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Beside the France family’s home is a playground with a bent basketball hoop and a broken slide. Few parents were there on Saturday afternoon, which some say is the problem in the first place.

“I never see parents out here with the kids,” said Linda Kearns, a Calgary Housing tenant of 15 years who lives in the area.

She said the children in the area sometimes develop a “gang mentality” when they see other children behaving a certain way.

“I’ve also seen them bully each other. It’s not a black and white thing,” Kearns said. “Everybody bullies each other because there’s no one there to stop it. I get along great with the kids and I’m white, I get along great with most of the parents and I’m white. I don’t think it had anything to do with colour.”

Ian Quayle and his wife live in the complex with their five children and say they are consistently the only parents out supervising and putting a halt to violence among the children.

“I don’t call it a racial thing,” Quayle said. “There’s only, I think, in total four white families living here. I just think the kids are bored, there’s not much to do. Calgary Housing doesn’t fix stuff.”

He said Calgary Housing needs to take a “100 per cent zero tolerance” approach to the problems of the neighbourhood and make parents more aware of their children’s misbehaviour.

Minoush Rafie, the program co-ordinator for Closer to Home Community Services, an organization that runs after-school and summer camp programs for families in the area, said the bullying issues aren’t unique to Shaganappi Village.

“It’s not a matter of fundraising and putting more stuff in the village,” she said. “It can happen in any community, not necessarily because this is low-cost housing. Every community has issues but it’s up to parents to address it and how to get together and be a community.”