Granite-adjacent housing project: Right idea, wrong place

Why is the Granite Curling Club’s parking lot ideal for high-rise development?

I recently saw the huge tracts of industrial land, within city limits, being redeveloped for the Water Tower District project.

This project has great potential, but as Teresa Cwik, president of the South Saint Boniface Residents Association mentions, it may lack crucial underlying infrastructure to manage the increased population and traffic. It’s a huge development without assurances of hospitals, schools and first responders to support it.

Cwik mentions that this isn’t a problem specific to this Winnipeg development.

She’s right.

Near home, we passed the Granite Curling Club, Mostyn Park, and the “disputed” parking lot.

The city currently owns this area and hopes to put a large affordable housing building on it. This is already a dense area with considerable housing. Further, the Granite Curling Club was developed to provide sporting amenities to the nearby neighbourhoods.

Over the years, the ownership of the club and its lot went back and forth between the club and the city, due to cost and management issues like construction and economic downturns. The city has collaborated with the club to support this community amenity for 113 years.

According to Coun. Evan Duncan, the Municipal Board’s ruling that the city and curling club must collaborate to figure out workable parking arrangements, is unacceptable. In one interview, Duncan indicated that perhaps the city could no longer accommodate the Granite Curling Club as a future leaseholder.

After over a century working together, this city representative doesn’t support collaboration. Further, he doesn’t think this amenity, with its needed parking lot, has value.

I’m not a curler. I have no stake in this, but I live near this area and walk it frequently. I was stunned to hear that a 113-year-old sports facility, created to support this community, was no longer an acceptable option to some.

While some luxury apartments line the riverbanks, this land also shifts and erodes, so it was surprising that this was seen as the optimal new high-rise location. Further, the gentle slope down to the river behind the curling club provides a great access point to the river trail. I’ve seen curlers and other neighbours lope down the hill as I walk on the river, and long admired that historic view.

If the city must locate a high-rise in this already high-density area, full of apartments and houses served by a small residential road, one other option remains.

It could move the building next door. In the several years I’ve lived here, there hasn’t been access to Mostyn Park. It’s always housed a homeless encampment or the remains of one. It’s a green space that’s inaccessible to most in the neighbourhood due to safety concerns. The riverside trail isn’t safe in warm weather. It’s full of litter year-round.

The curling club fronts the same residential street as the park and often deals with vandalism. The nearby daycare must hire security for pick up and drop off.

What if Mostyn Park were designated for this housing? This wouldn’t reduce green space access, because most residents have no access to this park due to encampments and litter. The curling club could maintain its historic river views and access, along with its parking. It could continue to offer its amenities — curling in winter, and a popular outdoor beer garden in summer — to the neighbourhood.

If using green space to build this affordable housing is abhorrent, perhaps the city should instead prioritize reuse of the many abandoned buildings or empty lots throughout the neighbourhood and throughout the city instead.

We need affordable housing. However, just as Cwik said, we need it in a place with enough infrastructure to support it.

Building new affordable, high-density housing right next to the Granite doesn’t create a bigger road in front to support the increased traffic. It doesn’t offer new sewers, better inner-city schools or bigger community clubs.

Instead, it boosts density in one of the most densely populated parts of Winnipeg. It puts more affordable housing for those in difficult circumstances in the riding that is already among the poorest in Canada.

If one consults a map, including Duncan’s ward, some parts of Winnipeg don’t have nearly the number of affordable units that areas like West Broadway already contain. Instead, perhaps consider the cost-benefit.

Everyone deserves affordable housing, but maybe this high-rise doesn’t have to be built riverside in the centre of Winnipeg.

Joanne Seiff, a Winnipeg author, has been contributing opinions and analysis to the Free Press since 2009.