Making sure her ‘hood is heard

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/10/2010 (5800 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Rae Butcher sold her house on the south side of the city and moved into her new husband’s house in the beaten-up heart of the old North End, she didn’t expect it to be the way it’s turned out.

By living the experience, she ended up writing about it in a way that drew attention from the mayor and the media.

It all started with a suggestion.

She was at a family birthday party in St. Vital last August, regaling everyone with accounts from her notorious neighbourhood, when someone told her what to do with her stories.

Stick them in a blog. And make sure she emailed a link to the mayor and city councillors.

She calls it “A Day In The Hood,” and it always begins the same way.

“I live in the North End of Winnipeg. This is a blog about life on my street. It shows issues what I, and my neighbours, deal with just on our one city block in the North End. Take the time to read the entire blog. See what is actually happening on a daily basis on my city block. If you have something to add about your block in the hood, place a comment in the latest blog entry or email butcher@raespace.com.”

What follows, on the occasions she writes, is not only street-level real, it’s articulate, probing, educational and even entertaining.

By the end of August, Sam Katz was calling, telling her he liked her blog.

And then he asked for her vote.

On her blog she reported it this way.

“He called to tell me he is working with the Winnipeg Police on a plan to make the North End a safer place. Ya, Ya, like we haven’t heard that before. But he seemed sincere. No, wait a minute, isn’t there an election coming up?”

The University of Manitoba grad and anthropology major has a natural journalist’s knack for asking the right questions and telling her short stories with catchy headlines.

“If you see my stolen van let me know,” reads one. “Party duplex at it again,” reads another.

But the blog is less about serious violent crime and more about the everyday annoyances of neighbourhood noise, cleaning up graffiti and what really grabs her:

Garbage issues.

She tells stories about late-night truck-driving garbage dumpers who treat the North End like a landfill site and her back lane in particular as a garbage dump. But when she got a truck licence number and reported it to the bylaw enforcement department she was treated to more garbage.

Bylaw enforcement doesn’t have access to the MPI database to track the licence plate. Only police do.

So Rae told the mayor about that.

“I told him the city bylaw department is currently just a facade. He agreed that the city bylaw department should be able to get the information they need from the police.

“Then he told me he was going to take care of my particular ‘ticket’ personally. He was going to ‘personally make sure’ it was taken care of. The mayor said it was just a shame that a citizen reports an illegal act and nothing is getting done about it.”

Katz never did get back to her.

Rae learned something else about her back-lane AutoBins that I never knew. There are 5,400 of them in the city and there’s a provision in the private garbage contract to have them sanitized.

“Hello Rae,” one city manager wrote in reply to her request for garbage info. “The AutoBins are sanitized when requested by a resident or when we have removed something particularly odiferous (like an animal). There has never been a schedule to sanitize all 5,400 bins and the vast majority have never been cleaned as they don’t smell. We really enjoy your blog as we share many of the same feelings about AutoBins that you do.

“Keep up the good work!”

There are times when keeping up the good work gets to her, though, as she wrote late last month.

“The more I open my eyes to the goings on in my neighbourhood, the more I wonder how much I really want to know. What I do want is a neighbourhood where it is against the law to sell drugs, and actions are taken. I want a neighbourhood where prostitutes do not work openly along my street and the streets around me. I want a neighbourhood where people from other parts of the city do not use my back lane for a dumping ground for items they no longer want or need. I want a neighbourhood where people have respect for themselves and others.”

But there was some good, late-breaking blog news to report from A Day In The Hood. Rae is supposed to be getting her AutoBin cleaned today.

And she’s voting for Judy.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca