Sprawlcast is Calgary’s in-depth municipal podcast. Made in collaboration with CJSW 90.9 FM, it’s a show for curious Calgarians who want a deeper understanding of the city they call home.

A lightly-edited transcript of this episode is below, for those who would rather read than listen. Subscribe to Sprawlcast on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts so you get new episodes as soon as they drop.

If you value in-depth Calgary journalism, support The Sprawl so we can do more stories like this one!

FRANCISCO ALANIZ URIBE: I think in all cities there is some sort of divide.

RUTH TWIGDEN: We just don’t see that investment east of the Deerfoot. In communities west of the Deerfoot, you see that occurring.

COUNCILLOR RAJ DHALIWAL: When we compare it to west, residents tell me we’re getting ignored.

JEREMY KLASZUS (HOST): Picture this. It’s March of 2024. And it’s afternoon rush hour at the busy intersection of 16th Avenue and 19th Street N.E., just east of Deerfoot Trail. And a group of residents from Mayland Heights and Vista Heights are gathered here because city hall recently closed a pedestrian bridge linking their two neighbourhoods. The bridge went over the Trans-Canada Highway and was closed by the city because of structural problems.

Residents are talking about how it’s hard to cross this intersection if you’re not in a car. And they’re doing a walking tour with some city staff and Andre Chabot, the local councillor.

[BEEP FROM PRESSING PEDESTRIAN “BEG BUTTON”]

KLASZUS TO RESIDENT: Oh yeah, good idea.

RESIDENT: There’s no reason that these lights shouldn’t automatically go pedestrian every time. You shouldn't have to do this.

LARRY LEACH: The neat thing about doing this when it’s cold is you can see where the snow is and how it impacts on pedestrian mobility.

KLASZUS: Olivia Yu knows the problems at this intersection firsthand. She moved to Canada from Hong Kong in 2022, first to Prince Edward Island and then to Calgary. Specifically, to Mayland Heights. And since she didn’t have a car, that meant getting around by transit. And with the pedestrian bridge over 16th Avenue now closed, that meant crossing the Trans-Canada Highway at ground level, going across nine lanes of traffic.

OLIVIA YU: Sometimes when I take the bus, I have to cross the road, but the traffic lights are a really long way to wait. So it’s really important for me if they can build a bridge like that. It’s really important for me, for people who don’t have a car.

KLASZUS: It doesn’t help when the walk signal doesn’t turn on, which means waiting a few minutes for the next one.

YU: Sometimes the traffic light is not working, so I have to cross the road without. I don’t watch the traffic light, because I have to catch the bus.

KLASZUS: Yeah, that's dangerous!

YU: Yeah. I know it’s illegal but I had no choice!

KLASZUS: This is a significant adjustment from Hong Kong.

YU: Because in Hong Kong when you wait for the train it’s not more than five minutes. I think Hong Kong is a well-developed city.

KLASZUS: Hong Kong has one of the best public transit systems in the world, with more than 70% of people taking public transit to get around. Calgary is a different story. Here, less than 10% of trips are by public transit. It’s a city built for the car. And while many communities west of Deerfoot Trail have some degree of walkability, infrastructure is quite different east of Deerfoot Trail. This defunct pedestrian bridge is a case in point.

It raises a longstanding issue in Calgary that’s always hanging in the background: why is the city so divided when it comes to infrastructure and amenities like this? And it’s not only infrastructure. Calgary is also divided in terms of class and economic opportunity—and those divides have shifted over time. Let’s get into it.

The “Deerfoot divide” is a term that’s been floating around Calgary for decades. Here’s University of Calgary sociologist Harry Hiller.

HARRY HILLER: The Deerfoot divide is an interesting reference of course to the fact that the Deerfoot Trail is a spine that basically divides the city north and south, and east and west in an important kind of way.

So it is a barrier, and it is a way of marking off areas and separating them from each other. What we see in the Deerfoot divide is something that I noticed some time ago already, where I encountered people who were new to Canada who initially settled in the northeast, and after a period of time decided that they wanted to jump the Deerfoot. Because by that point in time, they had developed economic resources to the point that they were able to afford houses that were more expensive in the northwest in particular.

But also by that point in time, they did not necessarily need their cultural compatriots in the same way that they did when they first arrived in the country. So the development of the northeast as a launching pad, if you will, for new arrivals to Canada and to Calgary, where houses were cheaper.

And in fact, I observed a builder a number of years ago building the same house in the northeast and the northwest, and there was a significant difference in price and maybe some of the amenities that were built into the house as well.

KLASZUS: The term “Deerfoot divide” has been used more recently to describe the discrepancies between city hall’s investment on the east side of Deerfoot compared to the west.

I asked Councillor Raj Dhaliwal about this. He represents Ward 5 in the city’s northeast, north of McKnight Blvd. and east of Deerfoot Trail. In Ward 5, 85% of residents are visible minorities and 60% are immigrants. And Dhaliwal’s own experience reflects that of his ward. His family immigrated to northeast Calgary from India when he was 14.

KLASZUS TO DHALIWAL: When I say that term “Deerfoot divide,” what comes to mind for you?

COUNCILLOR RAJ DHALIWAL: Actually, I’ve been living the Deerfoot divide for the last 30 years since I came to this country. And have always seen that east looks different than west when it comes to equity. I see more inequity in the east side than west side. Simple things like tree canopy, recreation, even sometimes transportation and infrastructure, road infrastructure. So the divide is exactly—I always put it this way: tale of two cities.

KLASZUS: And when you look at that divide, where do you think that comes from? Why do you think it is the way it is?

COUNCILLOR DHALIWAL: That’s hard to answer. I think this is based on the planning, how the city was planned—not now, back in the day. Even it's natural things like topography. We are more of a prairie on the east when it comes to trees and all that. And secondly, I also see a divide between not just east and west of Deerfoot, but also I'd mark like 16th Avenue north, and east of Deerfoot. That is my ward, and some part of Ward 10.

It’s just also the makeup of the ward. People who live there. And as we know, many of them came here as newcomers. Many of them represent immigrant communities. And sometimes it’s just that they're not that vocal. They're busy because their main focus is putting food on the table. Sometimes they do odd-hour jobs, double shifts…

KLASZUS: But it’s not only how the city was built in the past. It’s how the city is kept up—or not. Councillor Dhaliwal points to some of the massive potholes in the neighbourhood of Cityscape as an example. He showed them to me and quipped, “It’s like a war zone!”

KLASZUS: Dhaliwal says that out of the 10 neighbourhoods in Ward 5, only two have actively functioning community associations. This too is a challenge.

DHALIWAL: If you look at parking, for instance, you have car after car after car because we don’t have adequate transit yet. It creates blind spots. So if someone is walking and they go to, let’s say at the crosswalk, they go to cross the road—they’ve got to be very careful. Especially seniors. Lots of seniors like to bike—to places of worship, to get groceries. And they have missing links, meaning the sidewalks are sometimes—not sidewalks, pathways. Multi-use pathways are missing.

KLASZUS: You can see some of these disparities for yourself using an online tool called the Calgary Equity Index. It’s a tool that city hall is using to fill in some of the missing sidewalk and pathway links Councillor Dhaliwal is talking about. And city hall recently updated the index with new data. (You can also check out the city’s community profiles and ward profiles, which have detailed social statistics on each neighbourhood and ward in Calgary.)

MEAGHON REID: It's almost an aerial view of decisions that have been made.

KLASZUS: This is Meaghon Reid, executive director of Vibrant Communities Calgary.

REID: A lot of lore, I guess, about the Deerfoot divide actually bears out when it comes to evidence. It’s almost like we have two cities in this city, and when we look at all sorts of indicators and outcomes in terms of health and well-being and happiness, we do really see a divide based on the Deerfoot in terms of how people are doing east and west.

KLASZUS: This divide comes up in every municipal election season. There is always frustration in eastern wards about how neighbourhoods get treated by city hall compared with western ones—although the east side also has low voter turnout in municipal elections compared with the rest of the city.

RUTH TWIGDEN: We have a lot of newcomers like Olivia that come to the northeast, because it’s a little bit more affordable.

KLASZUS: This is Ruth Twigden, planning and development director of the Crossroads Community Association, which serves both Mayland Heights and its northern neighbour, Vista Heights. Twigden is from New Zealand and she and her husband moved to Mayland in 2017.

TWIGDEN: And when we saw the price point of Mayland Heights and the quality of the houses and the location to downtown—that it was only a few kilometres, we could still bike—we thought this is an absolute gem.

KLASZUS: Before that, they had been living on the west side, near Kensington. And after they hopped over the Deerfoot, it didn’t take long for Twigden to see the difference.

TWIGDEN: It’s very clear to see. It’s very clear to see that we have aging infrastructure in our community. There’s a lack of sidewalks, there’s a lack of street lighting, there’s a lack of upgrading amenities such as that pedestrian bridge. We have things that are reaching end of life with no schedule to replace them.

KLASZUS: Mayland Heights isn’t the deep northeast of Councillor Dhaliwal’s ward. It’s in the southwestern corner of Ward 10, where 44% of people are immigrants. (Citywide, 33% of Calgarians are immigrants.)

Mayland Heights was built in the 1960s. But in the 1970s, Deerfoot Trail was built to connect further suburbs with downtown. And the new freeway cut off Mayland Heights and other eastern neighbourhoods from the west side of the city.

TWIGDEN: The history of Mayland was a really close association with that Nose Creek Valley, close association with Bridgeland. We got a lot of early immigrants, Italians... These are the communities—Mayland Heights and Bridgeland—where there was the community. And once Deerfoot came in, it really created that great Deerfoot Divide, and we’re really trying to reconnect.

We want to encourage connection back to downtown. We want to be able to bike places. We want to be able to walk places within our community and outside of it. But it makes it really difficult because there’s such a lack of investment in active transportation in our community.

KLASZUS: At the southern end of Mayland is a CTrain station, the Barlow/Max Bell stop. But unlike the Bridgeland stop on the west side of Deerfoot, where a bunch of mixed-use condo towers have recently gone up, this one has a big field of empty space to the north. It’s where the Firestone tire plant used to be. The Firestone Tower is still there. You can see it from Deerfoot.

TWIGDEN: That’s a really big site. It’s 50 acres.

KLASZUS: To put that in context, that’s about the size of East Village. And it’s been sitting mostly empty for years. The Firestone tire plant closed in 1978. After that, in the ’80s, some different ideas were proposed for the land, including various forms of transit-oriented development. But a real estate company bought the land in the mid-1990s and has held it since.

Gordon Parker is the vice president of Yale Properties Limited.

GORDON PARKER: For a while it was seen to be a suburban office site. In the earliest days we had large industrial users like SMED, at one point, wanted to build their factory for their furniture plant on that site. So it went from warehouse industrial to then the concept of being a suburban office site. And quite frankly, now it's probably good that nothing happened, because ultimately, its best use is likely as a mixed-use site.

The ownership group behind it is relatively risk averse and has a lot of other issues to deal with, in terms of the fact that we also own a lot of office buildings in downtown Calgary that we're frankly struggling with right now.

KLASZUS: While the city is forecasting significant population growth in areas like Bridgeland, Inglewood and West Hillhurst, there is very little growth expected for Mayland Heights.

RICARDO COSENTINO: I think it’s interesting, given how close we are to downtown.

KLASZUS: This is Mayland resident Ricardo Cosentino, who’s also on the Crossroads Community Association board.

COSENTINO: I mean, we’re three stops from city hall, our LRT station. And if you look at similar areas within that same radius of downtown, there's a lot of development, there’s a lot of things happening. So I do find it funny that the city’s own forecast, with its push for inner city densification, doesn't have this area growing at all in the next several decades. I think it might be kind of what the Deerfoot divide is seen as—where the city admin doesn't see potential in these areas, and they don't see it deserving certain investment, because who's going to want to live there?

KLASZUS: Calgary’s industrial areas are on the east side of the city. When the Calgary Herald building was for sale in the Mayland industrial area a few years ago, the Crossroads Community Association saw it as an opportunity for the area. There were hopes that it could be put to a creative educational or commercial or maybe even a residential use.

TWIGDEN: We have transit so close, a 10 minute walk from the site. And so we really see the potential of Mayland industrial being this really cool mixed-use urban neighbourhood. Pretty much most of the development permit applications that we get from Mayland industrial is for storage.

KLASZUS: UHaul bought the Calgary Herald building.

TWIGDEN: So when we got the development permit application for this building, for it to be turned into storage, we’re like: we already have a huge over supply within our community. We don’t want to just completely lose our identity where there’s not people living here, there’s not people walking, there’s not people thriving. It’s just other people from other communities coming in dropping off their excess stuff.

KLASZUS: More recently, a developer is applying for a new mixed-use multifamily project in the Mayland industrial area.

Part of the challenge around here is Deerfoot Trail itself, which basically functions as a big wall if you’re walking or biking. A few years ago, Sustainable Calgary worked with some U of C planning students on re-envisioning an old industrial railway spur line that runs from Mayland under Deerfoot Trail—a potential connection between east and west (in addition to the existing 8th Avenue flyover). Lucia Blanco and Alfred Gomez are landscape designers who both worked on that proposal.

LUCIA BLANCO: The project was basically looking into transforming the abandoned CP rail line into a multimodal active transportation corridor.

ALFRED GOMEZ: There’s really so much potential with these abandoned rail lines. We’ve kind of seen that throughout the world now. I think with the start of the High Line in New York and some other industrial spaces that are turned into and revitalized into these public parks—I think we really just wanted to hone in and see what Calgary can do in that sense.

KLASZUS: The dream for this kind of thing is there, but for now it’s just that. A dream.

TWIGDEN: When you're on the west side of the city and looking east, we probably don’t look great to you. But when you’re on the east side of the city and you look west, you can’t believe what you’re looking at. You’re getting the best views in the city. You’re getting the views of downtown, you’re getting the views of the Rocky Mountains behind, you’re getting an old spur line that goes right downtown that could be this amazing active transportation route. We could have whole industries develop and grow within our community that could support Calgary’s vision.

KLASZUS: When we talk about the so-called “Deerfoot divide,” it can be easy to oversimplify and generalize. Forest Lawn and Mayland Heights and Taradale are all neighbourhoods east of Deerfoot, but they’re all very different. Forest Lawn was originally a separate town and recently got a new BRT line built down the middle of 17th Avenue SE for the MAX Purple. Mayland Heights we’ve already talked about. And further north, Taradale was built in the 1980s and has a CTrain station and the recreation hub of the Genesis Centre.

All of these neighbourhoods have different demographics, pressures and challenges.

NINDY BRAR: One thing we have been saying is that there is no area in Calgary, no community or no census track that is strong on every indicator.

KLASZUS: This is Nindy Brar, team lead of demographics and evaluation in the city’s community strategies department, which created the Calgary Equity Index.

BRAR: We really encourage people to explore and to not have generalizations about a community or an area, to recognize that there is need everywhere, but it’s: What is the need?

KLASZUS: Looking at the various indicators on the Calgary Equity Index, you can see that much of the need in Calgary doesn’t break down along east/west so much as inner/outer as the city grows. The far reaches of the city, for example, score low on walk score, transit score and amenities. There’s another “wall” that cuts off some of these new neighbourhoods from the rest of the city: Stoney Trail, the ring road.

KLASZUS: Naheed Nenshi once suggested another way of looking at how the city has become divided over time. This was a talk he did at TEDxCalgary in 2010, before he became mayor that same year. He talked about how in the 1990s, neighbourhoods in Calgary used to be more mixed in terms of income.

NAHEED NENSHI: They had rich people and they had poor people living in them. By 2006, it starts to look quite different and we start to have very serious pockets of poverty that occur throughout the city.

KLASZUS: The Calgary Equity Index shows high levels of working poor in the northeast. You can read more about economic segregation in Calgary in a 2019 episode of Sprawlcast called The Segregated City.

Interestingly, in 2010 Nenshi didn’t draw a line down Deerfoot Trail as the dividing line. He did draw a line, but it divided the city more diagonally into north and south.

NENSHI: If we were to take a red line, draw it down Crowchild Trail, deke around the university, go around downtown, we have two very different cities. The city on top is about 40% non-white. The city under the red line is about 8% non-white. And I use a red line on purpose by the way. It refers to the practice of certain real estate agents in the United States to redline neighbourhoods; to actually say to people, you can’t live there, that neighbourhood’s not for you. And there’s ample evidence that that sort of thing happens in Calgary.

KLASZUS: Nenshi noted where recreation facilities were being built at the time—south of that line.

NENSHI: What that suggests to me is that if you truly want to build neighbourhoods that are welcoming to everyone, that welcome participation from everyone, from the rich and the poor, in fact what you need to do is over-invest in those neighbourhoods that are seen by real estate agents as less desirable, in order to create that kind of mixing. Just as importantly as it is to invest in things like affordable housing to create the mixing on the other side.

KLASZUS: Fifteen years later, Ward 5 is still waiting for more of that city investment.

COUNCILLOR DHALIWAL: I remember when we had our first artificial soccer turf [in 2021] at the Genesis Centre. That was the first artificial soccer turf north of Memorial Drive and east of Deerfoot. Just imagine. My ward has 110,000 people. Ward 10 has 90,000. That's 200,000. Ward 9, add to that part of it. I mean, you had zero artificial soccer turf.

Tennis courts. We have two tennis courts in Ward 5 with a population that is serving 110,000-plus people. Recreation is missing. We don't have proper athletic parks. Right now we have exponential growth in emerging sports like cricket, field hockey. We are lacking those amenities. When we compare it to west, residents tell me we are getting ignored. The city or policymakers have left us behind. They haven't invested into it.

KLASZUS: Meanwhile, the question of neighbourhood desirability can be a vexing one. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg question, as the Crossroads Community Association has discovered in pushing for a Local Area Plan, or LAP. These are plans that guide future redevelopment in neighbourhoods.

COSENTINO: The city’s not putting forth the investment, and then that’s not driving any demand here. And that’s why we’re not getting an LAP, because the city says, well, you’re not going to get an LAP because we’re not seeing a lot of demand from developers.

KLASZUS: Francisco Alaniz Uribe has also considered this question. He’s an associate professor in the U of C’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. And he and his students have done some work in Ogden, just east of Deerfoot Trail in the southeast, on what the neighbourhood might look like in the future.

FRANCISCO ALANIZ URIBE: The desirability of neighbourhoods is complex, but I can say that some of the main factors are location and proximity to amenities, right? What do you have in walking distance, as well as how well connected you are to places of employment?

But there’s also this stereotype behind it. Ogden is a beautiful, great community—great assets. But for some reason there is an old stereotype that places it as a tough neighbourhood. But I can tell you from working with them, it’s a great place to be. And they’re not seeing as much pressure for redevelopment now, but they know they will in the future—and that’s why they wanted to work with us in a project to kind of guide and discuss what change could bring to their community.

KLASZUS: This brings us back to Mayland Heights and that intersection of 16th Avenue and 19th Street N.E. The pedestrian bridge has been taken down but as Cosentino points out, a community mural that was painted on its piers has been preserved.

COSENTINO: We had a bridge. It’s gone, and we have two pillars there now, which kind of are a monument to what used to be there. But there’s not going to be a bridge anytime soon.

KLASZUS: Over the past year, the city has upgraded the traffic signals here to make it a little better for pedestrians. And there are plans to redesign turning lanes and enlarge the tiny concrete “islands” that pedestrians have to stand on here while they wait to cross the street. The longer-term plan is to replace that intersection entirely with an overpass, but that’s years away.

In the meantime, it’s worth checking out the Calgary Equity Index (and the city’s community profiles) to look at your neighbourhood, no matter where you live in Calgary. You can check out everything from walkability score to economic opportunity to municipal voter turnout. Maya Kryzan is a social policy research analyst with the city.

MAYA KRYZAN: We want people to really explore deeper into why these conditions exist. So taking the tool and drilling down to the domain level and the indicator level, even going into their community, collecting their own data, working with community organizations to say: Why might we see discrepancies in these inequities, or why might there be more overlapping inequities in some neighbourhoods than others? Why does this exist in what areas, and what can we do to address this?

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl. If you value in-depth Calgary stories like this one, please pitch in to support our work!