Could new bylaws solve Rubin Block issue?

South Osborne

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/06/2023 (938 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It has twice been damaged by fire, and was once the scene of a murder.

The past several years have been rough on the building at the southeast corner of Osborne and Morley, known as the Rubin Block. One of approximately 685 “problem properties” in the city, it is vacant, neglected, and in decay.

Even if the property’s owner hasn’t shown any love to 270 Morley Ave., that doesn’t mean no one has. In January 2021, a “S.O. Resident” wrote what was described as a love letter to the building, blew the letter up to roughly 12 times the size of a sheet of paper, and pasted it to the building’s boarded-up façade. It was painted over a day later.

The Rubin Block was designed by influential Winnipeg-based architect Max Blankstein and built in 1914. Its 22 units – 19 apartments, and three retail spaces which originally housed a branch of the Merchants Bank of Canada, and shops for a barber and tailor – were fully occupied.

Area residents would like to see life return to the site. The community has shown tremendous support for finding a new use for the building. In 2017, more than 100 people packed a room at the Fort Rouge Leisure Centre hoping for information on its redevelopment, only to find out that there was little the city could do to force the owner’s hand.

In recent years, the number of vacant buildings around the city has grown dramatically, each one posing a fire hazard and an invitation to vandalism, or worse. In 2021, the city imposed an “empty building fee” equal to one per cent of a property’s most recent assessed value to be paid each year, in hope that it might help combat the issue.

This did nothing to change the Rubin Block’s status, and it remains on the National Trust for Canada’s Top 10 list of endangered buildings.

City council is again considering imposing tougher rules on vacant properties and two proposals in particular.

One would tighten security requirements, at the expense of property owners. The other would allow the director of the property and development department to issue demolition permits for vacant buildings without any plan for future development, and without public hearings.

Could either of these proposals solve the drawn-out conundrum of the Rubin Block? Maybe, if the goal is simply to have it torn down and redeveloped.

However, inadequate incentives or pressure from the city for property owners to maintain irreplaceable pieces of history means many re purposely being left to rot. Even if protected by a heritage designation, once they are deemed a “risk of harm to the health and safety of persons or property,” refusing to lift a demolition permit is already considered “undue prejudice to the owner.”

A Facebook group called Rubin Block Advocates was set up to prevent the building from being torn down. As of this writing, it had 437 followers, including the mysterious “SO resident.” The two proposals city council is considering likely won’t appease them.