Special place

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/12/2011 (5037 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Osborne Village is one of Winnipeg’s special places, a pedestrian and residential hub where people enjoy strolling, dining and hanging out. The city needs more places like Osborne Village.

Unfortunately, a development proposal by Shoppers Drug Mart, if approved by city council, would diminish the neighbourhood. The chain store at the southwest corner of Roslyn Road and Osborne Street wants to expand by demolishing Movie Village, a unique and popular movie-rental store, and a neighbouring restaurant, Vi-Ann, that is equally adored by its patrons.

These two businesses are not necessarily indispensable, but their relatively small spaces are needed to maintain the proper scale for the street. In their place, Shoppers is proposing to create a new parking lot, while adding 7,600 square feet of retail space to its store, in addition to a partial second floor of offices and storage space.

It sounds an awful lot like a big box store with a parking lot, which would be just fine almost anywhere else in the city, but not in Osborne Village. The city went through a similar experience several years when Canada Safeway proposed an expansion that was out of scale with the neighbourhood. To its credit, Safeway met with residents and scaled down its plans.

There was a time when any development in Winnipeg was considered good development, but not anymore, and certainly not in Osborne Village.