Last week on Instagram, the Downtown Guelph Business Association eagerly welcomed back the city students from the University of Guelph. It featured a couple of photographs of fine, upstanding young people having a nice time on a busy weekend night in the core.
“Whether you’re reuniting with friends or kicking off your university journey, welcome home,” the post read. “The bars of Downtown Guelph host some of the most unforgettable nights of the year this month, and we are so excited to welcome you Downtown!”
That’s nice, but it’s also a gross departure from downtown policy in the past. You see, the people that the DGBA is eagerly welcoming downtown, the ones that hit the bars en masse on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights from September to April, there was a time in the not-too-distant past when people downtown were calling them a “blight”.
Last week, we discussed in this space the process and procedural issues at the council meeting about the Public Space Use Bylaw, but all matters of government policy affect people, and there’s going to be a real effect on real people with this bylaw.
You know, “the blight.”
As a longtime observer of Guelph politics, I know that the presence of disadvantaged people downtown is nothing new. The unhoused, the underhoused, the ones addicted to substances, the ones with nowhere else to go, have all found their way to the core where it’s easy to access a number of social and support services.
I also know that pre-pandemic when there was vomit or refuse in a doorway, if someone was caught peeing in an alley, or if it was the remanent of someone enjoying a substance, then more often than not it was tied to a U of G student taking part in some weekend revelry. Their behaviour was often chastised for the way it broke the sanctity of our historic downtown with their obnoxiousness, their drunken brawling, their casual disregard for property and their lack of respect.
Sound familiar?
For as long as I’ve lived in Guelph there’s a been a cold war between dayside downtown and nightside, but now they have an enemy in common. In so much as the dayside may resent the nightside and its patrons, money still talks, and that leads me to one of the most repellent recurring talking points in delegations last week.
“The repercussions from this [the encampments] has become economically devastating for so many businesses and taxpaying community members, and the fact that the amount of intellectual people governing, protecting and leading our city combined just laying down and being walked over is repulsive,” said Julio Rodriguez, the owner of Valentini's Hair Design in his delegation.
If you watch the video, you will notice his emphasis on taxpaying community members, which was actually the second time he used it as a qualifier describing the “disregard for public safety and the mental health of all taxpaying citizens, business owners, employees, and our community, including visitors, travellers and students.” The inference is clear, the only people who count in Guelph should be those who contribute to the community as a producer, purveyor or consumer.
When last I checked, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms doesn’t carve out any special status for people who actively participate in the economy, even if you think they’re the only people who should matter.
There were also accusations thrown around that other cities are dropping off their unhoused people downtown since Guelph is so apparently welcoming to people in need. If this is true for Guelph, then this is true, and has been true, for every big city around Ontario for decades. It’s an urban legend, or in modern parlance, a conspiracy theory. City of London staff recently had to debunk it in a report about their piece of the homelessness crisis.
“Civic administration does not have a high level of confidence in the available data about relocation of homeless individuals from their home communities under false pretenses or against their will to London,” read a report from January.
So much of the debate on homelessness traffics in the subjective, rumours are treated like cherished wisdom; the personal experience of an individual is treated as a data point that tells the whole story. In the Public Space Use Bylaw debate we let there be only one very specific point of view on what is safe, and it belong to the people who, at least, have the relative safety of their own home.
From my subjective point of view, I don’t feel unsafe interacting with unhoused people downtown, I’m more scared walking around my own neighbourhood.
There have been multiple times this week that someone behind the wheel of their car has made me feel unsafe trying to sneakily turn around a corner right behind me outside my peripheral vision. I’m more scared of someone leaning too heavy on the gas pedal and not giving me a couple of extra seconds to clear a crosswalk than I am of anything I see downtown right now.
But over the last few years, it’s been clear that the arc of the moral universe in Guelph has bent towards affluence: outsiders are welcome so long as they bring with them economic incentives, we will only build high-density housing so long as it doesn’t violate “neighbourhood character”, and now we will only help you if you don’t congregate near the places where you get help.
Guelph has become a cold and mean place in recent weeks, which doesn’t help matters when it’s already cliquey and insular. The faux excitement around downtown redevelopment at Committee of the Whole just cements the idea that we’re moving the people we feel are worthless out of the way in order to make room for those people we believe hold more value. Downtown is *theirs* to enjoy.
What’s been happening with unhoused people and the Public Space Use Bylaw is the latest expression of an identity crisis in our downtown, is this area a living and breathing neighbourhood or is it just a large, historic outdoor mall? In the former, everyone can be there, and in the latter, you can throw people out when you’re sick of them hanging around.
On Oct. 1, Downtown Guelph is just another place where people are not welcome unless they’re buying something, finally putting a real sense of royal into the Royal City.
