It’s a changing neighbourhood

My neighbourhood in Edmonton has been struggling through some changes over the past year. The city changed its zoning regulations (which I wrote about last January) and allowed the development of higher and more densely packed housing than we were used to.

What’s more, we are seeing more unhoused people in our part of the city. This is driven primarily by increasing numbers of unhoused people across the whole city (and Edmonton isn’t alone in this – decreasing vacancy rates across the country drive up rents, leaving many vulnerable people unable to afford housing). It’s exacerbated by the Edmonton police’s policy of clearing encampments, which results in unhoused people scattering throughout the city.

The police cleared an encampment at roughly the same time as a permanent supportive housing development for hard-to-house people opened in the neighbourhood. Many of my neighbours (mistakenly, I believe) blame the development for the appearance of increased social disorder such as property crime, public drug use, etc.

Where does the anger go?

In sum, my neighbourhood used to feel like sheltered suburbs even though we were just a couple of kilometres from downtown Edmonton. It doesn’t feel like that anymore. So there has been a lot of discussion, frustration, anger and finger-pointing in the places where we get together to talk about our shared life in our part of the city. In the social media world that includes Facebook, neighbourhood groups have become full of vexation and recrimination against city council, the police and organizations offering services to our unhoused neighbours.

In response to this vitriol, a group of us have gotten together to try to better understand the changes in our neighbourhood and to help our neighbours understand them better too. A crucial part of this is to help shift the conversation from “What do we want in our community?” (Who is we”? Whose community is this?) to “What does our community need and what can it contribute to the city and its needs?” In other words, we’re trying to shift the conversation from self-protection to a focus on the common good, including the good of the more vulnerable of our neighbours.

The real trick

This kind of change really feels like swimming upstream. We are so habituated, after all, to having our opinions shaped by our sense of our own interests (property values), by our reactions (revulsion at public drug use) and by our anxieties (changed lifestyles). When we are asked to shift our perspective to what we can contribute to the common good, we tend to say things like, “I know that the city needs more affordable housing, but not here; that’s just my opinion.”
Our opinions aren’t reflexes or our parents (you just have to accept those). We’re responsible for our opinions. And we need to be responsible with our opinions: they affect how others see things and what they don’t see. We can shift our perspectives and the way we ask questions of our world. But we first have to want to. That’s the real trick; it may be less a matter of persuasion and more one of conversion.