(02-06-2024, 10:35 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: Since when does an encampment at Weber St. affect development on the transit hub lands between King and Duke, especially the first phase of such construction? Suddenly we’re building a transit hub 3 blocks long? Now I’m a big proponent of enormously horizontally large buildings, but this is the first we’ve heard of the Duke to Weber block having anything to do with the transit hub.
Well...it's incredibly unsafe. Put a dirty lawless homeless encampment 3 blocks from Union Station and you'd see it would be extremely undesirable and very unsafe. Nobody wants to be anywhere near that kind of mess because it would be dangerous. Add in construction and it's even worse.
It would make the job site very unsafe. GO Transit and VIA already have to be worried about crackheads stumbling across the tracks, so the last thing we need is them falling into a pit or nodding out on a massive urban job site. Plus, securing the site would be expensive because obviously they would be trying to steal stuff all the time. For the last couple years it has cost us tens of thousands of dollars (probably hundreds at this point) just to pay for security and policing them on a gravel lot. It'd cost even more money to have security monitoring a job site for a few years straight in order to minimize theft (tools, metals, electronics etc). Developers like VanMar and IN8 have had to spend a lot of money securing their job sites downtown, so doing the same on a government project that would take years to complete would cost even more money.
Asking how and why having homeless people, rail lines and construction sites together in a small area is a bad thing shouldn't even be a serious question. Injuries and potentially deaths would be inevitable. While the encampment sits a good 300 meters away, that's still way too close for it to be safe. In the United States of America where homelessness is much, much worse there has been a continual rise in deaths due to them camping out alongside railroad tracks.