A tough slog for first-time homebuyers

The third time's the charm for Pam McKenzie. After countless open houses, offers on three different homes and many dingy basements, the 28-year-old bought her first house last month.

However, the journey to her dream home isn't over yet.

"There's work that needs to be done," she admitted, citing a lot of the renovations in the Berry Street house were amateurish and probably need to be redone.

Although McKenzie is overjoyed to be a new homeowner, the home-hunting process was a tough slog.

One person fixes a lot of blight

A summer student hired to detail city housing-bylaw infractions in the William Whyte neighbourhood came up with a whopping 1,006 offences.

Hers was a pretty low-tech effort. Armed with nothing more than a clipboard and a pen, she walked the streets of the neighbourhood, noting broken windows, wonky steps, knee-high lawns and other eyesores. Back at the office, she'd send the city a separate email detailing each complaint.

She then mapped the area, using red dots to indicate bylaw infractions. Some streets are layered with dots. Some have few, usually streets with businesses and few homes.

The student doesn't want her identity released, fearing repercussions from an irate property owner or gang member her report may inconvenience. She was hired by community activist Sel Burrows, who used a federal grant to pay her salary.

Renovated out of reach: Upgrades boost rent, force tenants out

IT’S humble, with dripping taps, dingy walls and a kitchen that saw better days in the 1970s. But for Sylvia Boggs, her Flora Avenue duplex has been home for a decade, and she “ain’t moving.”

“They can’t make us,” she declares.

But her defiance is cloaked in confusion. Sylvia and her husband, Danny, have spent the summer in limbo, waiting to be evicted so the new landlord can renovate the 114-year-old house.

Nearly every day they hear conflicting rumours about who owns their duplex, when they might get evicted, what their rights are and what their rent might be if they are ever able to return.

Raise the (welfare) rent, inner-city advocates say

This fall, housing activists want the Manitoba government to do something it hasn't done since the New Kids on the Block topped the charts: Boost what welfare pays for rent.

A new lobbying effort, the latest in a years-long fight, is afoot to convince the Selinger government to hike the basic housing allowance given to welfare recipients, many of whom are disabled and can't work. That rate stands at $285 a month, an amount largely unchanged since 1992 and only a fraction of what it costs to secure a decent apartment in Winnipeg's tight rental market. Inner-city housing experts say it's the single biggest thing the province could do to improve the slum housing crisis.

So far, agencies from inner-city non-profits to more conservative business and real estate groups have signed on to a campaign led by Make Poverty History Manitoba. They are asking for a commitment in this fall's throne speech to boost the housing allowance, and real cash in next spring's budget.

"The increase in rent has just really gotten out of pace and that gap is really having an effect on people," said Marianne Cerilli, the policy and program analyst at the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg, which is also working on the campaign.

Commons answers prayers

Six years ago, St. Matthew's Anglican Church was faced with a dwindling congregation, a sprawling century-old building to maintain and the understanding the focus of its much-used structure had gradually shifted from serving God to serving the needs of the larger community.

Church leaders are frank about the crossroads they faced. When they received $500,000 in unexpected bequests, they could have taken the money, used it for operating expenses and shuttered the place when the money was gone.

Instead, they signed a 50-year lease, turning their building and $200,000 over to a non-profit housing organization. What was once a massive church is being transformed into WestEnd Commons (WEC), an affordable rental property for area residents.

It's a more than $6-million project, funded by three levels of government, the United Way, foundations and private donations. An active fundraising campaign is underway.

Core homes go green for free

A new inner-city program, the first of its kind in North America, could see 400 leaky North End rentals get energy retrofits in the next year.

That's 400 down, 79,600 more to go.

This fall, thanks to a tweak in Manitoba Hydro's arcane legislation, two inner-city renovation agencies are hoping to go door to door, block by block, in the William Whyte neighbourhood offering renters thousands of dollars in renovations, effectively for free.

Hydro fronts the cost of new insulation, high-efficiency furnaces, low-flow toilets and a menu of other green fixes, and then adds the cost to the renter's monthly bill. Because the home is using far less natural gas and electricity, the renter's bill goes down as much or more as the monthly payback on the retrofits. And, for the first time, the loan stays with the house. A renter doesn't have to pay it off if he moves, and the benefit rolls over to the new tenant.

Transforming an eyesore into a model society

Here's a phrase you don't hear often about the North End or its most troubled housing project: "It's gotten a heck of a lot better."

That's how Shawn Sullivan described his longtime home in Lord Selkirk Park, the maze-like Manitoba Housing complex in the William Whyte neighbourhood. Earlier this summer, Sullivan was one of 13 graduates from Lord Selkirk Park's innovative new adult high school, and just before that he moved his wife and five children to a bigger, better place near Grant Avenue.

"This area has gone from 'you stand outside and get shot' to you can be outside having BBQs and being social and you don't have to worry," said Sullivan, who hopes to attend Red River College next. "The community has helped out lots."

Lord Selkirk Park was once a classic 1960s public housing project -- well-intentioned, but bleak.

Home, decrepit home

Joe, a retired house painter, is wedged into a corner between the window and his television by a roomful of trash -- food containers, dirty clothes, mangy chairs, saggy boxes and bags.

"I'm living in a dump," said the 75-year-old, who still has an accent from his native Hungary. "I can't find anything better."

Joe has been living in the Pritchard Avenue rooming house with at least three other men for more than two years. He has a bath once a week in the grimy communal washroom, fries an egg or two on his hotplate and, stooped and slow-moving, clambers over his recliner to get into his debris-filled bedroom. He pays $350 a month.

Asked whether he could clean up a little, he said, "What for?"

An end to the perpetual welfare trap?

Bringing back a discarded government program could save taxpayers millions in health-care and bureaucracy costs and dramatically shrink poverty, just as it did in Dauphin almost 40 years ago.

The problem is, even the province's left-leaning NDP government likely doesn't have the political will to use it.

That was the feeling Tuesday at a standing-room-only lecture about a hot public-policy idea -- a guaranteed annual income that would replace welfare.

It's an idea with roots in Manitoba. Nearly 40 years ago, Dauphin was the site of an experiment on the effects of a guaranteed income. Every low-income person in town, including the working poor and people not eligible for welfare, got a top-up to ensure a basic level of income.

The problems many neighbourhoods face seem overpowering — but some refuse to abandon hope

DILLY Knol easily lists the problems facing her William Whyte neighbourhood.

Addiction’s the big one, she says, followed closely by poverty, lack of safety, gangs, poor housing and limited employment opportunities.

If you spend an hour in her cramped Andrew Street Family Centre office, a bleak picture emerges of a Winnipeg community under siege. Knol, the centre’s executive director, is blunt.

“People don’t have any money. The addictions have gotten really bad. The pills, the crack — it’s gotten really bad. It seems to totally overpower. They love their kids, but they love crack more.”

Divided we stand: as middle class shrinks, gap between Winnipeg’s rich and poor widens

Steve Swartz slowly opens the battered wooden door of his legendary Spence Street rooming house. He blinks into the sun, greeting two strangers cautiously.

Life has been hard on the 49-year-old. He's been on disability for five years, he says, and never expects to hold another job. Welfare pays $285 toward his $385 monthly rent. He has two rooms, no private bathroom. Swartz has to scramble to make up the rent shortage and feed himself.

He lives in the formerly grand home of the late John W. Dafoe, once editor of the Winnipeg Free Press. There's a plaque in the shaggy yard reminding passersby of Dafoe's legacy.

"I get pissed off," says Swartz, who once had his own autobody business and a ticket as a heavy-machine operator.

Economic inequality at root of Winnipeg General Strike

When the workers of Winnipeg went on strike, the newspapers went on the offensive: "Bolshevism invades Canada," screamed the New York Times.

But for most of the men and women who streamed out of the warehouses and onto the streets, the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike was not an exercise in ideology. Instead, its roots grew from a yawning chasm of economic inequality that had become too impossible to ignore.

When spring came that year and the snow melted into the mucky streets of the North End, the city was restless. The world was gasping for breath in the wake of the Great War.

Soldiers returned home from the trenches looking for work, but there was little to be had. Those who could find work gathered in fraternal halls to cry out in frustration at wages that limped behind a soaring cost of living.

Why you should care about the gap

More than morals should make you care about the growing income gap. Here's why:

Democracy erodes.In their much-talked-about new book Why Nations Fail, M.I.T. economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard political scientist James Robinson found that nations with huge disparities of wealth tend toward dictatorships and kleptocracies. Civil unrest is more common, as is profound mistrust of government, reduced economic and technical innovation and crime.

And the reverse is true -- countries thrive when their civil, political and economic institutions are inclusive and equal.

History lessons and hope

The Free Press asked a number of community leaders to comment on the growing gap between rich and poor. Is it getting better or worse? What has changed since the 1919 General Strike?

Lloyd Axworthypresident, University of Winnipeg

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 was an event of cataclysmic importance, reported around the world as a forerunner of revolution in the post-First World War western world. It was a violent confrontation between class and ethnic forces, an epic struggle between haves and have-nots.