The need for green in Winnipeg’s West End

I grew up in West End Winnipeg, on a neighbourly street situated between Wellington Avenue and Notre Dame. And while my neighbours and I enjoyed the glorious shade of what even then were mature boulevard elms, we had virtually no nearby parks, unless you counted treeless schoolyards and the old city dump as green spaces.

There were no nearby splash pads, but we did have a well-used outdoor pool at Sargent Park, where we could cool off on hot summer days for a whopping entrance fee of just 50 cents.

Personally, I wasn’t all that badly affected by the lack of city nature, because my grandfather, a railway machinist, had the foresight to build a small log cabin on a wilderness lake just outside the Whiteshell. Some years after they married, my mother and father did the same. So, from the time I was able to crawl, I was lucky enough to spend a good part of my summers at the lake, surrounded by black spruce, jack pine, poplars and birch trees, and a rich variety of wildlife.

My contemporaries weren’t so lucky. Most seven- to 12-year-olds near me faced a half-hour to 40-minute walk to the nearest green space or pool — a trek forbidden by our parents unless at least five us were going. As a result, most West End kids played in the backyard, assuming they had one.

I don’t think any of us felt particularly hard done by, because we didn’t know any better. But I often wonder how much richer our lives might have been if we’d been able to run down the street and play in a grove of trees in a small but beautiful park.

You’d think that things would have changed for the better in my childhood neighbourhood, especially given what we now know about the health benefits kids derive from contact with nature,. But, as it turns out, kids in the West End have just as little in the way of green space now, as we did some 60 years ago.

So, no surprise that local residents are up in arms about the loss of a small green space on Sherburn Street which the city has, in its “wisdom,” targeted as one of the locations for a supportive housing development. This, when there are dozens of abandoned buildings in the West End and adjacent neighbourhoods that could be torn down or retrofitted to do the same.

It’s even more outrageous when you consider that a recent survey on energy poverty in the Daniel Mac ward, which in includes the West End, Spence and West Broadway neighbourhoods, suggests that the lack of green space is having a negative impact on the physical and mental health of residents.

That’s because there are a greater number of lower-income renters and homeowners who simply can’t afford air conditioning. That, combined with the lack of green space and the decimation of the public tree canopy — more than 3,000 public trees lost in the Daniel Mac ward in just five years — has dialled up the heat.

Which is only made worse by a lack of free, public cooling centres like libraries and the closure of local pools.

Add to that predictions of more prolonged and intense summer heat waves thanks to climate change, and you have a city population at serious risk.

And make no mistake — heat waves do kill people. In fact, an estimated 12,000 people in the United States are killed every year by heat waves, more than are killed by any other extreme weather event, from hurricanes and tornadoes to wildfires. Those are numbers that will likely increase across North America as heat waves intensify.

And by and large it’s poor people, many with underlying health conditions like diabetes, heart disease and asthma, who will suffer most.

So why, in god’s name, is the city considering the destruction of even a small green space in the West End? Why isn’t council taking steps, not only to preserve and enhance what the neighbourhood has, but finding innovative ways to increase the number of parks that would help residents cope with the heat? Green spaces which, in a sustainable city, would be no more than three or four city blocks from every home in the neighbourhood.

While it’s true the city is doing its best to replace the thousands of trees lost in the ward, council needs to stop obsessing about wider roads and put serious money into green planning, especially in denser, low income neighbourhoods. Because if they don’t, they’re essentially saying that the kids and families in those neighbourhoods don’t really matter.

And as someone who grew up there, I can tell you this — they do matter. A lot.

Erna Buffie is a writer and filmmaker. Read more @ https://www.ernabuffie.com/