It's Time For A Real Homecoming Jubilee

Moderation and Responsibility Can Bring The University and The Neighbourhood Back Together

If anything good comes from what the Coast is calling the War on Pizza, it is that our annual neighbourhood re-enactment of The Purge movie franchise may stay in the headlines and on our minds long enough this year to do something about it.

In support of the local corner stores, the neighbourhood, and the university, this paper reviews the issues, re-frames the problem, and proposes a four-pointed solution system to bring the community back together in a true homecoming within two years.

What’s Happening?

University age kids by the thousand are disturbing the peace and quiet enjoyment of a mature residential neighbourhood in Halifax. There are street parties, crowds, vandalism, noise, unpleasantness, and general property damage and mayhem that leaves locals unhappy. When people get up the nerve to speak out the response by government and authorities is tepid, kid-gloved, reactive, and soaked in a kind of victim blaming that insinuates that people in the neighbourhood have it too good anyway, they could use a little roughing up, and they don’t deserve better.

After this year’s chaos, local frustration, laser-focused by a local councilor, is about the kids hanging out late at night at the local corner stores and socializing around curbside pizza. It’s pizza that’s keeping more than a few corner store families afloat and the problem isn’t about pizza.

The Neighbourhood:  Rich people? Expensive houses? Not really.

With Jubilee Road down the middle, the Halifax neighbourhood includes parts of Halifax Chebucto and Halifax Sable Island provincial electoral districts. The average income in the area is about 20% higher than the NS average but areas of Hammonds Plains, Bedford, and Fall River are higher. Home prices are also on par with Bedford and Fall River, though with much smaller property sizes. And where other neighbourhoods are going up in income this nieghbourhood is going down. The Research Council of Canada reports a 10-24% income decrease since 1980.

What Makes this Place Special

The main distinguishing feature of the neighbourhood is it’s popularity as quantified in its population density–- the number of people living here per square kilmoetre. It’s about 10 square kilometres with a resident population density of about 4,000 people per square kilometre. This number swells to about 6,000 per square kilometre each September when the 20,000 Dalhousie students are added and it’s important to understand this number in context. The population density of Nova Scotia overall is 18/km2. A typical subdivision suburb is about 32km2. The population density of the New York Metropolitan Area, the largest in the western world is about 2,000/km2. By any measure our neighbourhood is an astonishingly densely populated place by Canadian standards and getting more packed all the time as developers, universities, landlords, and sellers of every sort try to capitalize on what is generally thought of as a very nice place to live.

There is no right population density – no ideal. But there is no doubt population density changes a community more than any other thing. Too few people and the place is lonely, disconnected, and poor. Too many and it’s overcrowded, dirty, and expensive. Like Goldilock’s experience, there’s some number that feels about right for most people and some number, beyond which things are not nice.

What’s The Problem?

When there’s a problem with a river the real cause of the problem is often found far upstream. It’s the same with most things. This population density balance is the headwater of the problem, the ultimate source of the issue.

The local councilor’s framing of this community issue as being about corner store hours and pizza is unhelpful. It’s not about pizza.

Rather than raise armies of corner store boosters against people who need a little sleep we should start with the notion that it is our neighbourhood, we all love it, and we all want it to be awesome. Let’s not slice up the neighbourhood with a political pizza wheel. We can figure out the real problem and solutions here together.

In our neighbourhood the problem is too many kids living too large in too close quarters to people who want to quietly enjoy the neighbourhood in different ways. There’s nothing new under the sun. This is not a unique problem. Every community will struggle with it at some time and to some degree.

Upstream Cause

The kids are Dal students or drawn to the community by Dal students. Dalhousie sells the $9,000 tickets to the annual party and sells the kids the $90 T-shirts. Clearly, Dalhousie is the most immediate authority/institution to be held responsible.

What’s Changed?

This problem is new. What’s changed? Over the last generation, the number of Dalhousie students has grown from 5,000 to 9, to 12, to 18, and now about 20,000 students. No limits are put on this number or even discussed.  At the same time, Dalhousie’s annual budget has grown to about $540m per year including Kings College. About 50% of that is covered by Nova Scotia taxpayers through an annual operating grant of $240m plus various special programs, tax breaks, and contributions.

These are big numbers anywhere in the world. On a little peninsula measuring about 3 by 6 kilometres they are epic and influential.

The growth rate and its impact on the community needs to be discussed but there is also another change. Traditionally, campus life at Dalhousie included a self-contained and ongoing ‘pressure relief valve’ that included parties and events at campus bars, venues, and facilities.  During the 2017 school year, Dalhousie banned alcohol at orientation events ostensibly as a virtuous “harm-reduction” effort to keep students safe - to save them from themselves. At the time, the impact of this policy was considered at best debatable and many believed it would simply begin to push students off campus to drink and party. It did. Many people at the time suggested the real reason for this change was not harm reduction at all. It was risk reduction. There had been cases of student deaths and injuries from binge drinking and the liability and responsibility was clear from an institutional perspective. The insurers, risk managers, and accountants did not want any part of the responsibility and slowly shut down as much of what used to be called “Campus Life” as possible. But learning to drink, party responsibly, function socially, and still be a good citizen, is as much a part of the university learning experience as any other class. The university’s responsibility cannot be abdicated simply by sending the students down the street.

The Fallout

For the last six years, each fall 20,000 kids descend on the neighbourhood. Many have been there year-round. Most are just doing their best. Quietly dealing with the challenges and changes of becoming an adult and preparing for life. Many are the best and the brightest in our country, they are the future, putting forth more effort to learn and grow than most of us could even imagine possible. But in the mix, and in turns, there are a lot of kids who have a lot to learn plus bad habits and a sense of who they are that make it difficult for that to happen.

So we endure the parties and the fallout each fall. We listen while the university, the government, the petty politicians, and the police wring their hands, tut-tut, and agree that something should be done. Then winter comes, which always quiets down the town, and it’s forgotten until the next year, which is invariably the worst ever remembered, with its new promises that meetings will be had and emails will be sent with the most serious possible tone.

But it’s not working. There’s just no room and no time. At best the response is reactive. At worst it's a kind of acquiescence. This year, walking on Jubilee with my six-year-old daughter, I watched a pair of riot-geared policemen chase a sprinting young man down the block toward us, giving up with hands on knees after little more than a hundred-yard dash when the boy showed his cross-country skills and disappeared into a labyrinth of leafy backyards. The thing that struck me most was the demeanor of “oh, well” bemusement on the faces of the too-pooped-to-pop policemen. The scene symbolizes the whole story.

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Solutions

For those in the know, I’ve probably written more than needed about the community and the problem, but it’s worth understanding what’s really going on and helping clear away the effects that are being mistaken for causes.

It took us six years to get here to this mess. Here are four simple solutions that people are talking about, which, if implemented together, could get this thing permanently fixed in two years.

1/  Civics 101 - Today universities (like businesses) should require an ‘onboarding’ class for new students and staff. In the same way business students, when I went to Dal, were required to complete pass/fail English and Math courses to show proficiency, each new student should be required to pass a civics and good citizenship class that covers ‘how not to be racist’, civics, community standards and engagement, the importance of self-improvement, student mental health, and an overview of all the basic issues from drinking to sexual politics, and yes, I suppose pizza and how to be a good neighbour. The course might be 8 hours of class time plus a test and paper submission required by October in order to continue on campus.

2/ University Student Population Control through Responsibility - The Province should meet with the city and set a six-month task force to determine upper limits to growth at the university and the university should be required to prepare and submit a rolling five-year plan on how it plans to accommodate the student population along with any further proposed growth.

A general working theory would be to set the campus population back to what it was before all this started, limit it to that, and require the university to prove how it can be responsible for any growth, with the strong suggestion that some faculties could be moved to other communities that might more benefit from additional students and university economics, without being at the bursting point where more students are an over-population.  This would also help with housing, rents, zoning violations, and other crowding problems while potentially helping other communities grow.

3/ Community Policing - community-oriented policing (COP), is a strategy of policing that focuses on developing relationships with community members. It is a philosophy of full-service policing that is highly personal, where an officer patrols the same area for an extended time and develops a partnership with citizens to collaboratively identify and solve problems.

The goal is for police to build relationships with the community, including through local agencies to reduce social disorder and low-level crime but the broken windows theory proposes that this can reduce serious crimes as well. It’s about getting ahead of the problem by getting out from behind the desk, out of the car, and onto the street with the people with officers recruited and trained with the mindset to be communicators, not enforcers.

Community policing is related to problem-oriented policing and intelligence-led policing and contrasted with reactive policing strategies which were predominant in the late 20th century.

This strategy is proven to work in much more difficult situations than this. It’s what we were promised. It’s what we pay for. And it’s what we want.

4/ Institutional Responsibility – Dalhousie cannot abdicate responsibility for their students. They sold the $9,000 tickets to this party and they sold the $90 t-shirts. This is on Dalhousie. Through the power of the Provincial government's purse strings, the community must forcefully return to the university the responsibility that is theirs when they take the tuition and accept the student. The school, at their expense and liability, needs to study and understand how to build systems, events, and rules, that reasonably acclimatize students to university life within a larger community that has high expectations. In particular, Dalhousie must be responsible for a Homecoming season and events where people, the neighbourhood, high schools, and the university, come together in a positive and uplifting way rather than manning drink and drug-bombed battle lines and barricades. 

Here’s a simple call to action. If you’re convinced the problem is not about corner store hours and pizza, you might consider supporting these local small businesses that are such an important part of the community by signing one of the petitions in-store on Jubilee or here at Change.org