Fiddling while Winnipeg burns . . . again

There is a small white two-storey house on McPhillips Street north of Selkirk Avenue — if it was being described in a police or fire department news release, they’d generalize about its address, saying it was “in the 700 block of McPhillips.”

The house is empty, but not strictly speaking, abandoned: someone, presumably its owner, regularly comes to fix the kicked-in front door, and has barricaded that door — and all the ground-floor windows — with two-by-fours.

Just as regularly, though, the front door is kicked in again, two-by-fours or not. When there’s fresh snow on the front stairs, it shows that only a day or so goes by before someone’s back inside. You don’t look too long: you don’t want whoever it is in there to catch you staring.

In the evolution of failing properties that exists right now in Winnipeg, the next stage of the lifecycle may well be a house fire. Just because that seems to be what happens, and it’s what has already happened to two garages and another vacant house in the neighbourhood, all within two blocks of each other.

You just see it coming. Decay, empty, burn, repeat.

Like the fire on Wednesday at the vacant Manwin Hotel — you could see it coming, after the hotel’s residents were turfed out for fire-safety reasons over a year ago. One could have also predicted the fire that burned down the Sutherland Hotel, nearly a year ago to the day of the Manwin fire. The Sutherland burned, yet 12 months later, nothing has been learned.

The city can act swiftly because someone’s had the temerity to put a face on a boulevard tree, but not effectively, it seems, on buildings primed to burn on major city thoroughfares. They apparently can’t act as houses and commercial buildings spend years sliding downhill towards their seemingly inevitable end.

Properties fall into disrepair, reach a point where they are no longer inhabitable, burn and then stay as rubble for lengthy periods of time. The Anco Lumber building on Logan Avenue burned in August 2023. After several more fires in the rubble, the site is finally being cleared. Down the street from the aforementioned McPhillips house, another burned property stood derelict, with holes through the walls and roof, for over a year until it was torn down and hauled away this week.

We can’t just accept this as the Winnipeg way. If something clearly isn’t working, you don’t just keep doing it and hope that things will turn out better the next time. (Spoiler alert — it doesn’t turn out better the next time.)

Fires damage and endanger nearby property owners, harm neighbourhoods and business owners, endanger Winnipeg’s overstretched firefighters and leave a moonscape along major city routes, sometimes for years.

It is time for the city to become far more proactive and far less reactive. After fires, we hear about the various methods the city has tried, but see very few signs that those methods have succeeded or will succeed.

There has to be a mechanism or legislation that will let the city step in far sooner — and far more decisively. After all, one of the things neighbours tell the Free Press repeatedly after fires is that they saw it coming. That they reported vandalism, break-ins and even small fires in the properties that have since burned. And that nothing was done.

And if a small white house burns on McPhillips, we will raise that fact in a future editorial. Because this same story plays out far too many times, in exactly the same way.

You can see it coming.