Crumbling foundation Inner city has the highest rates of poverty, lowest housing stock and increasing pressure to help people without any home By: Malak Abas Posted: 7:59 PM CST Thursday, Dec. 29, 2022 Last Modified: 7:29 AM CST Friday, Dec. 30, 2022 Updates

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This article was published 28/12/2022 (727 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brian Pincott lives in a home on Spence Street. He loves downtown Winnipeg — he was a city councillor in Calgary for a decade before moving here three and a half years ago and was immediately struck by what he calls some of the best “urban bones” in the country.

“We have an amazing mix of heritage, of facilities, we’ve got an amazing urban environment in the downtown on two rivers,” he says.

But while he’s enjoying the beauty of the city’s core, he also laments what it could be.

“It is an environment that is hostile to me living there,” he says. “It is an environment that is hostile to me walking to a shop.”

When asked what he’d like to see change, the list is long: investments in housing, in active transport, in community supports to make that housing successful.

“The focus has been more around the big projects, more around business and less around people,” he says. “The big signature projects, as opposed to what livability actually means.”

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Housing in the core is as diverse as anywhere in Winnipeg, ranging from expensive, high-rise riverfront condos to low-income, subsidized rental apartments. It also has the city’s lowest amount of housing stock. Plus there are issues surrounding the unhoused, those literally and figuratively left out in the cold.

The area has struggled for decades to increase the number of residents. Higher construction costs play a role, but so does the lack of amenities, such as grocery stores. And there’s fears about personal safety, real and perceived.

A 2021 Downtown Winnipeg BIZ report states one of the greatest barriers to bringing people back downtown is the perception of it being unsafe. In fact, the study notes that during the pandemic, crime reported downtown dropped 31 per cent. And even pre-pandemic, Statistics Canada data show the number of violent crimes per 100,000 Winnipeggers dropped from 1,623 in 1998 to 1,483 in 2019.

The area has struggled for decades to increase the number of residents. Higher construction costs play a role, but so does the lack of amenities, such as grocery stores. And there’s fears about personal safety, real and perceived.

This perception, the report speculates, could be “fueled in part by widespread social stigma surrounding homelessness, mental health and substance use.”

However, in the 15 years prior to the pandemic, Winnipeg’s downtown was making strides in creating a neighbourhood that didn’t just offer attractions for suburbanites, but amenities for its inhabitants too, University of Winnipeg urban geography Prof. Jino Distasio explains. That progress came to a halt once the pandemic hit.

“We saw billions of dollars invested in the downtown, we were firing on all cylinders, there was a lot of hoopla, a lot of a sense of euphoria that downtown Winnipeg had turned this mystical corner,” he says. “All that seemed to come undone.”

Now, Distasio says, the city has to focus on who the downtown residents will be in the future.

“We’ve done more recent work attracting the younger professionals, smaller households, we’ve done not too bad in filling in a few rentals,” he says.

“But maybe the question is, is the next step what we see in other jurisdictions that have really focused in on larger households, with more occupants, two-parent households with children? And are we thinking about the infrastructure necessary to sustain that?”

“Concerts, skyscrapers don’t necessarily nurture a downtown residential environment… But a combination of things do. Opportunities for small-scale shopping, groceries, neighbourhood-level kinds of amenities.”–Jino Distasio, urban geography professor, University of Winnipeg

As the federal government prepares to mitigate labour shortages by bringing in 500,000 immigrants to Canada yearly by 2025, Winnipeg’s downtown population could become even more diverse.

According to a 2016 census report, immigrants are slightly over-represented in the core, accounting for almost 35 per cent of its population. But housing in downtown, which has the least amount of residences of any zone in the city, doesn’t reflect the needs of newcomers and their families.

“We need to start thinking about that and how we’re going to accommodate more people who are moving to Canada, potentially Winnipeg, with families with a range of affordability issues,” Distasio says.

With that, Winnipeg needs to invest in smaller neighbourhood amenities.

“Concerts, skyscrapers don’t necessarily nurture a downtown residential environment,” he says. “But a combination of things do. Opportunities for small-scale shopping, groceries, neighbourhood-level kinds of amenities.”

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A stretch along Assiniboine Avenue, marked by parks and proximity to the river, boasts one of the densest population — and likely the highest with children — in the downtown. It could be one of the more enticing places to live if the city would fix an “amenity desert,” says Jeremy Read, CEO of the University of Winnipeg Community Renewal Corporation (UWCRC).

“If you look along the parks at Assiniboine Avenue, they’re in pretty rough shape and the splash pad hasn’t been running for years. In no other community in our city would that be acceptable,” he says.

Read is well-versed in what makes core-area housing successful. The UWCRC is responsible for the creation of the Downtown Commons, a 14-storey building on Colony Street where identical premium-, market-, and affordable-rate units are mixed together. Included are 31 affordable units for U of W students, and 15 for immigrant student families moving out of transitional housing.

“Our kind of housing stock is, I’ll say, it goes upstream and downstream from homelessness,” Read says.

“So we’re either trying to prevent people from getting there by having housing stock they can afford, or having a place, once they’re stabilized, they’ll (move) into because they can afford it.”

Rent is geared to income at the Commons, with the province paying up to 80 per cent of the median market rent. There are people paying $1,400, $1,000 and $200 for the same style of unit, depending on their level of need.

“When we think about downtown development, we’re thinking about a community that is inclusive, that makes sure that there’s a place for people of all income levels, and particularly those that are unaddressed in the lower income bracket,” he says.

“But we see the value, actually, of that spectrum of housing across the way and how to ensure that you’re not creating kind of pockets of people of one kind of income type or another without any opportunities for being neighbours.”

It’s more expensive to develop housing in the downtown — notably land is pricier — but Read says, contrary to some of the more concerning statistics around safety, there is a consistent stream of people who, if given the proper amenities and supports, want to live there.

“I think there’s an important message there, in terms of the Christmas message anyway,” he says. “If the Messiah needed housing to thrive, why would we expect anyone else to be able to thrive without housing?”

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At Salvation Army on Christmas Day, downtown Winnipeg’s unhoused community get a taste of some of the comforts of home – hot chocolate, gifts of socks and jackets, warm meals.

Christopher Anthony Delaurier has been staying at the shelter for three weeks, but has been in and out in the past. It’s never easy – his current stint with homelessness has lasted about a month, which he attributes to “too much drugs, getting a little crazy” — and it’s also been brutally cold.

“Even just taking the heat out of the bus shacks? I get that everybody congregates there, but (we need) more warm spaces,” the 52-year-old says.

According to a street census conducted by the organization End Homelessness Winnipeg in May, there were at least 1,250 people experiencing some form of homelessness in the city.

Delaurier, like many of his fellow shelter clients, want a place he can call his own. More affordable housing, regardless of a person’s mental health or addiction issues, is critical, he says.

“I’d give everybody a house. Every family would have their own house. They’d live happy,” he says.

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The city-commissioned 2020 Comprehensive Housing Needs Assessment report paints a picture of the average downtown resident.

Downtown and the wider Centennial area have the highest rates of poverty in the city, and 26.9 per cent of downtown households had a total income of $20,382 or less, putting them in the bottom bracket. Just two per cent, or 180 households, had an income in the top bracket ($160,340 or higher).

According to the report, using data from 2016, there were 9,055 private households in the downtown area, the least of any zone in the city. Nearly 90 per cent of those households are occupied by renters, with an average monthly rent of $855, among the cheapest in Winnipeg.

Geographically, both the highest housing need and lowest quality of housing can be found in the city’s core — and the inventory of social housing is getting worse, according to Shauna MacKinnon, University of Winnipeg associate professor and chair of the department of urban and inner-city studies.

As an example, the 185 Smith St. building, which was originally used as provincial social housing, sold to Edison Properties for $16.2 million in 2018 and was converted into lofts. One, available at the end of December, goes for $2,060 a month.

“All of those people were living in rent-geared-to-income housing, and, basically, the government just allowed it to fall apart, got rid of it, and then that displaced all those people,” MacKinnon says. “Now think about those people who lived there, those are all people who are low-income people who were living downtown and spent their whole lives downtown.”

Earlier this year, Manitoba’s largest non-profit seniors housing complex Lions Place reached a tentative deal to sell its building to a company based in Alberta, which MacKinnon says all but “guarantees” rent increases.

It deepens the divides in the downtown, she says.

“We talk about sort of this polarized environment … there are people living without any home, and then you’ve chased out the ones who are actually lower income people, so you’ve created an even more significant problem,” she says.

Social housing — largely defined as government-subsidized affordable housing — is what’s needed in downtown, MacKinnon says.

But provincial and city housing policies have suffered in recent years. The Comprehensive Housing Needs report lists a “stagnation, if not outright decline” in the number of social housing units in Winnipeg and calls the city’s housing support initiatives “sparse.”

“There’s multiple problems, and we create them ourselves,” MacKinnon says.

The city needs to take a more hands-on approach to improving the housing options for downtown residents, both current and prospective, MacKinnon says.

“Who is really assessing housing need, and even if we know what the housing need is, the development is just not aligning with it.”–Shauna MacKinnon, University of Winnipeg associate professor

“They have a minimal role, but what they do have are some tools around zoning and regulation, and other cities have done it where you require a certain number of units … at median market rent or below. And they’re not requiring that,” she says.

There are some projects working to abate that need — UWCRC 2.0 and CentreVenture’s upcoming $40-million Market Lands project, funded through financing and non-profit funding, is set to include both market rent and affordable units.

The owner of the St. Charles hotel announced this month he was meeting with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. in hopes of turning the long-vacant 235 Notre Dame Ave. building into affordable housing.

But the need far outweighs what’s coming.

“It just makes you wonder, where’s the planning?” MacKinnon continues. “Who is really assessing housing need, and even if we know what the housing need is, the development is just not aligning with it.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca