Calgary Housing Action Initiative
Minutes of General Meeting

Date: December 12, 2006
Time: 7-9pm
Place: Knox United Church

1. Introductions
2. Open forum for raising issues and problem-solving around responses.
A.“Affordable housing” is the wrong term because it has negative connotations. Use “diversity of housing options” instead?
B. Have we done any door knocking to promote the benefits of affordable housing, ask people if they would oppose having affordable housing next door to them or in their neighbourhood? No, we haven’t done this yet. But we are working on ways to do more awareness raising.
C. Have we looked into rent to own options? HSBC Bank may have a program like this, based on shariya law. David will look into this, explore for Alternative Housing working group future presentation.
D. Speculating is causing inflation in housing prices and should not be allowed. It is likely to die down as market cools off and it is no longer as profitable.
E. Millican Ogden community group developed affordable housing for their community. Pauline will dig into her archives and provide us with more information on this. Perhaps we can learn from this experience.
F. We should be involving more people who are homeless in our work. We need to be doing more to build relationships with this community and reduce barriers to involvement in CHAI. Our role is to support citizens in taking action, and letting people know about our activities.
G. Is there a need to raise more awareness about homelessness in Calgary? How can we do this? We could support protests or media campaigns if people who are homeless want to be a part of this. Or we could represent the numbers using objects like boxes. We could create a new red mile. We could do a mural representing the two side of Calgary. We could see if a magazine is interested in doing an article on the two sides of Calgary.
H. Do we want to help in the current clothing drives being done by the shelters? Pauline will post the info about this on our website.
I. It has been shown that if the top 20% of income earners gave 5% of their income through taxes to the bottom 20% of income earners, this would be enough money to lift them out of poverty.
J. We should organize a walk/run to end homelessness and include street theatre.
K. We should create a list of actions on our website for people looking for ideas for what to do about the housing crisis. Jennifer will create a forum on this.
L. We should create a list of actions for CHAI to get involved in, post on website, and vote on them online. Jennifer will create a forum for this. Grant will create a way to vote on this online.
M. We should create a Christmas Wish List with our top 5 wishes if we could have anything we wanted. This can be sent to members, posted on the website, and turned into a press release. It should be humourous. A list was made of possible wishes. AJ will work on this and post to the website for feedback.
N. Next meeting: Tuesday, January 9th, Knox United Church