The rise, fall and rise of Winnipeg’s downtown

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/12/2016 (3203 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s downtown in the 1970s and ’80s had a special feel through the holiday season.

As a kid, I fondly recall the lights, sounds and even smells of a bustling Portage Avenue, where Eaton’s and the Bay anchored a storied winter wonderland with vibrant window displays that would draw people from all over the province — especially on Saturdays, the dominant shopping day of the week.

For many Winnipeggers, the old toy departments and elaborate Christmas decorations remain cherished memories of a bygone era. However, as a kid, I did not realize the window dressings also masked a bigger set of issues facing a proud, but increasingly divided, prairie city. The rise, fall and eventual rebound of Winnipeg is marked by a number of interrelated events and great people who have led us to today, when our current growth trend is, perhaps, more optimistic than ever before.

The lustre of downtown began to tarnish during the 1970s, accelerating rapidly through the ’90s as more businesses and people turned outward for goods and services. At the same time, an increasing number of our best and brightest minds fled to the burgeoning economies of Alberta and B.C. in hopes of finding jobs and a better future. The old line from people visiting Winnipeg after long periods away would be, “Nothing has changed since I left 20 years ago.” The outcome was a sustained period of urban decline marked by slow, stagnant growth and increasing outflows of people.

In fact, Winnipeg would suffer many years in which more people left than arrived. Many of us recall the headlines about store closures, increasing vacancies and the social upheaval within downtown and nearby inner-city neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, local residents worked tirelessly to take back ownership of their communities and address mounting problems, such as the spike in arson that garnered international attention in the late 1990s.

Winnipeg’s era of decline gave rise to an important set of government interventions that sought to inject an economic boost into the downtown and inner city. Beginning in 1980, and lasting for a period of more than 30 years, all three levels of government contributed to a range of programs with each promising to cure an ailing city. I refer to this period as the era of desperation planning, marked by strong public subsidies to lure business and people back to Winnipeg and the downtown, mostly by throwing money at the problem.

Often the mantra of cities such as Winnipeg was to compete against each other to attract investment by offering the best set of incentives, forgetting that on their own, buildings and cash would not end poverty and despair. However, in this desperation, Winnipeg would retool and launch an ambitious set of initiatives and policies that began to offer communities hope. Some of the best examples were those grounded in the grassroots, offering a bottom-up approach to local capacity building. This would seed the growth of many of today’s very successful neighbourhood organizations — now six strong and scattered throughout the inner city — that continue to make a difference.

During this period, it was also critical to address two sets of opposing but strongly related issues that included not only supporting the restructuring of the downtown economy but also assisting the 30-plus diverse neighbourhoods of the inner city.

To put this in context, in 1986, the inner-city population was 132,000 people or roughly 22 per cent of the city’s population. The population plummeted to a low of 119,000 in 2001, before rebounding in 2011 to just over 127,000 and growing steadily since. However, it was the level of poverty, unemployment and other characteristics that defined the inner city’s ongoing need for additional supports.

The challenge downtown was equally as complex, as sustaining a strong employment base and rebranding the declining retail and entertainment sectors while growing a stronger residential base remained complicated and costly.

For example, the downtown population in 1980 was barely over 10,000. On our proudest corner of Portage and Main, we had embarked on building barricades and filling in the empty lots (some would say at great cost). Today, we are in a much better position, and we can even dream of closing in on 20,000 residents in the not-too-distant future.

 

As well, we’ve had close to $3 billion in investment over the last 10 or so years on more than 100 major projects that brought people, business and fun back to the downtown. This tremendous growth in our downtown and the rise in private investment is the result of many important current economic trends, but our success owes some debt to the past 35 years of local interventions that sought to find the right mix of incentives while empowering community members and businesses to succeed.

Our current success did not come easy, as the early 2000s remained less than kind while we struggled with our self-image still bruised by the loss of the Jets, a stagnant economy, slow growth patterns and a tarnished national perception of murder, mayhem and mosquitoes prevailed. For those of us close to the action, a powerful undercurrent was building, buoyed by a strong group of resilient community leaders whose contributions began to make positive change evident. In some ways, they too began their own set of desperation plans, but driven by the goal of community wellness.

Leaders such as Harry Lehotsky stood up for the community and made a real difference. I miss him dearly and his tenacious character of taking on the establishment and looking for ways to make his adopted community better. The Free Press rightly honoured his legacy in a piece last month (The hope Harry built, Nov. 19)  a touching look at the contribution of one man with a dream to better his community. It was his early efforts and those before and after him that helped change the present course, which is now pointing us toward a brighter pathway and one of which I am sure Harry would approve.

Countless community leaders, government officials and local entrepreneurs continue to make Winnipeg Canada’s most resilient city. We give to charity, we help our neighbours and we never give up. Not surprisingly, the past 10 years marked perhaps the most significant turnaround in our city’s history since the 1920s. This change has reached far and wide, including an explosion in suburban growth, a complete restructuring of the retail landscape and an ongoing renaissance of our downtown.

In addition, our population has grown, strengthened by strong international migration that has added more than 100,000 people to the city. It is also among our new citizens that we see many new leaders emerging who will build on the strong prairie spirit of hope and possibility.

In the end, our reliance on desperation planning has shifted somewhat as our city grows and the inner city and downtown prosper. No, we have not ended poverty, nor have we addressed all the issues that have divided us. Nevertheless, today we can say that Winnipeg is a better place than it has been in a very long time. So over the holiday season, let us continue to remember and thank the many heroes like Harry who came to this city with a dream and changed lives and communities for decades to come.

Jino Distasio is the director of the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg.