The City of Calgary - Flooding - Know your flood risk

My assumption is it's a very coarse map and some of the Silver Springs area (the sliver next to the river) is in a risk zone, rather than most of it at the top of the hill...

All of Calgary is safe. Even the "dodgy" parts. I'm from Glasgow. I don't rate the "dodgy" parts as being dodgy at all. That said, the people in the dodgy parts are annoying even if they are not that scary. Here's my quick sketch:
NW - snobby white people, snobby chinese people. "Good schools"
SE - "average middle class people" some working class areas
SW - slightly less snobby than the NW but more or less the same type of
people as the NW. Some seriously rich parts here.
NE - The "dodgy" parts. Marborough and Forest Lawn are "the hood". Some other parts of NE are really just low rent parts of the NW and are OK. Particularly on the west side of deerfoot towards the airport. The kind of "hardcore" part of the NE is really just immigrant town and not dodgy at all. Lots of Indians (from Indian subcontinent) lots of latinos and lots of africans.

There are some fairly new balancing ponds at the bottom of the hill which get flooded now and again, but the houses are not in the flood zone. A lot of the Bowness area opposite had water lapping half way up their gardens in the big flood of 2013, but it was a lot worse round the corner as you head downtown.

A number of homes were decimated in Bowness in the floods along Bow Crescent. I know because two of my friends houses were severely damaged there, and I also helped muck out and gut several other houses.

As Flossy and Jim mentions, there are no houses along the river's edge on the Silver Sprin gs' side of the river (north side). It's all park with steep cliffs (and the ravine I mentioned). Think of an extremely, extremely humble version of the the cliffs of Dover with the houses on top.

I would agree with most of this. All of the areas cover wide geographic spaces with room for affluent and rougher parts. The NE has always had a bad reputation; Forest Lawn was traditionally considered the worst neighbourhood in Calgary. I once drove through it and what struck me most was the fact that people were on their front lawns, sitting, drinking, seeming to interact with neighbours - most unCalgary-like behaviour! But they did have a rough demeanour to them. If you were to drive through most parts of the NE you’d shrug your shoulders and wonder what the fuss was all about as it mostly looks like anywhere else. I think the main issue is if you’re raising a family. The High Schools have long had reputations for gang violence. You may ask why there are teenage gangs at all in a city like Calgary and even when I was myself a teenager and heard rumours of them I couldn’t comprehend it. I’ve always suspected too much television. Some of course were forms of Asian gangs. Some seemed to be sprung purely from the delusions of our own variant of NEDS.
Growing up in the NW I never thought of it as affluent, just middle class (a mix of the British and Canadian sense of that term). Only Bowness had something of a rough reputation, but that just seemed to add to its flavour. Bowness was many, many years ago was its own town and still retains something of its own feel.
Both SE & SW, both have quite nice bits. It always seemed to me the SE had just a wee bit nicer weather than the NW, due probably to the latter’s proximity to the mountains.
Snobbery in Calgary, if it exists, is certainly worthy of ridicule. I’d be very ashamed to hear any BEs have encountered it. There is no real class difference there; there are those who have large salaries and those who don’t. Those with large salaries tend to have no more culture than those who don’t and no more interest in accruing it.

MT. Pleasant is an excellent choice. I once lived next to there in an area called Rosemont. You're next to Confederation Park, which is a large, very agreeable spot (and often strangely unknown by many Calgarians). You have good transport links to downtown by bus (15 min or so). No flood risks at all as you're not near the river. I recommend it.

I just had a look at that flood map. The only reason I can think of is that there are walk/cycle paths that run along the river's edge so people need to know of the possibility of flooding and is why it includes Scenic Acres & Silver Springs as a risk area. Varsity for example is nowhere near the river at all yet it's coloured in. On the whole that map makes no sense to me.

That "affected community" map is pretty useless. If one tiny corner of a community might get a little wet, the whole community - even the areas atop large hills - is deemed "affected".

You need to look at the Floodplain/Floodway/Flood Fringe maps to really get a picture of what will be affected by the next 100 year flood.

An interactive version is linked from here, with details of how to turn on the flood data for the map.

Below is an excerpt for Bowness and Silver Springs. As you'll see, the floodway/floodfringe barely touches the edge of the community boundary of Silver Springs. Calling it "affected", which although strictly is technically correct, is a pretty far stretch of the imagination. Not a single home would be affected directly.

TBH when I think "safe" I mean you're not likely to have your house broken into. I was already under the impression there wasn't really anywhere unsafe. I'm put of by the SE as it's next to the airport more than anything else. Thanks for the lowdown.

Photoplex - Awesome, didn't know that existed. I'll have a look at that. I'm not too worried about flooding but after the last big floods a bit of due diligence is always a good idea... That said it's pretty obvious where the flooding is likely to be just looking at google earth, floodplains flood, areas 30m+ above the river, not so likely...

I think I'm going to start putting some 1-2km circles round the C-Train stations and then when we buy we'll concentrate on those areas for housing.

Are you sure you once lived in Calgary?

I meant NE...

And nope, never lived in Calgary, I think that's JJHJ you're thinking of...

I'm not sure there are no burglaries, there just doesn't seem to be the things-grow-legs situation that exists back home. You still have to lock your car in Calgary as I learned the hard way by forgetting to lock it. You also can't leave e.g. bicycles lying around outside the house overnight or they'll drive themselves away.

But bear in mind my definition of safe and yours might be significantly far from each other. As I said earlier I grew up in Glasgow. I've got a particular point of view of what safe means to me and it will be different than that of someone who grew up in e.g. Surrey. The NE of Calgary *is* unsafe if you act like a twat. A Canadian friend of ours had their son get stabbed for acting like a belligerent fool in a bar in marlborough. They thought it was barbaric that he got stabbed. And it is. But I thought from the story he told that he was a fool who had no respect and that was what got him stabbed.

Do you see property coming off their highs on the near future, the oil slump must have made some consider selling up and this might cause the prices to drop.

I think yes there are likely to be a bunch of distressed sellers in the next year.
The problem with this point of view though, is that when this happens it's because there are no jobs and people are losing their shirt. So the idea of getting a place cheap then waltzing in and getting a great job (or maybe even any job) won't work. There will be bargains for the "independently wealthy".