Where is easy street? Survey of city’s richest routes may surprise

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This article was published 08/06/2013 (4526 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Here’s a fun parlour game to play.

Guess which are the wealthiest streets in Winnipeg.

Wellington Crescent? Park Boulevard?

They’re too obvious — and probably too public for the most discriminating wealth.

Time’s up… the richest street in Winnipeg is Chataway Boulevard — actually it’s the entire little enclave from Park Boulevard to Edgeland Boulevard, from Wellington Crescent to Nanton Boulevard.

That’s the determination of Canadian Business magazine, which worked with Environics Analytics to come up with an amazingly detailed list of the five richest neighbourhoods in every province in the country.

On the south side of Wellington Crescent just west of the Rady Jewish Community Centre, the Chataway neighbourhood is the epitome of old-Tuxedo wealth and taste.

Canadian Business and Environics determined the enclave’s 138 households have the highest average net worth — $3,341,436 — the highest average household income — $612,415 — and the highest average home value — $844,484 — in the city.

But there’s also juicy info about their relative taste in wine, predisposition for European travel and how the street voted — 66 of the households enjoyed imported wine and 79 of them were in Europe over the past year.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised not too many of the good people of Chataway Boulevard neighbourhood voted NDP — only six per cent. And, because this is old-money Winnipeg, they are good patrons of the arts and they attended 53 symphony, opera or ballet events in the past year. (Their neighbours immediately south of Nanton attended 72 such highbrow affairs.)

The four other wealthiest enclaves of Winnipeg are all clustered around the same part of the city: the southern half of the Chataway enclave from Nanton to Corydon Avenue; and three other areas just to the southwest centred around Bower Boulevard, Litchfield Boulevard and Colchester Bay.

Mark Brown, the managing editor of Canadian Business, said this is the first time such a list has been put together. With the help of Environics’ rich database and statistical modelling they’ve come up with some interesting lifestyle assumptions.

“Everyone wants to know how the other half lives,” Brown said.

Working with real estate agents in the neighbourhoods, they got inside of some of the homes in those neighbourhoods that are on the market.

“I was amazed at the number of homes in these areas that have a suit of armour sitting at the front door,” said Brown. “I have not quite figured that out yet.”

Brown said it was surprising to note across the board, no matter what the voting preference of the community at large was, the richest neighbourhoods almost all leaned right, with NDP representation in the low single-digit percentages.

And while the largest cities — Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal — have the highest net worth and most expensive homes in the richest neighbourhoods, there were some pockets of outlier wealth in neighbourhoods such as Halifax’s Ridgewood Drive and Furdale, Sask., on the southern edge of Saskatoon.

It’s interesting to note the long-held belief Winnipeggers support the arts more than most may actually be true.

In one of the richest neighbourhoods in the country — the Park Lane/Bridle Path area of North Toronto — where the average net worth is $ 16,301,254 and the average home value is $1,604,857, they don’t go to theatre or ballet any more often than the old Tuxedo crowd.

Their 122 households attended 53 events — the same number as 138 households in the Chataway neighbourhood in Winnipeg.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

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