those costs were going up, council—led by low tax stalwarts like Savage and Outhit—keep keeping taxes low. This means that one of the big reasons we won’t be able to do anything but normalize homelessness is that we can’t do more to fight homelessness because council has been starving itself of vital resources it needs to do so.
If Savage is serious about fighting homelessness, we need to change how we move around this city and how we build it. The good news is that thanks to the Housing Accelerator Fund, we are starting to do the latter, although that brings us to notable debate number two.
Councillor Cuttell’s consultation conundrum
During the debate about the new public consultation strategy, councillor Cuttell pushed for more public engagement. Her concern was that this strategic plan would have a massive impact on us, so we should have a say in what these changes look like, which is true. However, issues arise when public consultation can work against the short-term goals of council or the long-term interests of the city.
For example, the reason the Spring Garden Road transit-only pilot is not likely to become a reality until 2025. In March 2023, when the Transportation Standing Committee was about to instruct staff to come back with a plan to manage motorists, Cuttell got the motion amended to consult with local businesses as part of that process. This public consultation was an open house held on April 29, 2024, at the Lord Nelson Hotel. Local business owners were asked to provide input on what they thought about using paint, or signs, or gates to control the traffic. Most of them wanted to talk about whether or not they wanted drivers on Spring Garden Road and didn’t really care about how that was managed. But businesses had already been “extensively consulted” way back in 2019. The concerns they voiced then were the same ones they voiced in 2024. Since 2019, cities have started doing pedestrianized streets and learned that they generate a boatload of money for businesses and cities and generate a lot of public approval. At a certain point, politicians just need to make a hard decision and our council has gotten really good at using public consultation to avoid making decisions.
Alternatively, like with the Housing Accelerator Fund, the city sometimes uses public consultation as cover to make a bad decision. One of the bylaw changes the city was considering to qualify for the $79 million in federal Housing Accelerator Fund money was to densify around universities. After receiving only 170 emails from residents around the universities, city staff decided to back off on the proposed densification of Halifax’s south end because residents believed the changes may create a “lack of single-unit housing for doctors, academics, professionals and families to live.” They were also concerned that the south end being densified would “place strain on infrastructure and services.” In reality, what’s really putting a strain on infrastructure and services is the fact that District 13 in Hammonds Plains is growing faster than District 7, for all of the same reasons highlighted by Cleveland and Pec in 2017 and Stantec in 2013 and the provincial government in 2003.
That said, some things don’t need public engagement just for the sake of doing so, and the public consultation strategy may be one of those best left to experts—if you get the right experts. When we put car traffic managers in charge of road safety, they devised a plan to continue normalizing road violence. Here’s to hoping the public engagement staff are better suited to their job.
