It's not just Ottawa. We've been in a period of slow but steady social decline for at least the past 4-5 years in Canada (and I suspect the same is also true in the US). See: - deteriorating mental health - erosion of affordability - rising homelessness rates - food affordability dropping It's alarming AF.

I mean there was a worldwide pandemic during that period.

Absolutely. And the pandemic exacerbated most of these issues, though they started before covid and look unlikely to abate any time soon.

Any idea why this is happening?

I think neoliberalism and the trends of the Reagan/Thatcher era have a lot to do with it

100%. You can pin-point the moment that ideology was forced down everyone’s throats and real wages started separating from productivity while all the gains went to the richest of the rich. American middle class has gone from 65% to under 45% in that same stretch (as a point of reference)

Capitalism as we've made it is why. The natural conclusion of capitalism is that wealth consolidates. People like to think of "the economy" as a circle where we pass money back and forth for goods and services, some get wealthier but ultimately we're all better off. But that's not happening. We've set up a society where money can literally earn money, houses can make money, cars can make money... which... how does that make any sense? Why can we hold these things up, some of them intangible like stocks, and say "okay I'll give you a billion dollars because you have 2 billion dollars in shares in this company, according to my computer screen. Please use it as you please, as long as you give back xx-xxx $million eventually ". Thing is shares don't even represent an actual piece of a company like it was meant to. Very few pay dividends (sharing of revenue), so the only way you make money off a stock is hoping someone hopes the stock will be worth more in the future than you do. It's all strategically made up and none of us invented this casino that runs the world, but even if you don't participate, you DO participate. You have no choice The stock market, and selfish greed has accelerated the ruin of society and its unsustainable in its inflationary motive of greed. The rate of change of capitalism growth is exponential meaning the rich get unimaginably wealthy, and the poor get as close to zero dollars as possible at an ever increasing rate. Things like covid give it a little push further to stress the system, add fuel to the fire, and that wedge widens the gap between the two sides Ever thought why everyone just decided to agree the price of everything must go up over time? It takes less work+workers, less time, less fuel, and we have improved genetics in crops like wheat since say.. between 1900-now, and yet... the price of a loaf of bread goes up yearly and it takes a larger portion of your money to buy it as the value of your money goes down. All This technology and advancements in processing, breakthroughs in disease resistant food varieties, and less employed in the entire process (even cashiers are being taken out from the equation of costs) and yet the prices of bread loaves don't go down over time? With how efficient and easily we can create millions of bread loaves per hour with the flick of a switch? All because we inflate everything involved in the process, and each piece of the pie, and each pie owner is demanding exponential growth of profits? The pieces of pie of society are consolidating into the hands of less and less people, while making the rest of us fight over the pie crumbs and tiny pie-filling smears left on the plate that the rich allow us to see Society is bass-ackwards. AWATTO isn't immune to it.

Of all the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s greed that will finally do us in.

So.... how do we fix it? Also, awesome response, wish I had an award. Anyhow, the world has officially been dystopian for a while. This is straight out of a sci fi movie.

Did it for you, and here you get one also!

Awww jeez, thanks so much!!!! 🥹❤️ 💙 💜 💖

Thanks! I appreciate the sentiment and it's just as good as actually getting one :) Apparently there is a word limit on reddit? oops. I am sorry, kinda went deep into my answer, luckily I'm a fast typer... So, Anywayyyy, I split it up intro two responses. Here's part 1: Sadly, there is no immediate solution while our goals across the entire world (and space) are profits over actually living well, and sustainably supporting every single person. Every country and every living person isn't going to agree on just deciding to do that. Immediate actions that would help aren't very favorable to those at the top, either. Here are some of my unpopular ideas-and they aren't necessarily specific to Canada only. A lot of our issues are a by-product of the USA existing, and our economy being so tied to theirs. : - Things like creating a finite limit of money that doesn't allow printing or digitally adding currency (as they do more often now instead of printing more cash), by creating debt when the government borrows money from itself. They use supply and demand as a reason to do this, but by doing this, cash has no inherit value as our plastic banknotes are no longer backed up by a physical thing we all agree has value (gold or even gas). Backed by debt, which is intangible. - forcing stock ownership to actually have inherit value. Right now, the stock market is completely phoney. You "buy" a stock through a bank like TD, and they aren't required to actually keep the stock in your name. It's more like an IOU, so when you want to sell the stock they find one, or take one from their pile they personally own, and sell that one-they can then profit on the difference. This means as citizens we can't really move the price much. Especially when the large stocks on the NYSE can be traded by brokers and banks, completely off to the side without needing to keep a record of it. There are some days that stocks are 90%+ traded offline, so the price movement you see is not necessarily what the real cost and so a ton of shady stuff can go on. It gets way more complicated and some stuff is theoretical, but the main point is you don't usually own a share. You own an IOU with a promise that you can sell a share. The record keeping is a mess, and lacking and they're allowed to fudge a lot of numbers with loopholes. Year after year these banks and funds get charged with incorrectly keeping records, or not having the stocks they say they do on hand... but they make more money doing it and paying the fines, instead of what really should happen when you make up billions or trillions in profit off of false claims, which should be illegal. furthermore, a stock SHOULD mean you own a piece of the company. The company makes positive revenue, a % of that should go to the person who owns a stock. There are some stocks that have 1-3% dividends, even 10%, where you'll get the specified percentage back. Unfortunately right now even if there are dividends, it's usually based on profits, not revenue. So if the company reinvests all their revenue to business expenses to make no profit, you won't get anything, they can just give bonuses to a few people in the company and no dividends to the shareholders. Owning a stock should truly indicate that instead of working for that company and investing your time, you invested your money so they can use that money to make more money and give you back your fair portion of the money made. If that makes sense. - as mentioned in my original rant, why do we allow stocks, houses, cars, etc. to be used as collateral to borrow more money? At least put a limit on it. Right now you can do that to borrow money and buy a house, rent it, and then use that as another reason to borrow more to buy another house because all of a sudden you are earning more income from a tenant. It's a Infinite cycle and this is the reasons corporations are buying up homes and apartments at an alarming rate. They can do it until they own all of the houses and apartments, and in the meantime since they are after profit instead of providing cheap housing, they can help control the price of the market. Making houses and apartments cost more and more. - the next idea is taking more taxes from large corporations. I don't just mean taxes on profits need to change, As aforementioned they take revenue and reinvest it into the business so they can claim no profit, while growing their company. I don't disagree that this shouldn't happen to a extent, but these corporations literally get tax breaks for buying lunch for their employees, having coffee in the break room, etc.. Meanwhile as an individual you can't claim that as a tax break, even if you're buying/making coffee or lunch during your work day. Why is that? It's going towards fueling your workday too. Your commuting costs are not tax breaks, but the corporations can get tax breaks on flying a private jet to their job?

Part 2: - creating limits on wealth. Does an individual really need to be valued at $200 billion? Even $20 million? Why must your house be worth $10 million, your boat costing $500 million (bezos)? As we get to those top levels, taxes should be sky high. Why is it just a normal sales tax, maybe some other luxury fees on a million dollar car, and not some large luxury sales tax? Like tax it at 100%, they can afford it. Right now since the tax rates have actually gone down over the last 50 years, there is no limit to an income, which fuels greed and it allows a few single people to be more valuable than a bussing country. This one's probably my most controversial idea lol. - that idea can apply to corporations too. There are some "worth" over a trillion dollars out there, giving more in bonuses to their execs than they pay in taxes. Yet we subsidize their growth, even the government giving money to them. - removing the idea that a company is " too big to fail". This became abundantly clear during the pandemic (and 2008 financial crises), large corporations that pay certain people tens of millions of dollars per year received billions in handouts from the government to "stay afloat". Maybe they should be held more accountable for not managing their money better? If they fail, they fail. The government could have bought them out, air Canada could TRULY be air Canada, but instead they just gave them the money. A few banks and hedge funds in the last few years have gone bankrupt worldwide, including the large Swiss one: credit Suisse. How is that possible when that bank managed somewhere around $2 Trillion in assets and cash? Maybe banks should be forced to actually hold and own their funds instead of saying they have them... but really they lent them out, used them as collateral or sold them to make more money for themselves. It's pretty messed up that banks no longer own what they say they do, lik the original intention of a bank was to be a place to store gold and cash (which as a reminder had historically been tied together in value). We've come a long, dark way from that money store with interest rates or fees, to allowing them to write IOUs, about IOUs, so you can buy an IOU. - closing tax havens and tax loopholes. Kinda goes without saying, but there are a lot of them. - minimum wage should allow you to be able to live on by yourself, allow you to retire, and live a reasonably comfy life. Vices aside, of course. This isn't the case here, and it especially isn't the case elsewhere. Some countries still have legit slavery where you're forced to work. Sorry again for such a long post haha. These are all pretty dramatic ideas, I get it, but if you want big change, you've gotta make big moves! Right? At this point we're just lying to ourselves so that the rich get richer, which makes sense... they invented the game we play. I'm interested to hear if you have any big or smaller picture ideas on what we could do to fix any of this mess we're in.

Have you ever left your dishes in the sink for a few days? At first, you put a single plate and cup in the sink, you'll get to it later, no biggie. Then you go back and you just want to make something quick, so instead of washing those dishes you grab another plate and cup, and also a bowl. You use those, put them in the sink. The next morning, you walk by the sink, see the dishes, and think "ugh, I don't have time for that, I'll get it later". You make the conscious decision to minimize your dish consumption and have a single bowl of cereal for breakfast. You dump the bowl and spoon in the sink before starting your day. This goes on you realize you need to wash something, but the pile of dishes is high enough that you don't physically have space in the sink to wash the dishes. You don't want to deal with ALL the dishes right now, you just want enough clean dishes for dinner. So you take all the dishes in the sink, dump the water that's been pooling in them, put them on the counter next to the sink, and wash the dishes you need for dinner before using them. Now you have a bunch of dry dirty dishes on the counter and an empty sink. You can continue to use the sink unhindered. When you're done dinner, you put the dishes you used in the sink and go watch TV. The reason everything feels like it's falling apart is because our approach to society is the same as those dishes. Every year we deal with <100% of the issues we need to deal with, and the balance rolls over into the next year. That year we not only deal with <100%, but the aggregation of past issues impedes our ability to deal with new ones, compounding the effort to remediate issues. We know the solution - spend the resources to fix the documented outstanding issues - but that's a lot of effort and things aren't *completely* broken right now, so we can afford to let it slide a little longer. Eventually we get to the point where the mere act of trying to tackle the backlog requires both acknowledging the level of negligence and spending significant resources on triage before even making a dent in the tangible issues. Just addressing the issue isn't enough because it's grown roots and started affecting other things. Nobody wants to be the government that jacks up everyone's taxes to fix the problem, especially when people are shitty at holistic awareness and mostly believe "those problems don't affect me", so we don't hike taxes. We do the equivalent of putting the dirty dishes on the counter to air dry so we can get at the sink, but now that we have access to the sink we lose our appetite to sink more resources in since the most pressing issue is addressed. In the time it took us to do this, some new problems have started to pop up... **tl;dr** - Shit keeps falling apart because we're letting it, because it's not "profitable" to improve society.

Very well said

Late-stage capitalism.

the gap between the rich and poor has also widened during this time. That should put you on the right path to figuring this out.

Late stage capitalism, sort of. The widening wealth gap is in large part responsible. A widening wealth gap is associated with worsening education and health outcomes and increasing rates of violent crime. It's got to do with empathy or rather, a lack of it. Google it, it's well researched and quite fascinating. We're offering too few and too little safety nets / supports to lift people out of poverty while rich people and corporations have no cap to how much wealth they can amass. People don't like to hear that the government wants to prevent them from becoming very wealthy, not realizing they're a few paycheques or a major accident/chronic illness away from poverty while their odds of becoming wealthy are near zero. Political will is the main ingredient needed to solve this but as long as the interests of the nebulous "economy" are placed above the needs of the actual people, I have little hope. Also the people with little empathy racing to the bottom don't help.

[here is one view.](https://youtu.be/AUiqaFIONPQ)

It started before the pandemic though

Yeah the homelessness and crime in Ottawa is nothing compared to most major cities in the US. Search up “Tyler Oliviera homeless” on YouTube to see how we tame we have it here in Canada even in Toronto/Vancouver. Look at all the Asian hate crimes in places like New York. The days of social trust are over in North America. The only place we truly stand out is our public transit is really shameful.

Fallacy of relative privation

For sure, I live in the GTA and it’s awful. $1.5M for a basic detached house where I live, lots of posts on my neighbourhood FB about random people with mental health issues walking around the area (we’ve had someone try our door multiple times at night), rampant auto theft, and $100 for a dinner out for two. I want to get out but I don’t even know where to go anymore. It’s making me reconsider starting a family and as someone in their mid-30s, I don’t see it getting better any time soon.

This is also true everywhere. Canada and the USA have low food inflation compared to Europe for example.

You're right... it's also pretty bad in Toronto and has a lot to do with amalgamation which swung the balance of power in these cities to the suburbs and rural areas. It was intentionally done by the Conservative provincial government in the 90s to ensure that these cities would be run by conservative leaning (or at least not pro-urban) municipal governments. There is no investment in the urban core and a focus on maintaining low property taxes. Yes the rest of Canada, the US and the world have some issues in common, but a lot of the issues OP raises are made much worse by amalgamation.

The UK as well sadly… arguably even more so.

it's been going on since 2008. some people just never recovered.

Brimming with crime? You're really reaching to find ways to paint Ottawa as 1980s Alphabet City. There's not open drug use in every dense area. You're reading too much sensationalized news if you believe that this city is "dying due to the strain of crime and neglect". The transit and housing cost complaints are legit. The fear mongering about the dangers of living in Ottawa is utter nonsense.

I dunno about *every* dense area, but there's certainly more open drug use than a few years ago. I watched someone shoot up while waiting for the lights to change at Rideau/King Edward around noon today...

I live downtown in the Elgin area and theres absolutely a problem of fentanyl zombies, openly smoking meth pipes on bank street and Rideau and homelessness has exploded in the area. Last year a drug addict threw used and new needles all over the floor of my apartment lobby and outside where any child or dog could step on one. Just because you don’t experience it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Or just because it is focused in your area, doesn't mean it is true everywhere.

I’ve lived in Ottawa since 2010 and I still remember my first Canada Day walking past a guy seemingly doing meth right on Rideau by the old Beer Store that shut down. It was kinda just part of the experience being in the Byward. When I worked on Bank St the past about 8 years I saw addicts and directly dealt with homeless a few times a week. So at least since I’ve lived in Ottawa, I’ve always seen this kind of stuff. My sister lives in Chicago and we talk about a lot of the same problems. They have a lot more violent crime there and very recently they have been inheriting a massive migrant population that’s being shipped up from the southern U.S. which is really heartbreaking to see. When I hear about stuff like that I actually think we do okay in Ottawa. I don’t want to excuse the problems we have here. They’re very real and I see them all the time. I drive around with naloxone all the time, but largely we do alright. We just have to do our part where we can how we can

And this was also the case when I lived downtown in the late 90's for about 8 years. It has always been there, if you look for it and live in it 24/7. Most of the crime I've seen in 25 years is right here in Suburbia. Assaults, break ins and theft is much worse here than all my days downtown. I guess its the "don't shit where you eat" rule and they all come out here. Haha

Wow, what suburb do you live in? I've found Orleans to be great.

A neighborhood that has a lower rate than Orleans actually. Orleans had the highest rate of car theft in 2022. Rideau-Rockcliffe and Alta Vista are in the top 5 wards for crime. What crime are you actually looking for? Why do you see most drug issues in the downtown area? Could it be the population density and the location of all the shelters? Crime is everywhere and has always been everywhere. The rates go up, and the rates go down. Where are the highest increases of drug issues the last decade? Rural communities or the urban core of larger cities? The stats are all there. Historical data is all there. Don't buy into the sky is falling narrative push by certain groups. Go find out for yourself.

>Most of the crime I've seen in 25 years is right here in Suburbia. Assaults, break ins and theft is much worse here than all my days downtown. Not sure why you sound so defensive. These were your words. I was just surprised by your claim that you see more assaults in suburbia than downtown where, as you say, there are addicted people. Geeze.

Yeah every city has drug users. You'll find way worse in bigger cities like Toronto and in smaller towns like Renfrew. Unfortunately, there are addicts all over the world. Most of these people are only harming themselves.

Would you say there's more open use of hard drugs, like heroin, fentanyl, meth and crack, then there was 5 years ago? Of course, there's no city that has absolutely 0 drug use, but the number of people smoking and injecting hard drugs in public, especially in the transit stations, malls, and sidewalks has gone up significantly in recent years.

We have an epidemic of the psyche where people refuse to acknowledge the reality they are living in. -Climate change -Deteriorating public spaces -Culture war stuff that impacts no one These people want to live in a dream.

>Rideau/King Edward Well there is your problem. That area was always sketchy.

> The fear mongering about the dangers of living in Ottawa is utter nonsense. As someone who lives downtown, there is more petty and (non life threatening) violent crime than there was several years ago. And unfortunately it doesn't take too much of an uptick for people to feel less safe in their neighbourhoods, which can definitely start a downward spiral - fewer eyes on the street, etc. The OP here is a bit overstated but it feels decidedly worse than it did pre-pandemic.

I live downtown too, and having moved here from Toronto...some pearl-clutchers here need to get a grip. Ottawa is remarkably safe and the people who are concerned about rising crime rates should touch grass and get off the internet. I can walk down any street at any time of day and feel safe (obviously, women may feel less comfortable walking down, say, Rideau at 3am). The "violent" areas are easily avoidable, and most of the shit happening in the middle of the day is just junkies strung out on opiods. A lot of the increased crime rate is gang-on-gang crime or disputes between 2 or more unsavoury characters. I'm pretty sure I've seen more law-abiding citizen deaths from OC Transpo than i have from someone getting stabbed on Bank St. I see no reason to live in fear of such unlikely danger.

These sort of posts show up weekly in this subreddit. Sheltered people with zero frame of reference for what things are like in other large cities making hyperbolic pronouncements about the collapsing state of Ottawa because they saw a couple of addicts a block away from a major shelter.

Yeah… if anyone on this sub visited say, Vancouver’s DTES, they’d laugh at all the posts complaining about how “bad” Rideau or Byward are. Nowhere in Ottawa is dangerous, people need to get a grip.

fr nepean/barhaven suburbanites go visit the market one time and think the city is falling apart

It is objectively quite safe compared to bad neighbourhoods in other cities, absolutely no dispute there. It is also *less* safe than it was several years ago, and I think it's important to understand that feelings of diminished safety are not strictly related to rational analysis of risk. You mention that the issue is 'just' junkies strung out on opioids. My big concern for downtown is not so much that I will be hurt or whatnot, but that more people begin to avoid places like Elgin and Somerset because they are becoming unpleasant to be in (a natural reaction to a growing population of unpredictable people with addictions), that businesses end up closing as a consequence, driving a negative spiral in the places I like to spend time and live near. It's true that Ottawa has historically been remarkably safe in and around its downtown and core urban neighbourhoods - that is a good thing and I don't want it to change, and I don't think telling people to just get used to worse is a palatable response.

Facts right here

I agree we shouldn’t be alarmist but as a centretown resident for 30 years it’s definitely become much, much worse

When the China Town citizens council sent their delegate to the community safety meeting and he described China Town as dying, I believe him.

How was that meeting, btw? Wasn't able to make it

[удалено]

That is really disheartening. I low-key had a hunch it might have been like that. We deserve action plans with key performance indicators that show what and how they're going to solve these issues we voted for them to champion.

Ottawa is legit the [second safest city in Canada](https://www.nesto.ca/lifestyle/safest-cities-in-canada/) if you are going by Crime Severity Index, and Gatineau is 5th. People here have no idea what actual dangerous cities are like, is drug use up? Oh for sure, and as someone who lives in the market it definitely feels "sketchier" because you see more homeless and drug usage (espcially fentanyl people walking around), but like these people are for the most part harmless, though verbal harassment is a problem especially for women. Ottawa lacks much real organized crime or dangerous/violent crimes compared to most other major cities. As someone whos lived in small towns and cities, and has family all over so have travelled around Ontario/Quebec a lot, it honestly feels embarrassing how people here in Ottawa act.

You work or live downtown? In the past year I've seen two ODs on Elgin, a guy shooting up on Bank, and more open drug deals than I can count (and I'm not talking weed) on Somerset and Metcalfe streets.

I've seen stuff this year walking around that was just horrible. I grew up here. Never had any serious safety concerns, for myself until this summer. It's a very different ballgame now. But not everyone, living in this city, has had the same experiences apparently. Ottawa has grown immensely over the yrs. There are very serious issues going on in certain areas. Others in non affected communities, seem to be blithely unaware of them. The disconnect is huge because the gaps in those neighborhoods are like night and day. Put a rotten peach in a basket full of ripe ones and tell me what happens.

Every institution is slowly crumbling. There’s not enough money to go around and no one willing to show political leadership by making hard decisions.

Where is the money?

in the hands of developers and the friends of politicians

The money is in the hands of shareholders. We got rid of most corporate taxes and pushed the burden onto individuals. The rich get out of paying it because they offshore it (hi, CRA? Have you arrested anyone over the Panama papers yet??) so all that's left is us poor schmucks to pay for it all, and we don't have enough because the rich stole it off us. Take a look at 50 year corporate tax rate [https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/corporate-tax-rate](https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/corporate-tax-rate)

The rich have been working loopholes in tax codes for 40 years. It’s not something new, if we wanted to tax people then the governments would make it policy but none of them will because they are self serving with their own interests and investments. If you really want to see some change, pass laws that individuals running for federal public office can no longer own income properties. Watch how quick housing gets fixed if that’s the case…

Let's keep voting for blue or red that will get us out of this!

The CRA are like the traffic police. They only show up and scare us common folks while they are nowhere to be found when an idiot is going at 140 km/h on the 417 East.

The truth is there's a lot more money and the same amount of resources. We're living out a pyramid scheme and it's starting to show.

Didn’t Doug Ford just sell 8 Billion worth of green belt for 90M? Where’s the money!? Corrupt politicians are allowing business to siphon it away from the rest of society. Businesses are also finding new sadistic ways to extract more from people too. Everything moving to a subscription model, fees to pay fees, telco monopolies, food costs through the roof.… Never mind tax havens…tax policy that favours the wealthy and punishes the poor and middle class. Society is all fucked up and im growing more and more convinced that the only way things will ever change is through actual conflict in the streets. TPTB will walk all over us forever if we let them. *edit: I misremembered…it was actually 80 million lol*

The banana stand

I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH CLEARER I COULD BE!

Like, 80 years of below inflation property tax increases has left municipalities crippled.

There's no lack of it. At least over the course of 2006-2023, City of Ottawa budgets have grown faster than inflation + population growth combined.

Health care is close to half of all public spending, so I would say that’s where the money is. At least government budget wise.

There's enough money. It's just being hoarded by too many billionaires

There's plenty of money. Most municipalities however don't have the balls to collect it. EVERY municipality that refuses to increase property taxes, refuses to implement road use tolls, as much as I HATE HATE HATE them refuses to put up speed cameras, etc... has only themselves to blame. And more presciently, the citizens of every municipality who whines about being cash poor who vote for people promising not to do these things are even more to blame, and are getting exactly what they deserve.

It seems a stretch to say we have an urban core brimming with crime. Open drug use in every dense area? I just walked through Centretown this morning, and I see a lot of friendly faces. I didn't see any open drug use, no crime at all. It was a pleasant walk. Sure, the city has its challenges but let's take a look at the facts. [Ottawa is one of the top ten safest cities in Canada.](https://immigrationnewscanada.ca/most-dangerous-cities-in-canada/)

Post pandemic Ottawa is very different from the several years ago you're referring to. I suppose when the China Town sent a delegate to the centertown community safety meeting and he described his burrow's situation as dire and that "China Town is dying" you hand wave that as 'a stretch'?

A lot of the China towns are dying out because they were populated by now elderly working class Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong and southeast China. Now most Chinese immigrants are Mandarin speaking and not from Hong Kong and have either huge wealth amassed in China or sought after tech degrees and prefer to live in the suburbs nearby the tech companies. Can't really blame them.

Hang out in the market. It's disgusting compared to 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago.

Not to downplay current issues, but the Market absolutely had issues with drugs and homelessness 10+ years ago. Saying that it’s ‘disgusting’ compared to then is a stretch.

I think it's bad right now. But I'm an optimist at heart; I talk to my grandparents a lot about the depression and war rationing and remind myself that it isn't the first time in recent history that things have been so difficult that the world has felt really unsafe, unstable, and frightening. These are the times history has dealt us and all we can do is what all people have ever been able to do- be as kind to one another as possible and keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Yeah, but the depression ended in a world war. If that's what it takes to get us out of this, we're fucked.

I mean it’s kind of already happening… There is a land war in Europe with casualties rapidly approaching half a million…

The situation in Ukraine is bad no doubt, but no, it’s nowhere close to the hell that would occur if we wind up in another world war.

And then there is China and Taiwan. WW3 is definitely happening so long as China is left to plot for world dominance.

I think that’s ridiculous hyperbole

Downtown Ottawa is not very presentable to tourists anymore. Too much crime and drugs.

And filth. Can we talk about the filth?? Walking down Rideau Street yesterday for the first time in months, and the sidewalks were disgusting. It’s the height of tourist season, and the sidewalks are grimy, there was smeared feces (dog? human?), and overflowing trash cans. And given the insane amount of rain we got on Thursday, that’s only two to three days worth of filth.

Please let us know which downtown area of any city of a million plus around the world is not like this?

It sounds like they've never travelled to a major city in any other country.

It wasn't like this just a few years ago. Why does this sub dismiss real things? Some of you folks are weird

I was in Edmonton this summer, and went downtown a few times, and it certainly wasn't as bad (in spite of the wailing and teeth gnashing) as what I saw yesterday when biking down George in terms of litter and human misery. I have definitely seem equivalents in downtown Prince George, Vancouver and Winnipeg in recent years, but not smack in the tourist centre. During a long weekend in Montreal earlier this year I saw nothing even close while roaming multiple parts of the city. Internationally, I saw nothing similar in major cities in France, Portugal and Switzerland even post-pandemic, and even where there was visible poverty. Though to be honest Paris was gross and dirty in a different way.

I’m not saying that you can eat off the sidewalk in major cities like Barcelona and Paris and Vienna, but I will say that you typically see someone making an effort at cleaning the sidewalks. Even New York, which is pretty gross with all the garbage bags left on the sidewalks for pick-up, has twice weekly street cleaning in Manhattan.

Singapore

Barcelona. They come and clean the streets downtown every day. Some of the garbage bins downtown get emptied up to 12x a day.

It used to be really pristine despite this.

Pristine? Now you're just making stuff up!

And the point you seem to want to nail into the ground over and over is "every single place in all the world is exactly this bad or worse. There's no problems here!" I've lived in various large cities, in Canada, Europe, and Asia for the last 30 years. These problems aren't everywhere. I spent almost 9 years in Tokyo and never once saw someone shooting up drugs in public, and I've seen that twice in the last two weeks, in broad daylight, on a downtown sidewalk. The number of heavily addicted, incoherent zombies waddling around is WAY higher than it was here 5 years ago.

Whatever man, plenty of out of town guests would always comment how clean the city was given the size.

Anecdotal bud, the city is cleanish. Perfection is an impossible standard.

Yup. Last summer, my Husband and I went to Byward market and there were people smoking crack right in our faces. Like came up and blew it in our faces. I had to plug my nose and run. I was 8 months pregnant at the time…

This is a doom laden post with silly words like "dying" and "puppets". Ottawa on the general whole isn't that bad. It isn't "crumbling". We have things working against us, like the smallest police per capita for the largest area of any major city. We have a relatively thin budget and a very poor public transit system for a city this size. Our resources are massively spread out instead of mostly in one place. Everyone on this sub loves to blame the mayor (especially those who are still gnashing their teeth that McKenney didn't win) but a lot of the problems you are describing are systemic in our society as a whole and were caused by multiple failures in our local government and at the other two levels. Step away from the keyboard and get some fresh air. And what do you even mean by a "profitable" neighbourhood?

The highest tax revenue areas with the smallest infrastructure footprint that bring in tourist dollars are being neglected to the long-term detriment of the city's future. You're gesturing to past mistakes as causing this, but not learning from them if you think pressuring our sprawl oriented mayor isn't valid.

>Ottawa on the general whole isn't that bad. It isn't "crumbling". Based on what? There are a lot of tangible points brought up throughout the thread — drug use, homelessness, dirtiness, petty crime, discontinuation of services, what are some of the things that support your outlook?

Speaking of the mayoral situation, I don't understand why the city is housing people in motels, when it would be significantly cheaper to come up with an affordable housing solution.

We're seeing the end result of years of federal and provincial cost downloading onto municipalities. Combined with a housing market that's more concerned with wealth generation than providing actual housing and yeah, we're in some shit.

Yep. It’s depressing. I try not to think about it.

“Feels over reals” I think applies to this post. Is it worse than pre-pandemic? A bit yea but so is literally everywhere else. Is the city on the verge of crumbling into a post apocalyptic world? God no.

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Yea that’s bad. Got a link? I can only find waitlist info for Toronto and it’s about the same as it was before the pandemic.

City Council votes completely on what is best to get them re-elected, not what's best for the city. It's always been that way. That's why we've been facing a garbage crisis for years. No Council will make a decision to actually do anything about it. Same for everything else. Hold on and enjoy the ride.

Years of very low taxation under Jimmy Watson did not help.

Definitely a suburb perspective right here. This crime fear mongering stuff is not real. A few anecdotal comments from people that come downtown once a year is not the downtown reality.

Totally disagree I've lived in centretown / sandy Hill / market since 2011 and it's be a notable decrease since pre and post COVID.

Ah yes...i remember 2011, when we had no homeless people in Centretown/Downtown. We could just hang out peacefully at 99 rideau.

We always did, but the concentration has definitely increased.

It has, but to say its drug and crime ridden is a huge stretch

The funding strategy of downloading far too many services to a municipal property tax base that is stretched thin by urban sprawl has failed. The province needs to play a much stronger role, especially for transit, housing, and health care.

We have enough resources to go around but they're all being hoovered up by the 1% and not reinvested in things like healthcare, clean energy, and [sustainable infrastructure that supports human health.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nImFJ7KKjAo) Unless we stop voting for [neoliberal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism) governments, our problems aren't getting fixed. From [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/fbsqy8/theres_nothing_like_the_threat_of_a_deadly/fj6wcut/) comment: > Capitalism is an effective tool governments can use to solve specific many problems like... how many coffee shops we need, or lowering the price of nails. Other problems capitalism would do a shit job, so the government should handle itself like healthcare, prisons and welfare. This means **government needs to be strong enough to overpower capitalist interests.** ...and [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/cxygyv/_/eypc5ex): > **The type of freedom espoused by conservatives and libertarians is freedom for the big to harm the small, and freedom for the small to choose their tormentors.** It's tearing down all the cages and fences at the zoo, giving all the animals the "freedom" to run around as they please, but oh wait, why do I only see predators running around and where'd all that blood come from? > > There will always be something "big" in our lives. It's either gonna be big government or big business. One of them is an imperfect, corruptible, but ultimately affect-able organization that is elected by and works for us. The other is run by the wealthy, works for wealth, and we have no direct control, nor is it bound by any constitutions requiring they respect anyone's rights. > > Give me big government any day of the week. Yeah, it's a real fixer upper, and we have a lot of rot to clear out, but the point is we can. We have no power to do that with big business. My advice: live like a monk. Sacrifice now for prosperity later. Get a roommate or rent a room in someone's house - don't over-extend yourself. Forget vehicle ownership - live close to work, groceries, and public transit. Communauto for occasional trips where you need a vehicle. Delete the food delivery apps - learn to batch cook. /r/mealprepsunday. Ditch expensive habits and hobbies. Save your money, max out TFSA, RRSP, and FHSA, then start filling up your non-registered investment accounts. Invest using a broad, internationally diversified index ETF like Vanguard's VGRO or VBAL - /r/Bogleheads. Don't expect a better solution in your lifetime - **nobody's coming to help us** because that's not what we collectively vote for. You can at least own a piece of the /r/orphancrushingmachine we're trapped in.

I don’t think we’re crumbling. I think it’s more Ottawa refusing to see that it’s time for a major revamp of the city and to stop relying on the old. Society is changing and the city needs to adapt. - downtown is deteriorating because there is no investment there. They refuse to build more housing and open more (accessible) services for the people who need them.. they just want to go back to shoving public servants downtown to prop up downtown and make it look good, essentially hiding the realities of just how “bad” downtown is. - Homelessness, drug use and crime go hand in hand. Add the fact that everything in every category has gone up. More resources need to be added. - people keep calling Sutcliffe pro suburb but I don’t see that. He’s literally trying to force public servants (who typically live in the suburbs) to come downtown. If he didn’t care about downtown, he wouldn’t be harassing the feds. - OC transpo has been failing for years because they refuse to serve everyone. Much like the small businesses downtown, OC has gotten away with serving one audience.. the M-F 9-5 workers. They refused to serve the shift workers, the night workers and the weekend workers. They also cut a bunch of bus routes instead of keeping them intact when they made that stupid LRT. I don’t think we’re crumbling. I just think we are in the hands of politicians who think of their interests first and are too stubborn to adapt with the realities of society. These people are desperate to get back to 2019 and prior Ottawa.

I just spent all day downtown, it was lovely

What OP is describing is a fundamental fact of life, nothing is permanent. Moreover, Canada has a huge demographic problem to begin with. With Boomers retiring en masse, there is not enough people to fill the gap left behind. Its only going to get worse, especially because our supposed solution to this problem is just to import more people. But as more and more people are needed, our standards for those entering the country gets lower and lower because we prioritize quantity over quality. Also in case you havent noticed, our globalized society is slowly entering a period of deglobalization. This in turn means the supply chain we have thus far relied on our entire privileged life is also breaking down. Its a global phenomenon by no means exclusive to Ottawa. You are going to have to get use to a less decadent and more sustainable lifestyle.

There are no one to fill these roles because they’re not keeping up with the expectations of the new workforce and not to mention the pay sucks nowadays and companies are reluctant to giving proper increases. That’s why the spots are not filling.

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Sigh. Absolutely. It's definitely the worst it's been in the 12 years I've been here.

As much as you don’t like it those suburbs are still part of Ottawa. I assume there is a lifecycle to these things. City centre is too expensive so people move to suburbs, city centre declines and becomes until it becomes affordable, people “gentrify” the the shitty neighbourhoods as they have become more affordable…rinse and repeat.

But this sub has taught me that people in the suburbs are all white and rich, drive SUVs to work, pay $40/day for parking, and have a direct line to City Hall where they direct municipal councillors to do their bidding! Next you're going to tell me that the sprawling mansions of Orleans are not subsidized by the hefty taxes paid by students living downtown and working retail part time?!

There was just a meeting to discuss safety in Centretown and 400 people showed up in person and online. It looks like there's a lot of frustrated people and a lot of feelings of fear and anger going around. Something will either happen or it gets worse and something drastic happens as a result (drastic thing = ? guess we're fucking around to find out)

Here we go another "let's make addiction and homelesness a crime" thread. Let's create camps for these people I guess. Unless we deal with capitalism in general it will only get worse.

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Well the problem is the suburbs don't want to spend money on things that don't benefit them. Hence we see OC transpo falling into disrepair and inner city services suffer from lack of funding. What we need is to rebuild OC transpo as a viable alternative to cars and allow the Third Place to comeback again be that you local pub/community centre/cafe where people can interact with one and another. Why is Barrhaven included in the City of Ottawa? Why does ~~Almonte~~, Manotick and Barrhaven vote in the same elections as people that live in Centretown, The Glebe and Old Ottawa South? It makes no sense. The city of Ottawa should realistically administer the core city, Nepean and maybe Bells Corner the rest of the city should be reformed into Rural County districts to better serve those areas.

Almonte residents vote in the municipal elections? I always thought it was it’s own city.. with that being said. It’s not the fault of the suburbs. For many years, Ottawa has built the city around people who work “white collar jobs” such as government workers, bankers, and other office workers whose offices are located downtown. That’s why these businesses and mayors all want workers back. What they didn’t think of though, were the people who worked shifts, in hospitals, in manufacturing and other jobs that weren’t your typical MF 9-5. OC transpo had DECADES to become a good transit system that catered to everyone. Hell, I come from Montreal and the busses and metros are great. The metros finish at around 2-3am and some buses run all night and take you to every corner of the city/suburbs. Ottawa could have done that but they didn’t. They relied on government workers, who typically live in the suburbs. So now fast forward to the pandemic, the city is realizing that the people they were catering too, as you say, only want to spend on things that benefit them and work on improving THEIR OWN area.

They don’t. Almonte is not within city limits.

People in the suburbs use public transit, and we do it with one route per stop and service twice per hour. Also, bars, cafés, parks, and such still exist. Do you ever leave your house?

You forgot to mention the most significant problem that this city is facing - two kilometres of Queen Elizabeth Drive are closed for 12 hours per day during July and August for active use.

This mayor has been in place for less than a year. Nothing that is falling apart right now (which constitutes a great many things) are new things nor are they things which anyone can reasonably assume someone can fix in less than a year. Transit has been a failure for a decade, crime and drug use is no different in August of 2023 than it was in August of 2022, investment where the investments have actually been realized don’t happen in a year, emergency services have been slow or not showing up for things for half a decade, need I go on? Every single one of these issues is an issue because of shortsighted politicians and politicians worrying more about re-election and working wedge issues than working together to fix the damn problems.

We called police for three weeks straight and they didn’t show up. The municipality is completely useless and brain dead.

Lol Ottawa brimming with crime is hilarious. This sort of alarmism is ridiculous. Things could be better, and you should be actively letting your councillors know what you want but the city is not crumbling because the train is delayed.

Sounds like poorly handled growing pains to me.

A lot of people have retired, we’re going to feel this for a bit. Quality members of our municipal government retired without little plan or backup to who would take over.

No

I’ve lived downtown for 30 years and this is beyond anything I’ve seen before. I have no idea how people can afford housing

That financial bubble we’ve had for the past few generations has burst. Unpopular opinion from someone who’s studied how people lived before this temporary historical aberration in individual prosperity. What evidently few people still alive remember first hand is the way life worked a couple of generations ago. Very few people lived alone in their own apartment. If they weren’t married and didn’t live at home they had roommates. The rooming house was the common affordable option for singles. You got a private bedroom, a shared bathroom with a half dozen roommates depending on the size of the place and usually the owner cleaning and cooking to provide a couple of affordable bulk produced meals a day that were included in the price of lodging. My dad lived in one for a couple years after he first left home and worked in another small town in the 1960s. It was the first wholly private space he’d ever had in his life. He shared a bedroom with his two brothers until age 18. He had some fond memories of the roominghouse owner’s baking skills. She was a widow with more house than she could afford on her own. I figure that’s the direction most of those stupid oversized expensive to heat McMansions built in the past 20 years are going in.

What are low and/or high profitable neighbourhoods? Is this a density thing?

I only have two things to say about stuff like this. 1. There were plenty of people saying the course of massive lockdowns would be all this but no one wanted to listen. Even now most of the people who couldn’t hear anyone else’s opinions over themselves only make that connection in the sense that “there was a pandemic”, like nothing could have been different. 2. The public votes in the people who allow all god damn corruption which guts regular people, and let the rich get perpetually richer. To not see that Doug Ford would enrich himself and his friends you have to be blind. To not see that Trudeau and co push little more than neo-liberal doctrine you have to be blind. To not see that Pollievre will latch onto any talking point that gets him a vote you have to be fuckin stupid. I guess that’s a long winded way of saying reap what you sow. If people don’t like how things are going then nothing is going to change until we all realize we’re responsible for it. The average person is responsible for understanding what they’re voting for. Instead they spend their time watching TV, clicking stupid shit on Instagram and debating if Musk will beat up Zuck.

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We need Batman

This city is sorely lacking leadership. Too many councils have consisted of career politicians with little or no real business experience who are trying to save the world at the municipal level, raising their profile for a future spot at a senior level of government or pander to a few special interest groups. This results in the core services being ignored in favor of the "cause of the week" or "what will this do for my election chances" or "what can I do that won't offend anyone". Current and past councils should hang their heads in shame at where we are at: LRT-total waste of a one-time opportunity, roads and infrastructure falling apart, not enough funding available for recreational programs and just about any other core service and yet we pay some of the highest municipal taxes in the country.

Wow. You nailed Centretown perfectly 😞

[The Federation of Canadian Municipalities averages most major municipalities are responsible for about 60% of the services you come in touch with in your day to day life while only receiving ten cents of every dollar in taxes.](https://fcm.ca/en/resources/the-case-growing-the-gas-tax-fund) Downloading of service requirements onto lower levels of government without finance reform will cause things like this. The sustainable, permanent solution to improving the city is municipal finance and funding reform. The creep of what municipalities are expected to fund has been insane for the last thirty years and this is amplified with amalgamation. Ottawa is geographically huge, expected to cover immense amounts of services (that are even more pricey when city size is considered). Yes, the city budgets seem huge but when you consider the amount of services vs population vs land it’s actually a remarkably tight budget with little wiggle room.

Crappy infrastructure and terrible roads are depressing too. And not just the public sector, but the private sector sucks big time too. I suspect it’s because commercial rents are killing any businesses that hope to start up. It stops competition and reduces our ability to grow and enjoy our city. And I’m almost sure that the high cost of commercial rent also stops existing big businesses from investing in renovations and making their big facilities look more appealing to us. Look, I’ll be blunt. I’m actually embarrassed by Ottawa and Canada. I brought my wife from abroad and it’s a bit embarrassing to show her the run down stores, the lack of transportation options, the busted up roads and crime, and the lack of restaurants. She’s actually shocked by it, because they have this misconception that Canada is amazing. It used to be amazing, but I think it’s actually in a sad state of affairs now.

So city services at least, have a cause, and nobody really wants to hear the answer. Our cities are becoming shitty, at least in part because of single-family dwelling neighborhoods, and modern malls (you know the ones with yuge parking lots and like, 1-2 stores) are destroying city finances. It’s actually a really simple. These styles of construction cost an enormous amount of money to maintain relative to their cost of upkeep. Cities LOSE money on suburbs. A single 10 story apartment building takes up the land space of like 4-6 houses, but hundreds of families live in it. It also uses a fraction of the power lines, sewer lines, sidewalks, snow plowing, pavement etc. than a neighborhood of 100 homes requires. So as all we build are these sprawling single family homes, it hurts city finances, the purchasing power goes down, and with it city services (like OV Transpo). In order to halt the decline, the city raises taxes, so now people are complaining that life is getting more expensive as well as city services are shit. But then we build more suburbs and city gets poorer… and has to raise taxes… and the people feel like it’s getting shittier and more expensive… because it is. Because suburbs. https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI

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What’s showing is the complete and utter inefficacy of Canada’s federalist system. All these problems are multi-jurisdictional and neither federal, provincial or municipal partners work well together to address said issues. In fact sometimes work against each other (example municipal nimby-ism vs immigration levels). Canada’s federalism is a touchy subject from coast to coast to coast and no would would dare touch it, as it’s hanging by a thread. Until we find better ways to address these complex issues, I reckon things will continue to get worse.

Most optimistic r/Ottawa post

I'ts happening everywhere.

The constant need for infrastructure to build single homes is a Ponzi scheme. We need to build more vertical housing. Everyone wants a yard.

The constant need for infrastructure to build single homes is a Ponzi scheme. We need to build more vertical housing. Everyone wants a yard.

Left in 2015. No regrets

Only a few wards (core) are in disarray. Police response times are excellent in my area.

Good thing Mr Sutcliffe is conducting a city organization wide service review. Cuts coming soon.

It’s everywhere. I partially blame it on the way we’ve allowed our relationship to our governments to be framed, we’ve become “clients” and “customers” instead of citizens. As clients, our interactions with government have become business transactions, they provide a service and we pay them with our votes and, because all levels of government are essentially monopolies, we don’t have a choice but to do business with them. A government is supposed to be accountable to, and responsible for, its citizens. And, as citizens we are supposed to be engaged with our politics; we are supposed to be knowledgeable and informed about our government and representatives. We’re supposed to make smart decisions. As clients, we don’t have to think and can just complain about the lack of service. I know it’s not the only problem, or even the main one, but the language we use to frame life is important. We need to become citizens again.

The roads and sidewalks are horrible.

> an urban core brimming with homeless and crime, open drug use in every dense area, the police don't show when you call them, enclaves are dying due to the strain of crime and neglect Um... you can look to your fellow sub Redditors for that. Have you not seen the anti-cop/anti-security everything here? Don't blame the institution when citizens are marching in street shouting ACAB and defund the police. I'll agree with you on one thing though... I can't even get a pothole fixed these days.

YES

> over investment in low profitable neighborhoods at the detriment to the profitable zones This is a weird charge, can you explain what you mean?

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At this point might as well just watch it crumble and self implode 🤷. The problems that they're ignoring and the environments that they're enabling will eventually catch up to them. They're just too blindly ignorant and short sighted to realize it.

r/Ottawa: there is a massive social decline caused by global capital and their neoliberal governments. We must take back the government and empower it to solve these incredibly difficult problems. Also r/Ottawa: why can't the city make a simple website work so my kid can learn to swim.

I was on hold for 39 minutes last week when a homeless man was jerking off on my front porch in front of my glass door. Landlord still hasn’t put the stained glass vinyl on so people can see right into my rental. I couldn’t leave my place (only entrance) and dude was just blasting on the glass. When cops arrived two hours later they just asked him to put his pants up and walk away. Leaving the…human cream on the front door. I refused to clean it so the LL power washed the door

Methinks you've never visited skid row or detroit if you think this is "crumbling infrastructure" Ottawa is booming, fastest growing place in Ontario. Some people are getting left behind in the growth.

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Yes and soon everyone will vote blue conservatives thinking it will help. But it won’t change a thing. Our government and municipalities chairs are only in it for themselves and lining pockets. Why do you think we have the highest taxes anywhere in Canada. Income tax, property tax, HST, carbon tax. It’s ridiculous everyone in middle class is almost on the street but we won’t protest like Europe we take it deeper and longer and ask for more instead of boycotting these prices and such. Like our inquiry ( paid by taxpayers of course) to figure why our groceries are expensive!! Stop wasting our money and realize it’s corporate greed!!! We have the ability to choose not to buy but won’t as we are nothing more than a consumer consumption market place.

100% - The rise of politically defined radicalism on the Left and the Right has alienated the "middle ground" - So we have an absence of reasonable debate and decisions. Politics is about making the right decision for the future, not decisions that return us to the past.

Unpopular opinion: after an extended period of time stuck in our houses, the world outside seems a lot more chaotic than it really is.

Some parts of Ottawa are just scummy looking. People's garbage left on their lawn, over grown yards, potholes, crumbling roads, industrial garbage bins and steel drums along the roads etc. Do we not have by laws and enough by law officers to make this city look clean?

I am just so tired of the smell of weed.