Spence residents call on city to help clean up lingering rubble

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/01/2024 (590 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Spence neighbourhood residents are pleading with the city, asking it to push forward the clean up of piles of rubble from fire-ravaged properties.

Cheryl Martens can point out four of what she calls “ski slopes” — snow-covered mounds of remains from buildings that have burned or been demolished in the past two years — in the central Winnipeg neighbourhood: a former Sherbrook Street apartment block, two properties on Furby Street and one on Sargent Avenue.

While the Furby and Sargent blazes happened in the past year, 694 Sherbrook St. burned to the ground in February 2022.

Martens and other Spence residents have taken to writing letters to city leadership asking that they take initiative in cleaning up the mess.

“(Our neighbourhood) has problems with landlords who just sort of disregard the buildings and properties once they have them,” she said Friday. “We thought, let’s start with the simple things: let’s get the rubble cleared from places that have just been knocked down and are left.”

The Sherbrook Street site in particular has been the centre of a years-long dispute.

In December 2022, the City of Winnipeg issued an order to the companies that own the site to clean it by Feb. 15, 2023. A lawyer representing Access Credit Union, which holds a mortgage on the site, appealed the order.

In September 2023, a city staff report suggested the city has the power to clean debris from sites and then charge property owners for the labour, but said it would be a costly process and did not recommend any action.

Amid the back and forth argument, Spence residents suffer the consequences, both from dangerous hazardous waste left for years and the impact of living in a neighbourhood pockmarked by piles of garbage, Martens said.

“It’s very dispiriting, disheartening, it drags you down,” she said. “Sometimes, people who live in our neighbourhood are experiencing poverty and other issues.

“It’s very dispiriting, disheartening, it drags you down.”–Cheryl Martens

“If you’re walking down the street, and there’s buildings that are falling down around you that you see every day and they’re there for years, I think it takes away from your feeling of living in a good place or wanting to live there.”

Coun. Cindy Gilroy (Daniel McIntyre) has been calling for an aggressive approach to rubble clean-up for several years. She said the city is seeing more and more burned-out buildings abandoned by owners and it will likely be left forced to take action eventually.

“My fear, and I think the city’s fear, is that some of these people will just let their properties go to the city anyways, because of the cost to clean them up.”

“My fear, and I think the city’s fear, is that some of these people will just let their properties go to the city anyways, because of the cost to clean them up.”–Coun. Cindy Gilroy

Gilroy would like to see the city enforce a reserve fund for property owners of vacant buildings that would come from permit fees and would go to possible clean-up costs, and forgive tipping fees (the cost of disposing waste) in communities where the cost of the clean-up would be higher than the property value of the lot.

It’s a “huge cost” to pay for such clean-ups, she added, and the province does have jurisdiction to get involved because of the health and safety hazards of demolished buildings.

“I think already, the inner city doesn’t get the new and shiny things, we see newer neighbourhoods being developed, and being developed with newer and shiny parks and community centres and stuff,” Gilroy said.

“So, it takes a lot more work for us to keep our community looking and feeling safe. When you start to see piles of rubble, it leads to unsafety, it leads to a place where you don’t want to live. It leads you to (ask): do our governments care about us, that they’re allowing this to happen?”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.