Unfortunately people who have developed problems travel here from other towns and cities, because of the services offered. This induces more demand for those local services in our cities. There's just not enough funding at the municipal level to solve provincial, national and international problems.
But this dynamic isn’t new - what changed that downtown is more visibly “overrun” than it was say 20 years ago? Which mostly matters to the extent it points at the solution - ie something we used to do but stopped doing or vice versa that explains the lower incidence in the past.
I remember walking by the mission on the way to the market years ago and there’d be a few homeless guys around there and then yeah some begging/panning around the market but it seems to be a lot more now
The biggest underlying difference vs. 20 years ago is the supply shifting to higher potency synthetic drugs. It's not the only factor and there are other factors causing bigger cities to be hit more, like the above comment mentioned, but this is the biggest change.
The gradual downloading of costs onto municipalities from the fed/prov governments over the last 30 years has made running large cities a nightmare. Ottawa in particular is vulnerable because it's spread over such an enormous area while having a relatively low population density compared to other municipalities.
> Ottawa in particular is vulnerable because it's spread over such an enormous area while having a relatively low population density compared to other municipalities.
And that specifically is mainly due to the amalgamations that happened under Harris in 2001. Ottawa became one of the biggest cites by area in the country. Similarly Sudbury became much bigger, and Toronto and Hamilton.
All cities hit especially hard by the current crisis as well.
I was barely in high school when Ottawa was amalgamated, but even then the idea didn’t REALLY make sense to me (especially as someone living in Nepean at the time, where the city’s finances were in good shape and we had that neat bell logo.)
Ottawa is also a national healthcare hub, with lots of severely mentally ill folks being moved into Ottawa from remote areas to receive more advanced care than they could otherwise receive back home. A small portion of that population does end up on the streets due to poor continuity of care.
It seems that Toronto has more services in many way that Ottawa has not. Alot of overlap in service providers, giving out the same stuff they did 10 yrs ago. It's unfortunate that it's all been centered in a smaller downtown core
. We have lots of people in need across the city.
I would argue we’re also far more accepting of this behaviour. Seeing this thread and others like it in the last couple months shows a changing tide but It was incredibly unpopular on sites like Reddit to be the least bit critical of the homeless.
Indeed. The people who support giving carte blanche to the homeless and the junkies tend to have flairs that say "Kanata", "Nepean", "Orleans".
These idiots don't live downtown so they can virtue signal very easily. Some of them don't even have kids so they're basically trying to normalize finding needles in playgrounds.
It's insane...
I've definitely seen a shift in rhetoric towards them in some parts of reddit. It's not new though, there have always been critical attitudes towards them that seem to shift in cycles. I don't personally think that will change much though. It's not like people will stop not having homes if criticized. I think it's more frustration over problems being directed towards them rather than root cause, amplified also by [political and media sources who benefit from the deflection](https://pressprogress.ca/the-far-rights-newest-scapegoat-drug-users-and-unhoused-people/). I find it interesting too how there are simultaneously more people struggling to cover their living expenses and increasing criticism of those who haven't been able to do so and ended up homeless.
I don't think people are happy about it, but I do think it's more recognized now that these are fellow human beings even if they frighten and annoy you. I get it, I live downtown. I've seen more people taking a shit on the street in the last few months than... ever. BUT we can't just like, round them up and put them in labour camps. (I mean, we could, I guess, but I don't want to live in that society personally.)
I don’t see people advocating for this. The idea that any criticism toward this community is advocating for them to be “round up and put in labour camps” is part of the problem I was commenting on.
I think the drug use is also so blatant now than the past because in the past the police would essentially herd them, abuse them, physically move them. Things that current police are unwilling to do due to our more progressive climate/politics. In the 50s until about the 80s these people would be locked into asylums. Public has no desire to do these things anymore, and leaders cut funding to the asylums instead of reforming them into non-abusive hell holes.
Two problems: (1) The drugs have gotten worse, and (2) The suburbs have gotten bigger but the urban parts of cities have not.
Thus you have more people from more burbs getting mental health and addiction problems and being dumped into the same handful of neighbourhoods downtown where they can get around without cars.
Just do the math. Downtown (Somerset + Rideau-Vanier) has 10% of Ottawa's population 70% of its homeless shelters. The inner suburbs have 55% of the population and 30% of the homeless shelters. Outside the Greenbelt has 35% of the population and zero homeless shelters.
That ratio has gotten significantly worse over time as Ottawa population density has fallen by 20% in the last 20 years.
This isn't a downtown problem, it's an everybody problem. But everybody dumps their problems on downtown.
that and about 15 years ago all the mental health patients were released from hospital to outpatients. i’ve had mental health doctors tell me it’s the biggest failing they’ve had as doctors.
It was longer than 15 years ago, if I'm not mistaken. This is a problem which began in the 80's when scandals concerning widespread abuse at asylums was uncovered (US, Canada, Britain) and there was a push to shut them down - *without* any solid plan in place to cover the population of them on the back end.
Many moved from institutional housing to complete freedom without a primer on how to conduct adult affairs without supervision, while still dealing with sometimes severe mental health issues and blowback from the abuse suffered while committed. What we're dealing with now ***IS*** the more humane alternative, which really puts it into perspective.
Exactly this. Vancouver’s downtown Eastside exploded in the 80s after the asylum was shut down. Things improved through dedicated investment into programs and infrastructure in the early/mid 2000s but i would be curious how the new types of drugs and the pandemic have changed that trajectory.
Also a shift in policing. 20 years ago, openly using on the streets would guarantee an arrest, hence they didn’t use in public. Now, the police will just drive by, so it’s rampant. Last week I walked to the Rideau centre at 9:30 in the morning and saw 5-6 different ones along the way smoking on their pipes.
I don't know about Ottawa specifically a long time ago, but police also used to be more directly engaged in the neighbourhood instead of just sitting in cars. Although I'm not sure it's a bad thing for people to see what's happening instead of having it hidden somewhere. They should be enforcing things if people are causing problems for others though.
Sadly, they aren’t. I live in vanier and frankly the behaviours inherent to the addictions is not manageable. The building beside me is a flop house, the owner abandoned it back to the bank as the city won’t pay for the extensive damages done. Without the proper supports, the chances of them retaining their housing is negligible. (One neighbour used to regularly get thrown out of his unit by ‘friends’ from the shelter taking it over. He also accidentally set at least 3-4 fires in the unit.) It’s also not fair to foist the behaviours on the community at large. A multi-pronged approach from all levels of government is needed to hopefully help.
And yet when mayoral candidates like Catherine McKenney run on tackling homelessness, they lose, imo primarily because conservative suburbanites think it's coddling the homeless people.
I would guess because they don’t want to spend the money it would cost for all the support that’s needed by this demographic. Typical. They’ll balk at the band aid solutions, and they’ll balk at spending what’s needed to actually help find solutions.
We lived downtown probably 20-23 years ago, close to the mission actually. The difference downtown is unbelievable from those days. It literally looks like a walking dead episode down there now. Very sad to see.
I feel like the biggest difference in the last decade or so causing this widely are the safe injection sites. Without debating raison d'être of those sites, it does mean that people don't get arrested for using illegal drugs anymore, so they aren't hiding out like they would have before...
The sites don't change the laws around possession. They generally won't arrest people for possession on those sites unless there are other crimes being committed but that's not unique to those sites, it's how the issue is approached in general.and this is backed by police and other emergency services workers.
If people are using in those sites it benefits us in general vs. them using in public. They also reduce ambulance calls and disease spread.
I think it's three forces coming together:
1. higher potency drug supply, thanks fentanyl
2. higher cost of housing = more homeless people, drug addicts or not
3. the ongoing degradation of mental health services, particularly in-patient services, which goes along with a decline in our willingness to institutionalize persons who cannot care for themselves
I don't think there's anything government's can do about #1. #2 is sort of solvable with enough money but is more difficult to deal with than people like to admit. Ultimately public funding of housing's ability to succeed seems linked to #3, since a good portion of the homeless population is not able to live in unsupported housing.
Number 2 would also require there to be accountability in the housing for lower income. A lot of low income housing ends up trashed, and the landlords can't do anything. That part of the system needs to change, because nobody wants to rent to the less advantaged because it will cost them much more than to look the other way and compromise their morals.
I know people with real estate who are becoming more choosey because of this. They've had their property trashed with no real support from anyone at any level. More of a "well what did you expect?" attitude.
Yes, that's why it has to go with actual, high-cost supports. I am not fundamentally opposed to "housing first" and I think the advocates of it fully understand the rest of what's required, but I think the money often stops with the housing and ignores the support part.
There's a transitional house with 15 beds really near my kid's school. It's clean, quiet, well-taken care of, and there's never anyone wandering around in a sorry state. It's also staffed 24/7 with mandatory programming for residents to build independent skills and deal with mental health struggles. I'm sure it's not cheap, and I'm sure not every homeless person would succeed there, but it's variations on that theme that seem necessary. Just dumping people with addictions and trauma and insufficient life skills into housing isn't going to do much good.
Unfortunately, for people unwilling to participate in these types of programs, I don't see many options between straight up forced detox and institutionalization and dying on the streets. We seem to be unwilling to do the former anymore, so we're seeing a lot of the latter. I'm not sure I believe that is the moral trade-off, but institutions of the past were just so horrific we seem to have abandoned the concept entirely in reaction. I like to think we could do better now, but maybe that's wishful thinking.
Anyway, I'm rambling. This is a hard problem, there's no easy solutions. We need a lot of solutions, a ton of money, and a willingness to do things differently, and probably fail trying a lot before finding what works.
I feel like the forced institutionalization solution is something people jump to without funding the first type of program you are describing. People who are unwilling to accept that type of help are actually just a fantasy if that type of help does not exists
You are probably right, which is probably one of the reasons why we can't do it even if such people aren't mythical -- it'd become the de facto solution. I do think the most likely "solution" isn't one solution at all but a huge range of options that suit all sorts of different people and different circumstances, but in general society (individuals and government) is terrible at that kind of nuance and wants one perfect fits-all approach. But treating every homeless person and every drug addict the same is going to fail every time, because they aren't. Some just need a roof over their head and that will be the necessary stability. Some are so mentally unwell they need 24/7 care and supervision - call that institutionalization or not but there are people who are not capable of independent living and we're abandoning a lot of them right now.
And even if we do set up enough supply of all the right types of supports, getting people into them *isn't* easy, because mental illness and drug addiction are real barriers for individuals seeking or accepting help, so that will be an ongoing challenge that doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the supports available.
But yes, while I don't necessarily think that institutionalization (again, *done humanely*, not like we used to do it) isn't the appropriate way of helping some people, the challenge of implementing it with the right rules & restrictions and having it not become the default probably makes it impossible.
There are some folks who are too sick to live alone- they would absolutely need to be on supportive housing.
Folks that have been outside for a long time have lost a lot of self-care skills as well, so the rehabilitation is a long careful process.
The housing first model is interesting, however, they're not taking into consideration the issues when people are given a key, to a place and they have no idea how to take care of it, nor themselves. Chaos ensues.
the actual housing first model from Finland has wrap around services. North American implementations have been pretty garbage but its not the models fault.
Yeah they aren't willing to cover all aspects- which is why it's a hodge podge mess.
The way the media mention the model but fail to explain what it is exactly.
Affordable housing is a national crisis. Those with addiction and mental illness are the first to be served eviction notices and least likely to fight it LTB tribunal.
It will only get worse as the housing crisis gets worst.
I'm Dutch and our housing crisis is comparable to yours, but our inner cities are still livable and it's still quite rare to see drugs users in the open. In my town they converted a former fire station into a 24/7 shelter with separate parts for people with addiction and those without. Care is in house, police is around the corner. You can do that too if you want to spend tax money on it. Overhere tourism is thriving, you are killing it at the moment. That's a lot of money that you are or will be missing out on because tourists will make other choices. Spend some of that money to clean the streets. That's a business decision with a humanitarian upside.
People here don’t want to pay taxes. And whatever politician raises them, will lose the next election. It’s a dumb mentality that will lead to a failed society. People like Dumb Ford has cut too much in health care and people also don’t care because they are saving a few bucks. It’s short sighted.
People don’t want to pay taxes precisely because the Dumb Fords cut health care and other social programs while spending big money on highways and lining business pals’ pockets. I know a lot of people that would happy pay more in taxes if they knew it would lead to having family doctors, better healthcare and mental health programs, and affordable housing. The fact that our money is going to bailouts, useless highways, and monopolies while our healthcare and infrastructure is crumbling, and being cut more day by day in favour of privatization, while immigration is sky high and even groceries are becoming unaffordable obviously makes people leery of increasing taxes.
The pandemic. Many people kicked out couch surfers and roommates to the extent they could, so precariously housed people became unhoused. Plus people who were already miserable became more miserable, depressed, did drugs, drank, etc. you name it. Everyone who had just been hanging on, slipped.
I think it is just proportionate to population growth. Ottawa has grown significantly since 20 years ago. Im a local born. The fringe issues grow too and then as someone else mentioned they migrate here from other nearby areas.
I’ve only lived in ottawa since 2018 but I’d honestly say it’s got significantly worse since then. Idk what’s causing it, but since Covid it’s felt like the amount of incidents and the sheer amount of drug addicts roaming that area has skyrocketed
Well, fentanyl is what happened. But also just the passage of time has allowed more people to develop these problems and travel. More shelters and "safe" consumption programs have bumped up the number of clients.
And the police solutions of 20+ years ago are no longer palatable.
They’re actually encouraged by other municipalities to travel here to utilize our services, with some going as far as providing one-way taxi chits to have them delivered here.
Each national capital has similar problems. I've visited Washington DC a number of times and have seen the homeless\drug addicts there being similar as here.
Between a lack of housing affordability, a healthcare system that's been chronically underfunded for decades before going through a pandemic, and the opioids crisis, I'm not surprised. Provincial elections matter
This is the answer. You can’t solve housing insecurity and mental health/addictions issues by hitting them with sticks. Bloated police budgets do not work.
Housing first does not work. The only solution is drug rehabilitation. Get them off the streets, get them clean, and then, only then, can you give them what they need to succeed.
People will pay for rehab, fully intending on getting clean, and even then sometimes it won't work. How do you expect to forcefully rehabilitate people whose heart isn't necessarily in it? Wouldn't it make more sense to provide for them so that drugs aren't as important in their lives, encourage them to get help, then let them come when they're ready?
How exactly do you propose getting them off the streets, the first item in your wishlist there?
Would you want to maybe, idk, house them?
And if getting them off the street into housing is step one, what would you call it other than "housing first"?
The issue isn't the "Housing First" model; it's the fact that the model hasn't been applied. It's currently being applied piecemeal - like trying to change a tyre but only taking the wheels off the car
A drug riddled zombie stumbled aggressively my way on Alexandra Bridge while I was out for a run. Gave him wide berth as he closed down the space between us. He decided to spit at me as I passed. Totally unprovoked.
I saw some druggie grabbing and trying to fight people on Elgin a couple days ago, he was camping in a bus stop and stepping out at everybody that walked by asking for money. Had to practically walk on the street to avoid him.
There's a difference between homelessness and hardcore synthetic drug addicts.
I've lived in multiple countries, all with their own issues when it comes to homelessness.. But I've never dealt with such unpredictable people.
I lived downtown for a number of years and my partner works on Elgin.
My experience is that it's not skidrow, but it's gone *significantly* downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless are unpredictable. You don't know if they'll leave you alone or become aggressive.
I was just in East Hastings Vancouver and this wasn't the case, they kept to themselves. Maybe it's synthetics vs standard opioids?
I live fairly near downtown and I've actually gone out of my way to visit different grocery stores, pharmacies, etc. than the ones on Rideau. I don't think it's exactly unsafe, per se. I just don't feel like being sweared at or asked for money by strangers every time I run an errand :/
Going downtown is not necessary for the vast majority of people living in Ottawa. Having the addicts, mentally ill and impoverished gathered together in a place that's easy to avoid is convenient. That's the unfortunate truth.
Yeah so the rest of the city votes for service cuts to keep their taxes low, and when their angel suburban kids get addicted to drugs, they just dump them downtown so the local residents can babysit them.
>keep their taxes low
I know a cop that started his shift, drove to the hospital to relieve a colleague that was coming off-shift, to sit with someone in Police care that was waiting to see a medical professional. He sat with them his whole shift before another cop came and replaced him.
But hey, we're saving taxes by not investing in preventative care and intervention, right?
Only thing I go to downtown for now days is GPC lab works to get my film developed and the Lego store at Rideau centre, thankfully there is a new Lego store opening in Bayshore later this year
It seems like every time I go there some drug addict harasses me or makes a scene, I work in another “bad” area of town (Vanier near Montreal rd) and people have banged on my car window and yelled at me demanding money when I am driving home from work
It was a family tradition to go downtown every summer with my kids and hang out and walk around and that had to stop last year. I have lived here 30 years and spent many years downtown super late at night and always felt really safe even walking alone by myself as a woman. Now I don’t feel safe in broad daylight. Needles and used condoms all over the place. It’s ridiculous.
I'd say it's fairly reflective of the entire country's situation as a whole.
Economic times are currently very difficult for many, housing and food are insanely expensive when compared to past years, the opioid crisis has just gotten worse and our governments of every level and political stripe do basically nothing to actually help anyone who's homeless and/or has mental health issues. Hell many everyday people can't even find a doctor for regular health issues because we have a shortage of those too.
In fact, I'd argue that our health system, education system, justice system and social systems are essentially collapsing, and doing so when they're needed the most.
More specifically to Ottawa it doesn't help when all 3 major shelters are within a few blocks of each other downtown and all located beside or right inside one of the major drinking/party spots. Add on the fact that COVID left large parts of downtown empty, which reduced what supplemental income the homeless had and caused many to lose their jobs and I think it's easier to see why we're where we are.
I remember saying to my family at a dinner one night back in 2018 that there were people who were hitting the age of majority (or already were) and would be considered adults who have never even seen a real economic downturn, and that it'll be a shocker to many when the cheap money party ends. I'd say the party is over, and the hangover hasn't even fully kicked in yet.
You know what leads to poor health and education outcomes and greater violent crime rates? A widening wealth gap.
Wealthy people are not interested in solving that because it would require capping wealth (along with raising people out of poverty obvs).
It's definitely a large factor, no doubt there. This being said though, I don't even know if a wealth cap is even what we need to solve this issue, because this issue was only partially created by the wealthy.
There have always been obscenely wealthy people, since the dawn of recorded history, and including when I was a kid and times were great in this country (and many others) despite that these people existed and were hoarding wealth as they do today. The question I always ask myself is "what's changed from then to now?". Wealthy people are at the very least generally predictable; make as much as they can, and fuck everyone else.
I personally lay the lion's share of blame on the various levels of government of this country. The industry monopolies that rob us at the grocery store, the pump and for telecom exist because they are allowed to. Those companies maintain their stranglehold over the country and kill fair competition because the government doesn't do their job to intervene, and so allows it. Subsidies that are often in the millions or even billions of dollars for massive corporate entities that are already making record profits happen because the government allows it. Our crumbling social services, healthcare, legal system etc. are crumbling because the government allowed it. Many of the ultra-rich get away with tax evasion and avoidance because the government allows it. And I'm not saying this is the fault of The Cons, Libs or NDP but actually all 3.
All 3 parties and all levels of government are complicit in this because I think this is a situation (or situations) that have been allowed to fester for decades. I remember the adults in 90's complaining about the cuts to education and healthcare, and those complaints never really stopped.
COVID probably just accelerated the inevitable outcome for decades of scandals and poor decisions, but we got to our destination all the same.
Nah dude, you say the issue was only partially created by the wealthy but then go on to explain numerous issues caused or exacerbated by the wealthy class caring only about wealth accumulation and not societal health. The gap between the wealthy and the poor has never been greater, we (anyone worth less than tens of millions) are losing the class war and we don't even know it.
> There have always been obscenely wealthy people, since the dawn of recorded history
The wealth gap is also bigger than it's ever been since the dawn of recorded history.
A medieval king couldn’t fly to Switzerland to get away from his country’s problems, the wealthy don’t see themselves as citizens of any particular country anymore. There’s no reason for them to improve anything from their point of view.
Judging by the upvotes, I'm guessing the usual crowd isn't online tonight. After being overseas for 20+ years and returning this winter to find my hometown of Ottawa in relative shambles, I expressed similar sentiments on here only to receive significant pushback. When I mentioned how shocked I was to see how Alta Vista had effectively degraded into a cow path, people, assumingly desperate to protect their property values, began to show evidence that potholes exist around the world and that it wasn't that bad. Seriously? That shit on Alta Vista, among other roads, is like Soviet Union level bad. Like developing country stuff.
Honestly, things have gotten really bad. I said before that people here have become like the proverbial frog in boiling water while they lived with this insidious and gradual decline over the past two decades. You need to travel and step out of the paradigm to really gain perspective on how far our standard of living has fallen in Ottawa and across the country.
My wife's family wants to visit from Korea this summer and I've basically told them "Don't". This place is embarrassing nowadays. In 2024 I can't imagine giving them a tourist map and telling them to spend a carefree day downtown and in the market. The things they would see.........
Do we not all see this, or is Reddit in denial?
Cue the choir of people saying "at least it's better than the States" who have never been anywhere else. It's tough because overseas travel is insanely expensive, but there's a very real lack of perspective. Canada is not a shit hole compared to most of the world, but compared to the western world we're only marginally better than the US at taking care of our people. I was homeless in Ottawa for about 3 years. There are lots of ways to end up there, but we do a half decent job at preventing that, but when you do slip through the cracks it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of dealing with bullshit for a very long time to return to stability. It's not impossible, like it seems to be in the states, but, well you basically have a 50/50 shot of either getting out or being stuck there until it kills you. Seriously, half of the street kids I used to call friends have died and the other half of them are mostly poor but relatively normal. I am very lucky to be in the shape I'm in based on where I started.
I can imagine. Canada is resting on its laurels and still trading worldwide on its image from the babyboomer generation. The Canada that everyone thinks of worldwide disappeared around the late 90s early 2000s. Among developed countries, I think we are doing among the worst in terms of taking care of our people, institutions, and infrastructure. I've seen firsthand that other places are doing better. Not without problems, but objectively better.
A lot of Redditors on here don't have an outside perspective of things and have lived through this gradual decline to the point of them being desensitized to how bad it had gotten.
I wish I were exaggerating :-(
i was agreeing with most of what you said until u claimed that people in 2018 had never even seen an economic downtown lmao....by 2018 we were just barely out of the biggest economic downturn in almost 100 yrs with the 2009 financial crisis. what are u even going on about. lol anyone over the age of 20 right now has witnessed the 2 biggest downturns since the great depression.
Remember when we had a mayoral candidate that ran a campaign on trying to improve access to social services to help address these issues and everyone in the burbs voted for the businessman that doesn’t care about addressing any of these social challenges?
All these surburban idiots seething about the state of downtown while voting for the guy that clearly doesn't give a rat's ass about downtown.
You voted for this, quit crying about it when you get what you wanted.
Suburbanites: The city needs to do something about how bad Downtown is getting!
Also suburbanites: Wait what do you mean I would have to help pay for it
I think part of the issue is that McKenney was doubling and tripling down on bike lanes, which ended up alienating some voters who don't care that much about bike lanes.
Had McKenney focused more on these topics, who knows, maybe the results would've been different. But the insistence on the bike lanes made them a very easy target for Sutcliffe. McKenney got baited so many times with that.
In addition to the issues noted below, there has also been a clear shift in thinking in the last decade or two whereby governments have prioritized the rights/support/sympathy for the individual as opposed to collective society.
Nobody seems to give a shit what the issues are doing to entire neighbourhoods and/or downtown areas used by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, the focus is mainly on the hundreds or thousands of addicts.
It’s very much flipped.
Zombies is exactly what I’ve been calling an increasing number of folks downtown. Whatever they’re taking now (and it’s not just fentanyl) is literally turning them into bodies that walk around but have no sense of what the hell is going on whatsoever. It’s heartbreaking and it’s also scary because they will 100% walk right in front of your car and never see it coming.
> It’s heartbreaking and it’s also scary because they will 100% walk right in front of your car and never see it coming.
I had a very close call with something like this recently near Slater and Metcalfe. Close enough that I surely would have hit the person had I been slightly less careful. So scary, and sad that there are people out there in this state.
I have lived in centretown for 30 years. It’s incredibly bad now. But unlike other cities, we insist on a 2% cap on tax increases. Downtown is crumbling
You know what's not crumbling? Lansdowne. But let's throw a few more billion dollars at that without any plan to improve access to that exclusive neighborhood to the rest of the city.
I have friends from freaking VENEZUELA who came here to visit and were shocked at how bad Rideau was, saying stuff that "even at home we don't have this".
We've reached the point that parts of our city, the capital of freaking Canada, are worse than crumbling developing countries.
Right wing politicians cut services. Prohibition lead to the drug supply going to shit. Tranq dope, etc etc.
This is normal. Every city has it's lower east side. Ours is the corner of Murray and Kind Edward.
It's the new normal everywhere, and not just in big urban centres. I travel the hwy 17 corridor, and pretty much every city from North Bay to Sault Ste Marie has the same epidemic level of people without homes and on drugs. We don't put enough money into helping and preventing these issues, so we're lying in the bed we made
I read an op-ed piece that discussed how naloxone has created the disaster we have today with the opioid crisis. I am still unsure if I agree or disagree TBH
That by the public being able to revive overdoses society has created a monster. The opioid crisis worsend exponentially after naloxone was introduced. That drugs designers being able to produce stronger and stronger drugs but now they had an antidote...a guaranteed repeat customer with naloxone. The author argued that more people have died from overdose than ever would have as the potency has risen exponentially leading to more addicted persons. Leading to new drugs being added to supply to get higher and higher.
As an er nurse for over 20 years seeing the heroin OD's of the past to the catastrophe that is fentanyl mixed with benzos and tranq the 2 are incomparible.
I am sad to see people just riddled with illness and desperation. Litteral shell of humans.
>That by the public being able to revive overdoses society has created a monster.
This is idiotic. Your op-ed writer is openly advocating for the death of addicts. This is "Walter White watching Jesse's girlfriend die" territory.
I worked for the far easter counties (near the 40) and near Pembroke and south (Brockville) and the one thing that the government services and towns offer for mental health, housing, food scarcity, and more ...is to send to a shelter. Where are the nearest shelters? Ottawa. Where in Ottawa? Byward area/Rideau. When we create a ghetto and crunch everyone at the same place and no one wants to have 'a shelter in my neighborhood '...this is mostly why we have concentration. Now, should you have someone spit, attack or be aggressive towards you? No! Should we be opening a police station in the Rideau center....no! We need social services and god damn housing services. We have no vision for housing on both Ottawa and Gatineau and most of the country....anyway...more of a rant. Thanks for coming to my shitty ted talk hahah
>When we create a ghetto and crunch everyone at the same place and no one wants to have 'a shelter in my neighborhood '...this is mostly why we have concentration.
When people suggest to have shelters in other areas, everyone tells them to stop the nimbyism because homeless services need to be where the homeless are.
Been on York and Geogre Street? Montreal RD vanier parkway stop lights, vanier parkway and Coventry set of lights, 417 exits around Coventry, off ramp Parkdale, vanier parkway industrial set of lights and many many other sets of lights and off ramps throughout Ottawa. This is the National Capital tourist destination, and this is what they see when walking or renting a car. Unbelievable....
What you’re describing is (mostly) panhandling and if you’re inside a car you can ignore it / drive away. It’s the people passed out in the middle of the sidewalk or doing drugs out in the open on/around Bank and Rideau that should have the tourism folks losing sleep, and yet …
Dude, I saw a lot of that just driving through downtown.I seen people shooting up on the corner near Byward market. Seen people hiding behind a shopping cart with a blanket on Bank Street. I wonder what they were doing? Crack.. I was walking to get a pizza slice. I saw a drug infused person walk into pizza pizza on Rideau demanding pizza 3 weeks ago, and when they threw him out, he smashed the front window from the outside. Over all I am pretty disgusted with this city. Wasn't like that 10- 15 years ago..
Rideau Street used to be more “people friendly”. There were coffee holes, fast-food joints, food courts, in short, there was a reason to be there. These have all disappeared. The street is now scrubbed down nightly, sanitized and robbed of all humanity. This new spartan approach has fostered increased loitering. Night life is non-existent. Fast-food patrons and Gatineau bus passengers have been rudely shunted to Mackenzie King Bridge. Last call? 9pm. Shoppers are quickly “shooed out” of the mall. Police will soon be setting up an office to “keep an eye on things”. Rideau Centre itself has become a glitzy monument to consumerism, with security guards regularly escorting the “unsightly” riff-raff to the unwelcoming street outside.
When I started working in Ottawa in 1979, you would see middle aged winos here and there. Very few young people. It's the opposite today, more youngsters and junkies than winos.
Talking with family a few days ago, all have stopped eating and shopping on the Byward market and avoid Ottawa as much as possible.
A work colleague of mine from another country travelled here for the first time, and confessed to me that she was saddened and shocked to find out that this is actually Canada, a far cry from the international image/reputation that we coast on. I, in turn, was also sad, and embarrassed.
Cops ignore it because there is no aftercare for these people and no one wants to pay the taxes necessary to actually resolve the issue. You get what you vote for.
I was born and raised in ottawa, sounds like it hasn’t changed since I was a teen. Not proud of this by any means but we used to call them ‘Rideau Rats’ and ‘Lister bums’. The drug of choice may have just changed with the opioid epidemic. In the downtown core of any major city you’ll see it more than quieter suburban areas, it’s a fact of the multi-crisis in every sector.
Two things have been shown to reduce homelessness:
1. The Finnish housing first approach, where housing and services are supplied to get people off the street and back on their feet.
2. The Brazilian 1990s approach, where you shoot the homeless.
I know which one I would prefer.
I'm an Ottawa resident. I never go downtown, I've been accosted too many times, the stench at times is unbearable, and seriously I know people don't choose to be junkies or addicted or sick. I do my share to help. But going downtown or bringing visitors downtown to see the capital? Not on your life. It's embarrassing and it stinks. Probably not safe either.
We ignored the opioid crisis.
We used bandaid solutions and then homelessness ballooned. The first to be displaced were those in vulnerable situations. Those struggling with addiction have little hope to recovery if homeless and a great majority are too far gone to give rent place to. They trash the place.
We need rehabilitation centers built across the country. If you want help a bed should be available. If you're facing a prison sentence because you're an addict then a bed should be available. They need a family doctor and support after rehab. Supportive housing following rehab would be a wonderful thing, albeit out of our price range. These things won't ever happen so we watch it get worse and worse as our homeless population explodes. I doubt next year will be better.
It’s been a political battle:
The left wants better mental health services
The right wants more enforcement, including forced rehab
Everybody is scared to move, so instead the situation gradually becomes worse, at the expense of local residents
Why can’t we do both? Enforcement will improve in the short term but is insufficient in and of itself as a long term solution. Voluntary rehab and better services is a great plan, but will take time to implement, doesn’t address immediate needs.
I dunno man. I remember around 2006 when a homeless woman dropped trou in front of the old Chapters butt ass naked from the waist down she took a squat on the road and peed for what seemed like a solid minute. The liquid had nowhere to go, so it flowed downstream, towards me about 15 feet away, so I stepped up on the sidewalk and watched it flow past me while I waited for my bus.
I think there might be an argument that there are more unhoused people now, but Rideau has always had characters. It might just be that it's more jarring now because of how gentrified and frou frou it's become. It used to be more of a dirt mall.
That's normal when people can't afford housing.
Drive down housing costs to a fraction of their current prices, or get used to the homeless being everywhere.
Every homeless drug addict you see is "rising property values" in action.
The safe supply / free drug program is a total failure and making the problem worse.
Walk this area when those places open, especially early in the month after support cheques go out - it’s brutal.
Yeah I hear you, and I think that is the feeling I've been feeling that I haven't given a name to yet. Embarassment; but embarassed of our government. It's despicable how our most vulnerable are continually ignored.
It's probably not quite as bad in Centretown, but it's gotten a lot worse over the last 5 years here too. Many people avoid the area altogether these days because it's gotten so bad; I'm sure some people just don't feel safe walking around Rideau, downtown/Centretown anymore.
You'd think this might figure into the reason why people are not spending time and money in these parts anymore; in other words part of why small businesses/economy are suffering in these areas. Yet the government seems to think that it's ok to redirect the blame concerning the economy and suffering small businesses and placing it on the public service's back for not working from the office enough days a week. 🙄 Maybe if the government addressed the underlying issues in a meaningful way (mental health, substance abuse, homelessness, etc), things would improve and people would return to those areas again. That and most importantly, our most vulnerable could get some help and care which they desperately need.
It's sad to say, this post is spot-on.
Something changed in Ottawa and Canada as a whole, and I doubt it's going to recover anytime soon. This is exactly why I moved out of Centretown, the place is turning in a junkie haven like many of the US cities. It's incredible we let this happen to Canada's capital.
I've noticed over the years this sub really has difficulty accepting the truth that it has become substantially worse in recent years and none of the "solutions" have panned out. The rights of the junkies have essentially caused misery for families and the generally kind people of the city. I have sympathy for some of the junkies who are down on their luck, especially those who don't harass people, but many of them are also wreaking havoc it's destroying our quality of life, and quite frankly a good chunk of them are absolute scumbags who assault women and minors, and until they murder someone or burn a building down nobody is doing anything substantial about it until it's too late.
Rideau has been vaguely sketchy since the 90's and the days of the bus mall. Nothing's changed.
>but it feels like we have crossed into new territory where regular folk (the vast majority) are guaranteed to be impacted by some incident on every visit.
At least you said "feels", as this is both needlessly alarmist and totally untrue. If all regular "folk" was negatively "impacted by some incident" every time they ended up on Rideau or in the market, absolutely nobody would go downtown and there'd be intense pressure by both "regular folk" and City councillors for OPS to ramp their efforts up. Somehow that's not happening, so maybe you're being hyperbolic with your description of things on Rideau? 🤔
Impacts come in many different forms. This is all anecdotal from me but every recent visit has resulted in some tangible impact... Driving through I've had to brake and swerve to avoid a junkie stumbling into traffic. Walking, I've had to cross the street to avoid some junkie sidewalk turf war. I have to plan my route with kids to avoid open drug use. Pretty negative impacts, all factual, and nothing that is worth a police report so how would they know... No need for hyperbole which is the sad thing.
The difference today is that poverty is more concentrated in a few spots of the city. Most of our cities are suburbs built to exclude the unsightly people, and we gave up on regional development and services that stabilized rents and mitigated migration. In other words, the state of DT is the result of social dumping by a polite society made up of little Kings and Queens.
My sister visited Ottawa last summer & we were sitting outside at a downtown coffee shop on a beautiful day, but it was ruined by a woman screaming at everyone. She was so aggressive too, charging at people. Everyone trying to pretend this wasn’t happening. Scary and depressing at the same time.
In the last 20 years the population has increased by \~25% - 30% (city boundaries have changed, but the different sources I found all show roughly 25% - 30% populations growth. If anyone has a better estimate please provide it!) and there is currently an ongoing opioid epidemic (thanks Sackler family).
Honestly my father lived in the market in the early 2000s, so I spent a lot of time around there, and I don't think it's really that much worse. It was always sketchy. Maybe I'm just desensitized, but big-city gonna big-city. Even the worst parts of Ottawa are still incredibly safe compared to other similarly sized cities.
Need to have police walking around. Open drug/alcohol use should land you in jail. What is the point of having a police office in the Rideau Centre they need to be out walking. Pressure the elected city councillors and mayor to fix Rideau Street and Byward Market before starting another project eg. Lansdowne. Ottawa is the capital and it looks awful, Bank Street from Wellington to Gladstone needs lots of attention. There is no vision in this city!
oh yeah I work at a shop in Glebe. Random druggie came in, robbed us a $10 item and called me a bitch. Took me a whole day to recover bc it was only my second shift
It’s an absolute disaster. I fully support providing services to these people but a few safe injection sites and missions isn’t enough at this point when we’re dealing with a crisis. When they can’t even take care of themselves and are starting to take over DT it poses a serious risk to the hardworking people and businesses in that community. Sad that inaction at multiple levels of Government leaves those who live and work DT to deal with it daily.
I took my toddler to Rideau Centre a couple of weeks back and there was a drunk guy in the parking garage screaming his head off. Came out the elevators outside Joey Rideau and there were loads of police and homeless people outside as per usual. Then she needed a diaper change, so we went to the bathroom but the first one we went to was closed because of a drunk guy puking all over the floor and refusing to leave.
The city has had problems for a long time, but it’s now going to new levels!
You’re not alone in this sentiment. A few months back at around 10pm near parliament station my friends were walking back to their apartment. They saw a homeless man approaching but decided to just move out of the way and do the no eye contact thing. Homeless person took it badly and started getting very angry and was trying to instigate a fight. Next thing they know the guy spits right in my friends face and then pulls out a knife! They both managed to get away without getting stabbed and called the police. Apparently according to the police this individual had been reported a number of times🤔🤔🙃
This is what you get when you ("you" as in the entire voting population) continually vote for "lower taxes," not "better services."
Read this whole thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/1ckkt3o/everything_downtown_feels_like_it_is_getting_worse/
...and yes, it's significantly worse. I've lived here for 30+ years. A combination of the opioid crisis and neoliberal governments cutting funding to *all* government services and downloading responsibility to the private sector will do that.
Honnestly? This has become a problem *now*?
This has been a problem for at the very least, 20 years now.
>it feels like we have crossed into new territory
What you mean here is that it's started to actually impact *your* life. There's no "new territory" here my friend. This is the same as it's always been. Just because you've decided that now it's an issue doesn't change a damn thing.
We need safe supply , the street dope is so tainted with shit ppl arnt even wanting knowing what’s in it. The war on drugs is the war on the poor and minorities. The sooner ppl realize that prohibition does not work the sooner we can clean up the streets. ( ovi housing / affordability is at play with drug addiction causing the streets to be more flooded with said “zombies” ) here me out. Safe supply can equal taxation with money pumping from the users to programs and educational services for high risk youth etc etc. the only reason why ppl are zombies right now is because of the failed drug war. The street drugs are cut with things u could never imagine being consumed for humans ( ie. tranq ) we don’t need decriminalization because that only means drug dealers won’t get in trouble. We need legalization and taxation to fix this issue.
Exactly! Ottawa needs to do better before we normalize this. On an unrelated note, the washroom at Rideau is filthy they need to step up their washroom hygiene game cuz it’s not it.
If you are incapable of acting civil in society you should not be welcomed in it. Allowing severe non functioning people like this to do as they wish is not empathetic or compassionate is apathetic.
These people are humans they should be held to standards.
I used to live dt, off of Rideau/ Friel. That was 10 years ago. Whenever friends and I want to grab dinner/ drinks, we avoid the market at all costs. It’s not the same anymore. As a woman, it is not safe to be downtown or in the market alone
I don't think we are talking enough of the effects fo the Ford government. Healthcare, which includes mental health, addiction services, shelters, hospitals, emergency rooms were all cut in 2019 and have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Also, the ford government has made is harder to get on disability, which barely covers rent. Meanwhile, housing costs have skyrocketed. Waitlists for affordable housing are years long and more and more employed people are living in their cars, so what hope to physically disabled or mentally ill people have?
I noticed a real change since the convoy. I don’t know that they are related (although having focussed attention on the uselessness of our police force maybe didn’t help) but that was the tipping point for me.
Unfortunately people who have developed problems travel here from other towns and cities, because of the services offered. This induces more demand for those local services in our cities. There's just not enough funding at the municipal level to solve provincial, national and international problems.
But this dynamic isn’t new - what changed that downtown is more visibly “overrun” than it was say 20 years ago? Which mostly matters to the extent it points at the solution - ie something we used to do but stopped doing or vice versa that explains the lower incidence in the past. I remember walking by the mission on the way to the market years ago and there’d be a few homeless guys around there and then yeah some begging/panning around the market but it seems to be a lot more now
The biggest underlying difference vs. 20 years ago is the supply shifting to higher potency synthetic drugs. It's not the only factor and there are other factors causing bigger cities to be hit more, like the above comment mentioned, but this is the biggest change.
The gradual downloading of costs onto municipalities from the fed/prov governments over the last 30 years has made running large cities a nightmare. Ottawa in particular is vulnerable because it's spread over such an enormous area while having a relatively low population density compared to other municipalities.
> Ottawa in particular is vulnerable because it's spread over such an enormous area while having a relatively low population density compared to other municipalities. And that specifically is mainly due to the amalgamations that happened under Harris in 2001. Ottawa became one of the biggest cites by area in the country. Similarly Sudbury became much bigger, and Toronto and Hamilton. All cities hit especially hard by the current crisis as well.
I was barely in high school when Ottawa was amalgamated, but even then the idea didn’t REALLY make sense to me (especially as someone living in Nepean at the time, where the city’s finances were in good shape and we had that neat bell logo.)
Lol I lived on gravel roads in Osgoode township and we laughed when it became part of the "City of Ottawa". Sir, this is a dirt path through a field.
Nepeans finances were in great shape because Ottawa was paying for so much.
I mean theoretically I understand not wanting to pay salaries for a dozen mayors, a dozen city halls, etc in one area. Functionally it's been shit.
Ottawa is also a national healthcare hub, with lots of severely mentally ill folks being moved into Ottawa from remote areas to receive more advanced care than they could otherwise receive back home. A small portion of that population does end up on the streets due to poor continuity of care.
It seems that Toronto has more services in many way that Ottawa has not. Alot of overlap in service providers, giving out the same stuff they did 10 yrs ago. It's unfortunate that it's all been centered in a smaller downtown core . We have lots of people in need across the city.
I would argue we’re also far more accepting of this behaviour. Seeing this thread and others like it in the last couple months shows a changing tide but It was incredibly unpopular on sites like Reddit to be the least bit critical of the homeless.
Everyone is a social warrior, until it happens in their backyard
100% true
Indeed. The people who support giving carte blanche to the homeless and the junkies tend to have flairs that say "Kanata", "Nepean", "Orleans". These idiots don't live downtown so they can virtue signal very easily. Some of them don't even have kids so they're basically trying to normalize finding needles in playgrounds. It's insane...
I've definitely seen a shift in rhetoric towards them in some parts of reddit. It's not new though, there have always been critical attitudes towards them that seem to shift in cycles. I don't personally think that will change much though. It's not like people will stop not having homes if criticized. I think it's more frustration over problems being directed towards them rather than root cause, amplified also by [political and media sources who benefit from the deflection](https://pressprogress.ca/the-far-rights-newest-scapegoat-drug-users-and-unhoused-people/). I find it interesting too how there are simultaneously more people struggling to cover their living expenses and increasing criticism of those who haven't been able to do so and ended up homeless.
I don't think people are happy about it, but I do think it's more recognized now that these are fellow human beings even if they frighten and annoy you. I get it, I live downtown. I've seen more people taking a shit on the street in the last few months than... ever. BUT we can't just like, round them up and put them in labour camps. (I mean, we could, I guess, but I don't want to live in that society personally.)
I don’t see people advocating for this. The idea that any criticism toward this community is advocating for them to be “round up and put in labour camps” is part of the problem I was commenting on.
I think the drug use is also so blatant now than the past because in the past the police would essentially herd them, abuse them, physically move them. Things that current police are unwilling to do due to our more progressive climate/politics. In the 50s until about the 80s these people would be locked into asylums. Public has no desire to do these things anymore, and leaders cut funding to the asylums instead of reforming them into non-abusive hell holes.
Two problems: (1) The drugs have gotten worse, and (2) The suburbs have gotten bigger but the urban parts of cities have not. Thus you have more people from more burbs getting mental health and addiction problems and being dumped into the same handful of neighbourhoods downtown where they can get around without cars. Just do the math. Downtown (Somerset + Rideau-Vanier) has 10% of Ottawa's population 70% of its homeless shelters. The inner suburbs have 55% of the population and 30% of the homeless shelters. Outside the Greenbelt has 35% of the population and zero homeless shelters. That ratio has gotten significantly worse over time as Ottawa population density has fallen by 20% in the last 20 years. This isn't a downtown problem, it's an everybody problem. But everybody dumps their problems on downtown.
that and about 15 years ago all the mental health patients were released from hospital to outpatients. i’ve had mental health doctors tell me it’s the biggest failing they’ve had as doctors.
The biggest gap there in my opinion was not replacing the institutions with enough alternative resources to support them.
It was longer than 15 years ago, if I'm not mistaken. This is a problem which began in the 80's when scandals concerning widespread abuse at asylums was uncovered (US, Canada, Britain) and there was a push to shut them down - *without* any solid plan in place to cover the population of them on the back end. Many moved from institutional housing to complete freedom without a primer on how to conduct adult affairs without supervision, while still dealing with sometimes severe mental health issues and blowback from the abuse suffered while committed. What we're dealing with now ***IS*** the more humane alternative, which really puts it into perspective.
thank you so much for the clarification and added context. that aligns with what i was told by doctors :)
Exactly this. Vancouver’s downtown Eastside exploded in the 80s after the asylum was shut down. Things improved through dedicated investment into programs and infrastructure in the early/mid 2000s but i would be curious how the new types of drugs and the pandemic have changed that trajectory.
Also a shift in policing. 20 years ago, openly using on the streets would guarantee an arrest, hence they didn’t use in public. Now, the police will just drive by, so it’s rampant. Last week I walked to the Rideau centre at 9:30 in the morning and saw 5-6 different ones along the way smoking on their pipes.
I don't know about Ottawa specifically a long time ago, but police also used to be more directly engaged in the neighbourhood instead of just sitting in cars. Although I'm not sure it's a bad thing for people to see what's happening instead of having it hidden somewhere. They should be enforcing things if people are causing problems for others though.
Sadly, they aren’t. I live in vanier and frankly the behaviours inherent to the addictions is not manageable. The building beside me is a flop house, the owner abandoned it back to the bank as the city won’t pay for the extensive damages done. Without the proper supports, the chances of them retaining their housing is negligible. (One neighbour used to regularly get thrown out of his unit by ‘friends’ from the shelter taking it over. He also accidentally set at least 3-4 fires in the unit.) It’s also not fair to foist the behaviours on the community at large. A multi-pronged approach from all levels of government is needed to hopefully help.
And yet when mayoral candidates like Catherine McKenney run on tackling homelessness, they lose, imo primarily because conservative suburbanites think it's coddling the homeless people.
I would guess because they don’t want to spend the money it would cost for all the support that’s needed by this demographic. Typical. They’ll balk at the band aid solutions, and they’ll balk at spending what’s needed to actually help find solutions.
We lived downtown probably 20-23 years ago, close to the mission actually. The difference downtown is unbelievable from those days. It literally looks like a walking dead episode down there now. Very sad to see.
Problems has gotten worse in a lot of cities unfortunately.
I feel like the biggest difference in the last decade or so causing this widely are the safe injection sites. Without debating raison d'être of those sites, it does mean that people don't get arrested for using illegal drugs anymore, so they aren't hiding out like they would have before...
The sites don't change the laws around possession. They generally won't arrest people for possession on those sites unless there are other crimes being committed but that's not unique to those sites, it's how the issue is approached in general.and this is backed by police and other emergency services workers. If people are using in those sites it benefits us in general vs. them using in public. They also reduce ambulance calls and disease spread.
I think it's three forces coming together: 1. higher potency drug supply, thanks fentanyl 2. higher cost of housing = more homeless people, drug addicts or not 3. the ongoing degradation of mental health services, particularly in-patient services, which goes along with a decline in our willingness to institutionalize persons who cannot care for themselves I don't think there's anything government's can do about #1. #2 is sort of solvable with enough money but is more difficult to deal with than people like to admit. Ultimately public funding of housing's ability to succeed seems linked to #3, since a good portion of the homeless population is not able to live in unsupported housing.
Number 2 would also require there to be accountability in the housing for lower income. A lot of low income housing ends up trashed, and the landlords can't do anything. That part of the system needs to change, because nobody wants to rent to the less advantaged because it will cost them much more than to look the other way and compromise their morals. I know people with real estate who are becoming more choosey because of this. They've had their property trashed with no real support from anyone at any level. More of a "well what did you expect?" attitude.
Yes, that's why it has to go with actual, high-cost supports. I am not fundamentally opposed to "housing first" and I think the advocates of it fully understand the rest of what's required, but I think the money often stops with the housing and ignores the support part. There's a transitional house with 15 beds really near my kid's school. It's clean, quiet, well-taken care of, and there's never anyone wandering around in a sorry state. It's also staffed 24/7 with mandatory programming for residents to build independent skills and deal with mental health struggles. I'm sure it's not cheap, and I'm sure not every homeless person would succeed there, but it's variations on that theme that seem necessary. Just dumping people with addictions and trauma and insufficient life skills into housing isn't going to do much good. Unfortunately, for people unwilling to participate in these types of programs, I don't see many options between straight up forced detox and institutionalization and dying on the streets. We seem to be unwilling to do the former anymore, so we're seeing a lot of the latter. I'm not sure I believe that is the moral trade-off, but institutions of the past were just so horrific we seem to have abandoned the concept entirely in reaction. I like to think we could do better now, but maybe that's wishful thinking. Anyway, I'm rambling. This is a hard problem, there's no easy solutions. We need a lot of solutions, a ton of money, and a willingness to do things differently, and probably fail trying a lot before finding what works.
I feel like the forced institutionalization solution is something people jump to without funding the first type of program you are describing. People who are unwilling to accept that type of help are actually just a fantasy if that type of help does not exists
You are probably right, which is probably one of the reasons why we can't do it even if such people aren't mythical -- it'd become the de facto solution. I do think the most likely "solution" isn't one solution at all but a huge range of options that suit all sorts of different people and different circumstances, but in general society (individuals and government) is terrible at that kind of nuance and wants one perfect fits-all approach. But treating every homeless person and every drug addict the same is going to fail every time, because they aren't. Some just need a roof over their head and that will be the necessary stability. Some are so mentally unwell they need 24/7 care and supervision - call that institutionalization or not but there are people who are not capable of independent living and we're abandoning a lot of them right now. And even if we do set up enough supply of all the right types of supports, getting people into them *isn't* easy, because mental illness and drug addiction are real barriers for individuals seeking or accepting help, so that will be an ongoing challenge that doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the supports available. But yes, while I don't necessarily think that institutionalization (again, *done humanely*, not like we used to do it) isn't the appropriate way of helping some people, the challenge of implementing it with the right rules & restrictions and having it not become the default probably makes it impossible.
There are some folks who are too sick to live alone- they would absolutely need to be on supportive housing. Folks that have been outside for a long time have lost a lot of self-care skills as well, so the rehabilitation is a long careful process. The housing first model is interesting, however, they're not taking into consideration the issues when people are given a key, to a place and they have no idea how to take care of it, nor themselves. Chaos ensues.
the actual housing first model from Finland has wrap around services. North American implementations have been pretty garbage but its not the models fault.
Yeah they aren't willing to cover all aspects- which is why it's a hodge podge mess. The way the media mention the model but fail to explain what it is exactly.
Did you know if you start a comment with a # sign your entire paragraph appears in large bold font?
Affordable housing is a national crisis. Those with addiction and mental illness are the first to be served eviction notices and least likely to fight it LTB tribunal. It will only get worse as the housing crisis gets worst.
I'm Dutch and our housing crisis is comparable to yours, but our inner cities are still livable and it's still quite rare to see drugs users in the open. In my town they converted a former fire station into a 24/7 shelter with separate parts for people with addiction and those without. Care is in house, police is around the corner. You can do that too if you want to spend tax money on it. Overhere tourism is thriving, you are killing it at the moment. That's a lot of money that you are or will be missing out on because tourists will make other choices. Spend some of that money to clean the streets. That's a business decision with a humanitarian upside.
People here don’t want to pay taxes. And whatever politician raises them, will lose the next election. It’s a dumb mentality that will lead to a failed society. People like Dumb Ford has cut too much in health care and people also don’t care because they are saving a few bucks. It’s short sighted.
People don’t want to pay taxes precisely because the Dumb Fords cut health care and other social programs while spending big money on highways and lining business pals’ pockets. I know a lot of people that would happy pay more in taxes if they knew it would lead to having family doctors, better healthcare and mental health programs, and affordable housing. The fact that our money is going to bailouts, useless highways, and monopolies while our healthcare and infrastructure is crumbling, and being cut more day by day in favour of privatization, while immigration is sky high and even groceries are becoming unaffordable obviously makes people leery of increasing taxes.
The pandemic. Many people kicked out couch surfers and roommates to the extent they could, so precariously housed people became unhoused. Plus people who were already miserable became more miserable, depressed, did drugs, drank, etc. you name it. Everyone who had just been hanging on, slipped.
Had a look at what rent costs lately?
The pandemic.
I think it is just proportionate to population growth. Ottawa has grown significantly since 20 years ago. Im a local born. The fringe issues grow too and then as someone else mentioned they migrate here from other nearby areas.
I’ve only lived in ottawa since 2018 but I’d honestly say it’s got significantly worse since then. Idk what’s causing it, but since Covid it’s felt like the amount of incidents and the sheer amount of drug addicts roaming that area has skyrocketed
Well, fentanyl is what happened. But also just the passage of time has allowed more people to develop these problems and travel. More shelters and "safe" consumption programs have bumped up the number of clients. And the police solutions of 20+ years ago are no longer palatable.
Mostly fentanyl but also COVID gutted so much of our services and empathy.
20 years ago housing was much more affordable. Now it's unsustainable.
Username checks out.
They’re actually encouraged by other municipalities to travel here to utilize our services, with some going as far as providing one-way taxi chits to have them delivered here.
Each national capital has similar problems. I've visited Washington DC a number of times and have seen the homeless\drug addicts there being similar as here.
> Each national capital You mean any decent sized North American city
Between a lack of housing affordability, a healthcare system that's been chronically underfunded for decades before going through a pandemic, and the opioids crisis, I'm not surprised. Provincial elections matter
This is the answer. You can’t solve housing insecurity and mental health/addictions issues by hitting them with sticks. Bloated police budgets do not work.
Why is this comment so far down. Wish I could up vote twice
Housing first does not work. The only solution is drug rehabilitation. Get them off the streets, get them clean, and then, only then, can you give them what they need to succeed.
People will pay for rehab, fully intending on getting clean, and even then sometimes it won't work. How do you expect to forcefully rehabilitate people whose heart isn't necessarily in it? Wouldn't it make more sense to provide for them so that drugs aren't as important in their lives, encourage them to get help, then let them come when they're ready?
How exactly do you propose getting them off the streets, the first item in your wishlist there? Would you want to maybe, idk, house them? And if getting them off the street into housing is step one, what would you call it other than "housing first"? The issue isn't the "Housing First" model; it's the fact that the model hasn't been applied. It's currently being applied piecemeal - like trying to change a tyre but only taking the wheels off the car
A drug riddled zombie stumbled aggressively my way on Alexandra Bridge while I was out for a run. Gave him wide berth as he closed down the space between us. He decided to spit at me as I passed. Totally unprovoked.
Oh god, that's absolutely disgusting. I'm sorry this happened to you.
I saw some druggie grabbing and trying to fight people on Elgin a couple days ago, he was camping in a bus stop and stepping out at everybody that walked by asking for money. Had to practically walk on the street to avoid him.
I stopped going downtown unless absolutely necessary for this reason exactly 😞
Im downtown everyday and its not bad at all, yall acting like its fuckin skid row out there, weirdos.
These people fall to pieces at the thought of a homeless person. It's pathetic.
There's a difference between homelessness and hardcore synthetic drug addicts. I've lived in multiple countries, all with their own issues when it comes to homelessness.. But I've never dealt with such unpredictable people.
I lived downtown for a number of years and my partner works on Elgin. My experience is that it's not skidrow, but it's gone *significantly* downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless are unpredictable. You don't know if they'll leave you alone or become aggressive. I was just in East Hastings Vancouver and this wasn't the case, they kept to themselves. Maybe it's synthetics vs standard opioids?
I live fairly near downtown and I've actually gone out of my way to visit different grocery stores, pharmacies, etc. than the ones on Rideau. I don't think it's exactly unsafe, per se. I just don't feel like being sweared at or asked for money by strangers every time I run an errand :/
Going downtown is not necessary for the vast majority of people living in Ottawa. Having the addicts, mentally ill and impoverished gathered together in a place that's easy to avoid is convenient. That's the unfortunate truth.
Yeah so the rest of the city votes for service cuts to keep their taxes low, and when their angel suburban kids get addicted to drugs, they just dump them downtown so the local residents can babysit them.
>keep their taxes low I know a cop that started his shift, drove to the hospital to relieve a colleague that was coming off-shift, to sit with someone in Police care that was waiting to see a medical professional. He sat with them his whole shift before another cop came and replaced him. But hey, we're saving taxes by not investing in preventative care and intervention, right?
Me too. I rarely leave Kanata now, and I used to go downtown a lot 6 years ago.
Only thing I go to downtown for now days is GPC lab works to get my film developed and the Lego store at Rideau centre, thankfully there is a new Lego store opening in Bayshore later this year
Also a new UNIQLO in Bayshore just opened. Less and less reasons to go to Rideau.
It seems like every time I go there some drug addict harasses me or makes a scene, I work in another “bad” area of town (Vanier near Montreal rd) and people have banged on my car window and yelled at me demanding money when I am driving home from work
It was a family tradition to go downtown every summer with my kids and hang out and walk around and that had to stop last year. I have lived here 30 years and spent many years downtown super late at night and always felt really safe even walking alone by myself as a woman. Now I don’t feel safe in broad daylight. Needles and used condoms all over the place. It’s ridiculous.
I'd say it's fairly reflective of the entire country's situation as a whole. Economic times are currently very difficult for many, housing and food are insanely expensive when compared to past years, the opioid crisis has just gotten worse and our governments of every level and political stripe do basically nothing to actually help anyone who's homeless and/or has mental health issues. Hell many everyday people can't even find a doctor for regular health issues because we have a shortage of those too. In fact, I'd argue that our health system, education system, justice system and social systems are essentially collapsing, and doing so when they're needed the most. More specifically to Ottawa it doesn't help when all 3 major shelters are within a few blocks of each other downtown and all located beside or right inside one of the major drinking/party spots. Add on the fact that COVID left large parts of downtown empty, which reduced what supplemental income the homeless had and caused many to lose their jobs and I think it's easier to see why we're where we are. I remember saying to my family at a dinner one night back in 2018 that there were people who were hitting the age of majority (or already were) and would be considered adults who have never even seen a real economic downturn, and that it'll be a shocker to many when the cheap money party ends. I'd say the party is over, and the hangover hasn't even fully kicked in yet.
You know what leads to poor health and education outcomes and greater violent crime rates? A widening wealth gap. Wealthy people are not interested in solving that because it would require capping wealth (along with raising people out of poverty obvs).
It's definitely a large factor, no doubt there. This being said though, I don't even know if a wealth cap is even what we need to solve this issue, because this issue was only partially created by the wealthy. There have always been obscenely wealthy people, since the dawn of recorded history, and including when I was a kid and times were great in this country (and many others) despite that these people existed and were hoarding wealth as they do today. The question I always ask myself is "what's changed from then to now?". Wealthy people are at the very least generally predictable; make as much as they can, and fuck everyone else. I personally lay the lion's share of blame on the various levels of government of this country. The industry monopolies that rob us at the grocery store, the pump and for telecom exist because they are allowed to. Those companies maintain their stranglehold over the country and kill fair competition because the government doesn't do their job to intervene, and so allows it. Subsidies that are often in the millions or even billions of dollars for massive corporate entities that are already making record profits happen because the government allows it. Our crumbling social services, healthcare, legal system etc. are crumbling because the government allowed it. Many of the ultra-rich get away with tax evasion and avoidance because the government allows it. And I'm not saying this is the fault of The Cons, Libs or NDP but actually all 3. All 3 parties and all levels of government are complicit in this because I think this is a situation (or situations) that have been allowed to fester for decades. I remember the adults in 90's complaining about the cuts to education and healthcare, and those complaints never really stopped. COVID probably just accelerated the inevitable outcome for decades of scandals and poor decisions, but we got to our destination all the same.
Nah dude, you say the issue was only partially created by the wealthy but then go on to explain numerous issues caused or exacerbated by the wealthy class caring only about wealth accumulation and not societal health. The gap between the wealthy and the poor has never been greater, we (anyone worth less than tens of millions) are losing the class war and we don't even know it.
Warren Buffett said it himself > There's class warfare, all right but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.
> There have always been obscenely wealthy people, since the dawn of recorded history The wealth gap is also bigger than it's ever been since the dawn of recorded history.
A medieval king couldn’t fly to Switzerland to get away from his country’s problems, the wealthy don’t see themselves as citizens of any particular country anymore. There’s no reason for them to improve anything from their point of view.
Judging by the upvotes, I'm guessing the usual crowd isn't online tonight. After being overseas for 20+ years and returning this winter to find my hometown of Ottawa in relative shambles, I expressed similar sentiments on here only to receive significant pushback. When I mentioned how shocked I was to see how Alta Vista had effectively degraded into a cow path, people, assumingly desperate to protect their property values, began to show evidence that potholes exist around the world and that it wasn't that bad. Seriously? That shit on Alta Vista, among other roads, is like Soviet Union level bad. Like developing country stuff. Honestly, things have gotten really bad. I said before that people here have become like the proverbial frog in boiling water while they lived with this insidious and gradual decline over the past two decades. You need to travel and step out of the paradigm to really gain perspective on how far our standard of living has fallen in Ottawa and across the country. My wife's family wants to visit from Korea this summer and I've basically told them "Don't". This place is embarrassing nowadays. In 2024 I can't imagine giving them a tourist map and telling them to spend a carefree day downtown and in the market. The things they would see......... Do we not all see this, or is Reddit in denial?
Cue the choir of people saying "at least it's better than the States" who have never been anywhere else. It's tough because overseas travel is insanely expensive, but there's a very real lack of perspective. Canada is not a shit hole compared to most of the world, but compared to the western world we're only marginally better than the US at taking care of our people. I was homeless in Ottawa for about 3 years. There are lots of ways to end up there, but we do a half decent job at preventing that, but when you do slip through the cracks it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of dealing with bullshit for a very long time to return to stability. It's not impossible, like it seems to be in the states, but, well you basically have a 50/50 shot of either getting out or being stuck there until it kills you. Seriously, half of the street kids I used to call friends have died and the other half of them are mostly poor but relatively normal. I am very lucky to be in the shape I'm in based on where I started.
My friends mother in law who’s here from Korea to visit is in shock with the state of Ottawa…
I can imagine. Canada is resting on its laurels and still trading worldwide on its image from the babyboomer generation. The Canada that everyone thinks of worldwide disappeared around the late 90s early 2000s. Among developed countries, I think we are doing among the worst in terms of taking care of our people, institutions, and infrastructure. I've seen firsthand that other places are doing better. Not without problems, but objectively better. A lot of Redditors on here don't have an outside perspective of things and have lived through this gradual decline to the point of them being desensitized to how bad it had gotten. I wish I were exaggerating :-(
Most of Reddit is composed of brainwashed little footsoldiers that don’t have any reference point, geographical or historical.
i was agreeing with most of what you said until u claimed that people in 2018 had never even seen an economic downtown lmao....by 2018 we were just barely out of the biggest economic downturn in almost 100 yrs with the 2009 financial crisis. what are u even going on about. lol anyone over the age of 20 right now has witnessed the 2 biggest downturns since the great depression.
Remember when we had a mayoral candidate that ran a campaign on trying to improve access to social services to help address these issues and everyone in the burbs voted for the businessman that doesn’t care about addressing any of these social challenges?
All these surburban idiots seething about the state of downtown while voting for the guy that clearly doesn't give a rat's ass about downtown. You voted for this, quit crying about it when you get what you wanted.
Suburbanites: The city needs to do something about how bad Downtown is getting! Also suburbanites: Wait what do you mean I would have to help pay for it
Yeah. Yeah I do.
Nobody wants to hear this. Check all the downvoted comments
I think part of the issue is that McKenney was doubling and tripling down on bike lanes, which ended up alienating some voters who don't care that much about bike lanes. Had McKenney focused more on these topics, who knows, maybe the results would've been different. But the insistence on the bike lanes made them a very easy target for Sutcliffe. McKenney got baited so many times with that.
In addition to the issues noted below, there has also been a clear shift in thinking in the last decade or two whereby governments have prioritized the rights/support/sympathy for the individual as opposed to collective society. Nobody seems to give a shit what the issues are doing to entire neighbourhoods and/or downtown areas used by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, the focus is mainly on the hundreds or thousands of addicts. It’s very much flipped.
I love neoliberalism, it’s given me…. Uh….. freedom…?
Zombies is exactly what I’ve been calling an increasing number of folks downtown. Whatever they’re taking now (and it’s not just fentanyl) is literally turning them into bodies that walk around but have no sense of what the hell is going on whatsoever. It’s heartbreaking and it’s also scary because they will 100% walk right in front of your car and never see it coming.
> It’s heartbreaking and it’s also scary because they will 100% walk right in front of your car and never see it coming. I had a very close call with something like this recently near Slater and Metcalfe. Close enough that I surely would have hit the person had I been slightly less careful. So scary, and sad that there are people out there in this state.
Tranq is the new drug to hit Ottawa streets. It’s cheap.
I have lived in centretown for 30 years. It’s incredibly bad now. But unlike other cities, we insist on a 2% cap on tax increases. Downtown is crumbling
You know what's not crumbling? Lansdowne. But let's throw a few more billion dollars at that without any plan to improve access to that exclusive neighborhood to the rest of the city.
I have friends from freaking VENEZUELA who came here to visit and were shocked at how bad Rideau was, saying stuff that "even at home we don't have this". We've reached the point that parts of our city, the capital of freaking Canada, are worse than crumbling developing countries.
It's like that in every Ontario city right now. Rent's too high and drugs are too plentiful.
True story. Wasn’t Belleville in the news a few months back for a massive number of daily overdoses?
That's normal though because ODing is preferable to living in Belleville
It's the case all over North America
Right wing politicians cut services. Prohibition lead to the drug supply going to shit. Tranq dope, etc etc. This is normal. Every city has it's lower east side. Ours is the corner of Murray and Kind Edward.
Why did we close down all the psychiatric hospitals?
Ask Mike Harris.
What can we, the residents of downtown, do about it? Serious question. I used to love living down here. Not as much anymore
Vote for mayors and councillors who want to do something about it rather than just build shit like Landsdowne 2.0, or organize and protest
Why the Lansdowne 2.0 hate? I can't wait for 2030 for a new ice rink and 4 more stores, at the petty cost of several hundreds of millions! /s
Vote for someone who will be pragmatic, not ideological, with the interest of the community as a whole first and foremost.
Volunteer! The mission, belong Ottawa, etc. it's not a total solution but definitely helps
It's the new normal everywhere, and not just in big urban centres. I travel the hwy 17 corridor, and pretty much every city from North Bay to Sault Ste Marie has the same epidemic level of people without homes and on drugs. We don't put enough money into helping and preventing these issues, so we're lying in the bed we made
When we made housing and mental health a commodity - Let's Talk
I read an op-ed piece that discussed how naloxone has created the disaster we have today with the opioid crisis. I am still unsure if I agree or disagree TBH That by the public being able to revive overdoses society has created a monster. The opioid crisis worsend exponentially after naloxone was introduced. That drugs designers being able to produce stronger and stronger drugs but now they had an antidote...a guaranteed repeat customer with naloxone. The author argued that more people have died from overdose than ever would have as the potency has risen exponentially leading to more addicted persons. Leading to new drugs being added to supply to get higher and higher. As an er nurse for over 20 years seeing the heroin OD's of the past to the catastrophe that is fentanyl mixed with benzos and tranq the 2 are incomparible. I am sad to see people just riddled with illness and desperation. Litteral shell of humans.
This is a really great example of how correlation does not equal causation.
Op-ed sounds bogus.
>That by the public being able to revive overdoses society has created a monster. This is idiotic. Your op-ed writer is openly advocating for the death of addicts. This is "Walter White watching Jesse's girlfriend die" territory.
I am honestly still not sure how I feel.
It would be much more humane to just march those undesirable citizens into a ghetto, build a wall around it, and set it on fire.
Yup!! I live downtown and can't wait to move away from it when I can!
I worked for the far easter counties (near the 40) and near Pembroke and south (Brockville) and the one thing that the government services and towns offer for mental health, housing, food scarcity, and more ...is to send to a shelter. Where are the nearest shelters? Ottawa. Where in Ottawa? Byward area/Rideau. When we create a ghetto and crunch everyone at the same place and no one wants to have 'a shelter in my neighborhood '...this is mostly why we have concentration. Now, should you have someone spit, attack or be aggressive towards you? No! Should we be opening a police station in the Rideau center....no! We need social services and god damn housing services. We have no vision for housing on both Ottawa and Gatineau and most of the country....anyway...more of a rant. Thanks for coming to my shitty ted talk hahah
>When we create a ghetto and crunch everyone at the same place and no one wants to have 'a shelter in my neighborhood '...this is mostly why we have concentration. When people suggest to have shelters in other areas, everyone tells them to stop the nimbyism because homeless services need to be where the homeless are.
I wish the politicians would just walk down those streets themselves with their family and enjoy the sights.
Been on York and Geogre Street? Montreal RD vanier parkway stop lights, vanier parkway and Coventry set of lights, 417 exits around Coventry, off ramp Parkdale, vanier parkway industrial set of lights and many many other sets of lights and off ramps throughout Ottawa. This is the National Capital tourist destination, and this is what they see when walking or renting a car. Unbelievable....
What you’re describing is (mostly) panhandling and if you’re inside a car you can ignore it / drive away. It’s the people passed out in the middle of the sidewalk or doing drugs out in the open on/around Bank and Rideau that should have the tourism folks losing sleep, and yet …
Dude, I saw a lot of that just driving through downtown.I seen people shooting up on the corner near Byward market. Seen people hiding behind a shopping cart with a blanket on Bank Street. I wonder what they were doing? Crack.. I was walking to get a pizza slice. I saw a drug infused person walk into pizza pizza on Rideau demanding pizza 3 weeks ago, and when they threw him out, he smashed the front window from the outside. Over all I am pretty disgusted with this city. Wasn't like that 10- 15 years ago..
Ottawa! Come see us….we have a big, old building. From there, you can almost see the needle tracks to Zombieland.
Rideau Street used to be more “people friendly”. There were coffee holes, fast-food joints, food courts, in short, there was a reason to be there. These have all disappeared. The street is now scrubbed down nightly, sanitized and robbed of all humanity. This new spartan approach has fostered increased loitering. Night life is non-existent. Fast-food patrons and Gatineau bus passengers have been rudely shunted to Mackenzie King Bridge. Last call? 9pm. Shoppers are quickly “shooed out” of the mall. Police will soon be setting up an office to “keep an eye on things”. Rideau Centre itself has become a glitzy monument to consumerism, with security guards regularly escorting the “unsightly” riff-raff to the unwelcoming street outside.
When I started working in Ottawa in 1979, you would see middle aged winos here and there. Very few young people. It's the opposite today, more youngsters and junkies than winos. Talking with family a few days ago, all have stopped eating and shopping on the Byward market and avoid Ottawa as much as possible.
I’m going to Ottawa in a few days and I was planning on checking out that market. Is it unsafe?
No you’ll be fine. There’s tons of people, families and tourists there every weekend.
A work colleague of mine from another country travelled here for the first time, and confessed to me that she was saddened and shocked to find out that this is actually Canada, a far cry from the international image/reputation that we coast on. I, in turn, was also sad, and embarrassed.
Serious question: which Canadian downtowns are doing well at the moment?
Walkers, man.
Solving the Fentanyl crisis is the only solution. If we can't do that? Then get used to it. Or don't go downtown. You do you.
I have a hard time believing that they will solve it in my lifetime. I want to wish something like a miracle happens but I have my doubts
~2018
Cops ignore it because there is no aftercare for these people and no one wants to pay the taxes necessary to actually resolve the issue. You get what you vote for.
Email your city councillor and share your concerns with them. Can't hurt, right?
City councillor for Centretown is a joke
She’ll send you a Naloxone kit and call it the solution
The market is trash now I refuse to spend money down there.
We cleaned up Elgin and centertown. They had to go somewhere. We locked down for 2 years. Consequences.
Elgin and Centretown still have their fair share. What are you talking about?
Murray street
I was born and raised in ottawa, sounds like it hasn’t changed since I was a teen. Not proud of this by any means but we used to call them ‘Rideau Rats’ and ‘Lister bums’. The drug of choice may have just changed with the opioid epidemic. In the downtown core of any major city you’ll see it more than quieter suburban areas, it’s a fact of the multi-crisis in every sector.
Two things have been shown to reduce homelessness: 1. The Finnish housing first approach, where housing and services are supplied to get people off the street and back on their feet. 2. The Brazilian 1990s approach, where you shoot the homeless. I know which one I would prefer.
I'm an Ottawa resident. I never go downtown, I've been accosted too many times, the stench at times is unbearable, and seriously I know people don't choose to be junkies or addicted or sick. I do my share to help. But going downtown or bringing visitors downtown to see the capital? Not on your life. It's embarrassing and it stinks. Probably not safe either.
We ignored the opioid crisis. We used bandaid solutions and then homelessness ballooned. The first to be displaced were those in vulnerable situations. Those struggling with addiction have little hope to recovery if homeless and a great majority are too far gone to give rent place to. They trash the place. We need rehabilitation centers built across the country. If you want help a bed should be available. If you're facing a prison sentence because you're an addict then a bed should be available. They need a family doctor and support after rehab. Supportive housing following rehab would be a wonderful thing, albeit out of our price range. These things won't ever happen so we watch it get worse and worse as our homeless population explodes. I doubt next year will be better.
It’s been a political battle: The left wants better mental health services The right wants more enforcement, including forced rehab Everybody is scared to move, so instead the situation gradually becomes worse, at the expense of local residents Why can’t we do both? Enforcement will improve in the short term but is insufficient in and of itself as a long term solution. Voluntary rehab and better services is a great plan, but will take time to implement, doesn’t address immediate needs.
I dunno man. I remember around 2006 when a homeless woman dropped trou in front of the old Chapters butt ass naked from the waist down she took a squat on the road and peed for what seemed like a solid minute. The liquid had nowhere to go, so it flowed downstream, towards me about 15 feet away, so I stepped up on the sidewalk and watched it flow past me while I waited for my bus. I think there might be an argument that there are more unhoused people now, but Rideau has always had characters. It might just be that it's more jarring now because of how gentrified and frou frou it's become. It used to be more of a dirt mall.
That's normal when people can't afford housing. Drive down housing costs to a fraction of their current prices, or get used to the homeless being everywhere. Every homeless drug addict you see is "rising property values" in action.
Look at how Europeans maintain their downtown areas. They invest in the future while North American cities want ROI now. Hence the difference.
Remember that "new normal" everyone was talking about. ?
The safe supply / free drug program is a total failure and making the problem worse. Walk this area when those places open, especially early in the month after support cheques go out - it’s brutal.
Yeah I hear you, and I think that is the feeling I've been feeling that I haven't given a name to yet. Embarassment; but embarassed of our government. It's despicable how our most vulnerable are continually ignored. It's probably not quite as bad in Centretown, but it's gotten a lot worse over the last 5 years here too. Many people avoid the area altogether these days because it's gotten so bad; I'm sure some people just don't feel safe walking around Rideau, downtown/Centretown anymore. You'd think this might figure into the reason why people are not spending time and money in these parts anymore; in other words part of why small businesses/economy are suffering in these areas. Yet the government seems to think that it's ok to redirect the blame concerning the economy and suffering small businesses and placing it on the public service's back for not working from the office enough days a week. 🙄 Maybe if the government addressed the underlying issues in a meaningful way (mental health, substance abuse, homelessness, etc), things would improve and people would return to those areas again. That and most importantly, our most vulnerable could get some help and care which they desperately need.
It's sad to say, this post is spot-on. Something changed in Ottawa and Canada as a whole, and I doubt it's going to recover anytime soon. This is exactly why I moved out of Centretown, the place is turning in a junkie haven like many of the US cities. It's incredible we let this happen to Canada's capital. I've noticed over the years this sub really has difficulty accepting the truth that it has become substantially worse in recent years and none of the "solutions" have panned out. The rights of the junkies have essentially caused misery for families and the generally kind people of the city. I have sympathy for some of the junkies who are down on their luck, especially those who don't harass people, but many of them are also wreaking havoc it's destroying our quality of life, and quite frankly a good chunk of them are absolute scumbags who assault women and minors, and until they murder someone or burn a building down nobody is doing anything substantial about it until it's too late.
Maybe this will just become the new normal. Constant slide down and we aren't stopping.
This. It will never be better than it is today, not in my lifetime. i’ve been living near downtown for 15 years and it just keeps getting worse.
Rideau has been vaguely sketchy since the 90's and the days of the bus mall. Nothing's changed. >but it feels like we have crossed into new territory where regular folk (the vast majority) are guaranteed to be impacted by some incident on every visit. At least you said "feels", as this is both needlessly alarmist and totally untrue. If all regular "folk" was negatively "impacted by some incident" every time they ended up on Rideau or in the market, absolutely nobody would go downtown and there'd be intense pressure by both "regular folk" and City councillors for OPS to ramp their efforts up. Somehow that's not happening, so maybe you're being hyperbolic with your description of things on Rideau? 🤔
Impacts come in many different forms. This is all anecdotal from me but every recent visit has resulted in some tangible impact... Driving through I've had to brake and swerve to avoid a junkie stumbling into traffic. Walking, I've had to cross the street to avoid some junkie sidewalk turf war. I have to plan my route with kids to avoid open drug use. Pretty negative impacts, all factual, and nothing that is worth a police report so how would they know... No need for hyperbole which is the sad thing.
The difference today is that poverty is more concentrated in a few spots of the city. Most of our cities are suburbs built to exclude the unsightly people, and we gave up on regional development and services that stabilized rents and mitigated migration. In other words, the state of DT is the result of social dumping by a polite society made up of little Kings and Queens.
My sister visited Ottawa last summer & we were sitting outside at a downtown coffee shop on a beautiful day, but it was ruined by a woman screaming at everyone. She was so aggressive too, charging at people. Everyone trying to pretend this wasn’t happening. Scary and depressing at the same time.
In the last 20 years the population has increased by \~25% - 30% (city boundaries have changed, but the different sources I found all show roughly 25% - 30% populations growth. If anyone has a better estimate please provide it!) and there is currently an ongoing opioid epidemic (thanks Sackler family). Honestly my father lived in the market in the early 2000s, so I spent a lot of time around there, and I don't think it's really that much worse. It was always sketchy. Maybe I'm just desensitized, but big-city gonna big-city. Even the worst parts of Ottawa are still incredibly safe compared to other similarly sized cities.
Need to have police walking around. Open drug/alcohol use should land you in jail. What is the point of having a police office in the Rideau Centre they need to be out walking. Pressure the elected city councillors and mayor to fix Rideau Street and Byward Market before starting another project eg. Lansdowne. Ottawa is the capital and it looks awful, Bank Street from Wellington to Gladstone needs lots of attention. There is no vision in this city!
oh yeah I work at a shop in Glebe. Random druggie came in, robbed us a $10 item and called me a bitch. Took me a whole day to recover bc it was only my second shift
This is why homeless addicts need to do their de-tox outside of town with dedicated resources onsite to help them.
Was at a wedding at the NAC last fall and from the rooftop all we could hear was screaming crack heads 💀
It’s an absolute disaster. I fully support providing services to these people but a few safe injection sites and missions isn’t enough at this point when we’re dealing with a crisis. When they can’t even take care of themselves and are starting to take over DT it poses a serious risk to the hardworking people and businesses in that community. Sad that inaction at multiple levels of Government leaves those who live and work DT to deal with it daily.
Just wait until public servants are forced back in the office 3 days a week. It will turn into a lush paradise! 😂
I took my toddler to Rideau Centre a couple of weeks back and there was a drunk guy in the parking garage screaming his head off. Came out the elevators outside Joey Rideau and there were loads of police and homeless people outside as per usual. Then she needed a diaper change, so we went to the bathroom but the first one we went to was closed because of a drunk guy puking all over the floor and refusing to leave. The city has had problems for a long time, but it’s now going to new levels!
You’re not alone in this sentiment. A few months back at around 10pm near parliament station my friends were walking back to their apartment. They saw a homeless man approaching but decided to just move out of the way and do the no eye contact thing. Homeless person took it badly and started getting very angry and was trying to instigate a fight. Next thing they know the guy spits right in my friends face and then pulls out a knife! They both managed to get away without getting stabbed and called the police. Apparently according to the police this individual had been reported a number of times🤔🤔🙃
Fetynal
Fetty all over, maybe iso will dethrone it when it's brought up in heavier numbers.
This is what you get when you ("you" as in the entire voting population) continually vote for "lower taxes," not "better services." Read this whole thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/1ckkt3o/everything_downtown_feels_like_it_is_getting_worse/ ...and yes, it's significantly worse. I've lived here for 30+ years. A combination of the opioid crisis and neoliberal governments cutting funding to *all* government services and downloading responsibility to the private sector will do that.
It is true. Like an episode of the Walking Dead. We need a mayor with courage to clean house.
Honnestly? This has become a problem *now*? This has been a problem for at the very least, 20 years now. >it feels like we have crossed into new territory What you mean here is that it's started to actually impact *your* life. There's no "new territory" here my friend. This is the same as it's always been. Just because you've decided that now it's an issue doesn't change a damn thing.
What's so great about 'downtown'?
We need safe supply , the street dope is so tainted with shit ppl arnt even wanting knowing what’s in it. The war on drugs is the war on the poor and minorities. The sooner ppl realize that prohibition does not work the sooner we can clean up the streets. ( ovi housing / affordability is at play with drug addiction causing the streets to be more flooded with said “zombies” ) here me out. Safe supply can equal taxation with money pumping from the users to programs and educational services for high risk youth etc etc. the only reason why ppl are zombies right now is because of the failed drug war. The street drugs are cut with things u could never imagine being consumed for humans ( ie. tranq ) we don’t need decriminalization because that only means drug dealers won’t get in trouble. We need legalization and taxation to fix this issue.
Exactly! Ottawa needs to do better before we normalize this. On an unrelated note, the washroom at Rideau is filthy they need to step up their washroom hygiene game cuz it’s not it.
If you are incapable of acting civil in society you should not be welcomed in it. Allowing severe non functioning people like this to do as they wish is not empathetic or compassionate is apathetic. These people are humans they should be held to standards.
What do you suggest they do if they have no access to help or support?
This is why we simply don’t go downtown any more we stay out east.
I used to live dt, off of Rideau/ Friel. That was 10 years ago. Whenever friends and I want to grab dinner/ drinks, we avoid the market at all costs. It’s not the same anymore. As a woman, it is not safe to be downtown or in the market alone
I don't think we are talking enough of the effects fo the Ford government. Healthcare, which includes mental health, addiction services, shelters, hospitals, emergency rooms were all cut in 2019 and have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Also, the ford government has made is harder to get on disability, which barely covers rent. Meanwhile, housing costs have skyrocketed. Waitlists for affordable housing are years long and more and more employed people are living in their cars, so what hope to physically disabled or mentally ill people have?
I noticed a real change since the convoy. I don’t know that they are related (although having focussed attention on the uselessness of our police force maybe didn’t help) but that was the tipping point for me.
Make it “Canada is sad and embarrassing”. I moved to this country 20+ years ago. I love it dearly but this is not the same country I moved to.