Nenshi and Carra on what went wrong at Midfield Park
It’s a nightmare scenario for residents: you’re told that city council has decided that your entire neighbourhood will be razed in three years, and you need to say goodbye and get out.
But the imminent closure of Midfield Mobile Home Park has also become a headache for incumbent civic politicians, as the eviction date—Saturday, September 30—falls in the midst of an election campaign.
“What they did was abhorrent,” said Ward 9 candidate Cheryl Link, criticizing both incumbent mayor Naheed Nenshi and area councillor Gian-Carlo Carra. “We expect more from government, I’m sorry. I feel like we’re in Brazil during the Olympics when they were pushing people out of their shantytowns.”
In interviews this week, Nenshi and Carra both said they wish things would have turned out differently at Midfield, which sits on prime land on 16 Avenue N.E. just west of Deerfoot Trail.
“It’s not the outcome I ever wanted,” said Carra.
In 2014, city council announced plans to close the park due to aging water and sewer lines. For those who called Midfield home, the decision means losing not just their homes, but their entire community. The compensation package from the city — $10,000, plus up to $10,000 in moving expenses — has been described by residents as a “slap in the face.”
The city had originally planned to relocate Midfield residents to a planned city-built trailer park on the eastern outskirts of the city, but that plan got spiked by council in 2014. Carra opposed that relocation plan, warning that the planned East Hills project would be a “ginormous” trailer park “in the middle of nowhere.”
“What we heard in 2010 when we were doorknocking was that the people of Midfield very clearly did not want to leave the neighbourhood — that the idea of moving out to East Hills made no sense,” said Carra, who was first elected that year.
Link, who is running against Carra, said a new trailer park wasn’t “part of his New York vision for New York density.” (Carra grew up in both Calgary and New York City.) “They like to talk about affordable housing — but I guess it’s only good if you’re stacked on top of each other like sardines with no garden space, etcetera,” Link said, adding that trailer parks are the ultimate affordable housing for many.
Carra favoured the approach laid out in the 2006 Winston Heights/Mountview Area Redevelopment Plan, which called for the introduction of multi-unit and mixed-use residential and commercial development, including affordable housing, to Midfield Park.
“The idea was that there was a lot of space there and you could phase in development,” said Carra.
But he said when that possibility went before council, it never got off the ground.
“My argument and the mayor’s argument to council was that we have to learn how to take existing neighbourhoods and transition people,” said Carra. “We would build seniors housing, and then transition seniors into that. We would build affordable housing, we would transition people into that.”
“That was something that I think administration was not even remotely prepared to entertain or think about and they were freaked out about. And I think they freaked council out about it.”
Council opted to simply close Midfield and not build the new park.
This week, after Wednesday’s U of C mayoral candidate forum, Nenshi reiterated his support of the city’s decision, even as he lamented that council didn’t support a last-ditch plan that would have kept residents at Midfield for awhile longer.
“I didn’t vote for this outcome,” Nenshi said. “But at the end of the day I’ve got to respect council’s wisdom in what they’ve chosen to do.”
“Councillor Carra and I had an alternative plan. I can’t tell you too many details of that, because it was in camera… but the vast majority of council said, ‘No, it’s not right to leave these people in a situation where it’s unsafe.’”
Midfield’s resident community organizer, 82-year-old Rudy Prediger, has said he plans to launch a legal challenge against the eviction next week before the closure date of September 30.
Nenshi said the situation at Midfield is “terrible,” but defended both the city’s compensation package and timeline.
“Under the law we had to give one year’s notice and no compensation,” he said. “And we said, ‘That’s not good enough. We are a government, not a heartless landlord.’”
Carra also defended the city’s course of action.
“It’s not the outcome I pledged to fight for,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I think we got a pretty fair deal for the residents.”
Carra added that if the Midfield decision was being made today, the outcome might be different. “We’ve become more sophisticated in the project of neighbourhood change thanks to work we’ve done along the Green Line and stuff like that.”
“The typical approach to development in Calgary is that you reduce everything to a blank slate and then you build. The challenge we have going forward as we run LRT out to the west, and now along the Green Line, is how do you transition neighbourhoods to greater intensity without displacing the people?”
—Jeremy Klaszus
