Mayor Naheed Nenshi addresses city’s jobs, community and housing

Calgary is bursting with opportunity, and George Brown College (GBC) students and graduates are being invited to be a part of it.

Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi visited GBC’s Waterfront campus on Oct. 22 to talk about the opportunities in his city. He says the city needs 200,000 more people to live and work there.

“We’ve had terrific graduates from George Brown that we’ve met in Calgary, and we think that the kind of folks who love being at a downtown, urban campus would also love living in Calgary,” said Nenshi.

A poster behind the mayor read, “Calgary: you’re invited to be part of the energy,” which he described as having many meanings, the most obvious being the thriving energy sector, but also the energy in the air, in the city, the people and in the community.

He described the energy sector as the nucleus of the city’s economy and community, but he made sure that people in attendance knew that that wasn’t all Calgary had to offer.

His speech was both educational and emotional, focused on the city’s “buoyant” job market, the remarkable outdoors, and the sense of community, which he believes is unique to Calgary.

Nenshi spoke passionately about the 2013 Alberta floods, “the incredible power and resilience of everyday people, doing everyday things, with their everyday hands, to make extraordinary change in the world,” saying it was the most remarkable experience of humanity he had ever seen in his life, despite the devastation and tragedy experienced by Calgarians.

“We live in a place where every single person, in every single corner of the community, has the opportunity in Calgary right here, right now, to live a great Canadian life. That’s what we managed to build,” said Nenshi. “We managed to build it in most parts of this country. It’s a very special thing, but we’ve really managed to build it in Calgary.”

He ended his talk with a moving promotional video about Calgary, followed by an interactive question and answer period with students.

When asked what the City of Calgary was doing to address the lack of affordable housing Nenshi said, “If there’s a negative part to all of you coming to Calgary immediately, booking your flights right away, it’s that it will be tough to find a place to live.”

According to a report released in June by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) Calgary’s vacancy rate for rental housing is one of the lowest in Canada at 1.2 per cent.

Describing what he calls a system “clogged at the top” with the high cost of homes in Calgary, Nenshi highlighted that Attainable Homes Calgary, a subsidiary of the City, has helped 500 homeowners buy their first home.

The average rent for a two bedroom apartment in Calgary is $1,267,  a 12.2 per cent increase in the past two years, according to the CMHC report.

With no rent control in Alberta, landlords are free to raise the rent however high they think the market can bear each year.

“We have to build more social housing, we have to build more affordable housing,” said Nenshi adding that Calgary was short 5,000 units, “the federal and provincial governments really have to understand that this is a crisis and that the only way to build social housing is to have the funding to build social housing, and that has been few and far between.”

For more information on opportunities in Calgary, visit the city’s Be Part of the Energy website bepartoftheenergy.ca.

 

With files from Mick Sweetman