Is a downtown fix even possible?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/06/2024 (449 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Commercially stagnant, decaying esthetically, and rife with social ills.”

That’s how local writer Larry Krotz described downtown Winnipeg in 1983. It could arguably describe most of downtown Winnipeg today, except for a few brave pockets of wealthy folks hunkered down in fancy condos scattered here and there.

And a new Core Area Initiative the city wants just won’t fix it.

As a reporter back in the early 1980s, I covered the announcements of the Core Area Initiatives 1 and 2, Portage Place, and The Forks. We journalists muzzled ourselves after the Portage Place newser, thinking darkly “oh, yeah, a bunch more retail shopping, that’ll fix poverty and crime.” We dutifully kept our opinions to ourselves and meekly filed our boosterist copy.

Mind you, we couldn’t figure out what would fix it. But any fool, we thought, could see this was just a way for developers to build retail sales monuments of brick and mortar that would accomplish nothing in the way of social change.

And it didn’t.

The first Core Area Initiative launched in 1981. After two five-year CAIs (and $196 million) that spawned one massive white elephant Portage Place, sparked a sprawling Forks, a gussied-up Exchange District relabeled the “Entertainment District”, and an eventual baseball park, hockey arena and Museum of Human Rights thrown in, in increasingly desperate, costly efforts to paper over the ugly poverty and violence, downtown remains rotten. Poverty is worse, crime escalating.

We know our Indigenous population suffers poverty and violence hugely disproportionate to the rest of the population, and downtown residents are now overwhelmingly Indigenous. Their migration from the area north of the CP Rail Yards began as a trickle back in the 1960s and became a flood by the 1980s. Until then, their embarrassing economic condition had remained largely invisible to businesses and shoppers downtown.

Lip service in Core 1 and 2 promised education, job training, help out of poverty.

Didn’t happen.

The $80-million Portage Place, announced in 1983, was built and running by 1987. Almost instantly, it began its devolution into a hangout for the jobless, homeless and drug-addicted.

Conservative cabinet minister Jake Epp announced The Forks in 1987. I was struck by the preening Epp ignoring the work and vision by Liberal Lloyd Axworthy that had created the concept during the first CAI. During Epp’s newser, I spotted Axworthy standing quietly at the back of the room, and remembered walking the abandoned railyard with him during Core 1, while he told me about the dream he had for the place.

It always comes down to politics and power, I thought.

The Forks merged corporately with North Portage in 1994. And though The Forks attracts more than four million visitors annually, by 2023, the merged partnership managed to turn a pocket change profit of $575,322.

In 2014, The Forks hatched a giddy plan to spur high rise condos surrounding its campus. Ground floors would house yet more shops and restaurants. The Free Press joyously reported “the tens of millions spent will add a 24-hour component of people living in The Forks area. The amount of housing going up won’t spoil the public nature of the park. However, enough is going up to possibly trigger some additional housing beside Union Station and Earl’s, because Mahatma Gandhi Way is likely to see a heck of a lot more foot traffic.”

Didn’t happen.

In March 2023, Mark Chipman’s True North Real Estate Development bargained to pay less than $35 million for Portage Place (two large private developers had bought, then dumped it over the years), promising housing, health care campuses, a grocery store, recreational areas. This would create, said Chipman, “social and economic impact by building a sense of community-mindedness.”

By 2024, he had to bring into the plan the Indigenous development group into whose lap the Bay building had landed, to share costs and seek government bailouts. Chipman’s $35-million bargain needs some $650 million, plus tax increment financing, plus housing support from the federal government.

Work is supposed to start in 2025. Without hundreds of millions flushed into it from — oh, gee, maybe a new Core Area Initiative, I’m not optimistic.

A few upscale condos have sprouted along Waterfront Drive, a few heritage buildings converted to condos for folks comfortably liquid financially. The Bay and Bank of Montreal have been gifted to Indigenous groups promising a museum at the bank and housing in the Bay.

But the poverty and violence just gets worse. The Centennial Concert Hall complex now locks its doors and parkade entrances 24-7. Transit buses carry armed security. Recently, the Free Press reported a stabbing murder, an off-duty police officer the victim of a random attempted carjacking, and a knife-wielding suspect who’d run into traffic and threatened people shot by police, all on a single Tuesday.

Another Core Area Initiative, a bunch more bricks and mortar thrown into Portage Place, will not fix any of this.

It didn’t happen in 1981, or 1987, or 2014, and yet another Core Area Initiative ain’t gonna make it happen now. It would pump hundreds of millions into the pockets of developers. The only change — one of those developers is Indigenous.

Well, maybe they can figure out how to fix it, having entered into the mainstream of politics and power.

The rest of us sure haven’t.

Judy Waytiuk is an old warhorse of a Winnipeg journalist who’s seen it all over the decades, and is now terminally jaded.