I am a born and raised Calgarian, I know I truly am a rare breed in this booming city where many residents are new to the city. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life in North East Calgary and I’ve always thought we got a bum rap in our portrayal in the media as the lower class area of Calgary where every crime tends to be committed if the media is to be believed. When it came time to purchase my first home over 3 years ago I was proud to call Falconridge home, and I was happy to stay in the northeast since I knew the area and all of the amenities available to me here.
We are so proud of our first home and wanted to show our pride by doing our part to make our area a nicer place to live. In three years here we have taken the time to improve our home as best we could on our limited budget, we’ve made small renovations, purchased new furniture, re-did the flower bed in front of our home, planting a few trees and created a little garden in our backyard.
Unfortunately our neighbours do not share our point of view. I understand there are a lot of renters in our area. I have nothing against renting, heck we were in a rental apartment before we managed to buy our home just before the big housing boom and now with that boom it has becoming increasingly impossible to become a homeowner. But when we were in our rental apartment we always took the best possible care of it to make it look its best because this was our home. I wish I could say the same about my neighbours. Every year since we moved in things are getting progressively worse on our street to the point where I now find the drive home to be depressing knowing that I have to come home to garbage strewn yards with items like doors, spare tires, mattresses lying wherever on their lawns. Not to mention most of the front lawns have become parking pads for assorted abandoned or working vehicles and recreational vehicles (I’m not talking about in the driveways, I’m taking about vehicles parked every which way on the front lawn). No one ever shovels their sidewalks or mows their lawn. Plus the hedges are never trimmed; they are simply neglected like everything else on the street. One of the trees we planted has even become a doggy washroom for every neighbourhood dog! People let their dogs run loose or tie them in a way that they are sure to get loose to the point that people are frightened to walk down our street in fear of being bit or viciously attacked by a dog. People are constantly blaring their music until all hours of the day and night with no respect to anyone that lives near them, or having unattended bonfires in the summer creating toxic fumes and fire hazards. Basically our area is one big bylaw infraction and I’m tired of living this way.
All I ask is this, please respect your neighbours by taking care of your property, keeping your noise to a minimum, and if you don’t have the room to park all of your vehicles in front of your home, walk the few extra steps it would take and park them on the street. Please take pride in where you live, regardless of whether you rent or own this is still your home. Don’t you want to live in an area you can be proud of?
I just wanted to respond to this article. I totally agree with the author. I too have lived in Falconridge for approx 7 years and have also watched it turn into a dump. People have no respect for other people’s property. I have dogs that use the washroom in the backyard; however, I have to constantly clean dog feces out of my front yard. One time a guy let his dog take a dump in my yard as I was watching and just walked away when I was motioning for him to clean up. Whenever I take my dogs for walks I bring bags! People throw garbage in my yard as well as steal from it. Recently I had bricks stolen from my garden and my neighbour had his birdbath stolen from his front yard. I took my niece to the park to play and had to spend 20 mins just cleaning the broken boards with nails and garbage off it before she could play. I understand people live different lifestyles and that’s fine but I am not proud to even tell people I live in Falconridge. It has become a dangerous, filthy dump and no one will ever get the true value of their property as long as it stays this way.
Comment by Kendra — April 2, 2008 @ 10:08 pm
Having read “Kendra’s” letter, those same observations apply to Pineridge and Rundle communitiea. One can as well observe that “Ray Jones” is the Alderman supposedly representing those communities as well.
Perhaps here I should stop.
Thanks for your excellent publication.Klaas.
Comment by Klaas — August 13, 2008 @ 5:40 pm