The burly, dishevelled man in front of the slim woman was drunkenly waving his arms and shouting about his rent.
Years as a social housing manager had taught the woman what to do. She looked right at the man, her back ballerina-straight, her delicate hands motionless at her sides.
She knew she couldn't call a man to help her because the men would argue and perhaps even fight. She was on her own.
Stomach churning, she talked quietly and calmly. Eventually, the man agreed to leave and to come back and discuss his rent when he was sober.
This kind of incident happened about once a month at Jack's, a housing project near Main Street and Higgins Avenue, but the woman was never harmed. Her secret: "You have to treat everyone with dignity."
And that's exactly what the city often doesn't do when it plans and encourages development in poor, inner-city neighbourhoods.
The ducks are being lined up for the city's latest excursion into inner-city development -- the part of Main Street near where the social housing manager worked.
The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority is going to plop a big building down in this area; the Bell Hotel is gone; a line of trendy condos is being purchased on Waterfront Drive; some experts in CentreVenture, the city's development agency, are arguing the area should be drastically changed and Phil Sheegl, a friend of Mayor Sam Katz and a former real estate salesperson, is the city's new director of property, planning and development.
Who can complain about derelict, historically unimportant buildings being torn down to make way for new ones? Not me. My point is this: What is going to happen to people and institutions already in the neighbourhood?
Fewer persons live around Main and Higgins than in the days when the social housing manager worked there. But some, many of them aboriginal, still hang around. And a lot of good people have built up institutions to help them -- the Salvation Army, the Main Street Project, Thunderbird House and other aboriginal projects and various missions and outreach programs.
We don't know what will happen to them if the city cuts loose with a white painting spree -- a program to change most aspects of a community.
Dalton Camp, a columnist and Tory strategist, used to say people over-plan step one of a project. The key step two hardly gets any attention.
The city's planning department has had this problem, as is apparent in what's been done so far on this part of Main Street.
The WRHA building doesn't represent a new program. It is merely moving to Main Street a primary health care clinic from nearby 425 Elgin St., where it is located in a large social housing project that can accommodate frail people.
We are just moving checkers around a board. This quick-fix development approach has not worked before: A contemporary, new Winnipeg City Hall, police office and parking garage didn't have much impact on Main Street. Now, the limestone cladding on some of the buildings is falling off.
Activists in communities such as Centennial and Point Douglas tell us failed neighbourhoods, like failed countries, can only develop if there's a surge of uniformed officers to bring security; improved institutions such as schools and programs to encourage community participation and leadership.
City hall officials can't seem to leave Main Street near Higgins alone. They appear to be ashamed of it. They shouldn't be. It's where our city developed.
In the 1900s, thousands of newcomers, many of them poor and scruffy, spilled off trains at the old CPR station and flowed around the nearby streets looking for something to do.
In response, our business community happily built movie houses (then considered cheap, low-brow entertainment), hotels and taverns, greasy spoons, real estate offices, local banks and second-hand clothing stores.
When I was a kid, I loved talking to the colourful old guys who ran these stores. I even got used to the mind-numbing smell -- small rooms packed with clothes, all hard-used by hundreds of people before the days of deodorant.
Some don't like to think of Winnipeg as a sweaty, hard-working, rambunctious community. But it was. Because of this history, we became one of the world's most successful multicultural cities.
I don't know what Phil Sheegl is going to do as the city's director of property, planning and development.
But I have a few words of advice for him: If you are going to redevelop an inner-city area, treat the people who are already there with dignity. They're part of our history.
Tom Ford is managing editor of The Issues Network and past chair of the Westminster Housing Society and a director of the Manitoba Historical Society.
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