Sunday, March 4, 2007

Welcome to SLUMBURBIA
Joe Paraskevas, Winnipeg Free Press

MARK Lubosch has watched the neighbourhood of his youth wither and die.

The 42-year-old former city councillor grew up on Mark Pearce Avenue, a few blocks from Edison Avenue in North Kildonan. In four decades, Lubosch says, the stretch of Edison between Henderson Highway and Rothesay Street, once a place where parents were unafraid to let their children walk to school, has become a place of drug deals, break-and-enter crime and sexual assaults.

"If you ask the police," Lubosch said, "they'll tell you that that strip is one of the most at-risk neighbourhoods in all of Winnipeg, in terms of the amount of crime there."

"There are other areas, in Elmwood (and) in the Maples," he added, listing places suffering the same fate.

Other community observers see the same phenomenon. They believe many Winnipeg neighbourhoods, known for decades as the epitome of working-class or middle-class order, are showing signs of decay seen only in the city's core until now.

Five years ago, Normand Gousseau, director of economic development for Entreprises Riel, an office that oversees business growth in three Franco-Manitoban communities, helped organize a meeting of business people and St. Boniface neighbourhood residents.

"It was a reality check," Gousseau said. Through their study of one of the city's most famous suburbs they found that in the previous 30 years, St. Boniface had lost 25 per cent of its population, and many of its neighbourhoods, particularly north of Marion Street, were pocked with dilapidated homes. Many once-proud houses had become poorly maintained triplexes, sold by their owners to landlords generally uninterested in improving the properties.

Linda van den Broek, a 16-year veteran of real estate sales, now a Re/Max agent, knows what Lubosch and Gousseau are talking about.

Like the others, she emphasizes that entire suburbs are not becoming wastelands.

But she has seen telltale signs of decay on many streets, even across entire neighbourhoods.

Last week, she said, she took some clients to a West End house amid a row of neatly kept properties. The house had a fence covered in graffiti.

"The West End, some parts of St. James, even in Fort Rouge," she said. "Great neighbourhoods but terrifying because there's been nothing kept up... I think that's what's happening here in a lot of these really great neighbourhoods in Winnipeg and I feel sorry for the people that live there and are watching their neighbourhoods just deteriorate before their eyes."

Those suburbs, known as the first ring or inner ring of suburbia, include many of Winnipeg's best-loved neighbourhoods: the Kildonans, St. Boniface, St. Vital, St. James.

Almost 80,000 houses were built there between the Second World War and the 1970s.

They now need renewal. If the repairs aren't made, the appearance -- and potentially the social makeup -- of their streets begins to suffer.

Only the residents may notice. The first symptoms are growing transience, property neglect and crime, petty at first and then serious, increasing crime. The people who look after their homes sell out and move.

The University of Winnipeg's Institute of Urban Studies says about 16,000 homes in the city's older suburbs require major repairs.

"The visible signs are houses or yards not being taken care of the way they used to," said Chris Leo, a professor of urban politics at the U of W.

In some places, even in upscale River Heights, major house problems are structural. But it is also the interiors of many homes that demand change. They exist as if in a time warp.

"The structure and everything is all good on most of these homes," said van den Broek. "It's that nobody has spent any money updating them. So, for a young couple to come in and buy these homes at an average price in Winnipeg hovering at around that $165,000 mark, they don't have any money left over to renovate, to take (off) the orange carpets, the Brady Bunch wallpaper.

"To gut these places and just update the decor is thousands and tens of thousands of dollars, if someone hasn't done anything," she added.

"It's hard for mayors, it's hard for local community leaders, politicians to attract the attention of anyone who can provide political or financial help (to aging suburbs)," said Alexandra Murphy, a Princeton University doctoral student who has studied suburban decay across North America.

Winnipeg is particularly at risk. Its housing stock is relatively old. The average Winnipeg house is 55 years old. And it is slow-growing, meaning fewer people have the money to fix up older homes, or the interest. In Winnipeg, some observers blame poor city planning.

City hall, developers and many of the city's residents have turned most of their attention either to the communities at Winnipeg's edges or on revitalizing the city's core, Leo said. As the city has spread out into new, low-density subdivisions, administrators have struggled to cover the costs of services to all Winnipeggers.

"The development charges for new subdivisions don't cover the costs," Leo added. "The entire range of municipal services has to be provided at lower and lower densities, meaning less taxpayers to cover the total cost the farther out you go. And we're not taking that into account."

Garth Steek, president of the Manitoba Home Builders Association, said worries about suburban decay are "alarmist" and "without foundation."

"Those older neighbourhoods... are highly, highly desirable," Steek said. "They have people lined up to buy. There's no shortage of buyers."

Some home renovators have backlogs of up to two years, Steek added, and their industry in general is healthy.

Both the city and the province offer financial incentives to renovate older, smaller homes and build new homes in old neighbourhoods.

Indeed, some suburbs back up Steek's optimism. Windsor Park, for example, figures to be a candidate for decay. But community centre participation, an indicator of neighbourhood health, is booming.

"Programs couldn't be any busier," said Dino Moran, facility manager of Winakwa Community Centre. "We're bursting at the seams. It couldn't be any better. We're looking at expansion."

St. Boniface, which saw the looming problem in 2002, continues to fight it. Since then, the development of condominiums and seniors' residences has intensified. Housing density, a factor in improved economic development, has grown. Normand Gousseau met recently with neighbourhood leaders to plot their next move.

THE next challenges are the absence in St. Boniface of what Gousseau calls good-quality affordable housing, and the continuing general decline of the suburb's housing stock.

Gousseau said he and others will look at forming a corporation to buy and renovate some of the very triplexes that have been a scourge of St. Boniface neighbourhoods. They would sell the renewed buildings to residents rather than investors looking for rental properties.

If they take that route they would be borrowing an idea already in play in the West End, where an organization called HOP, for Housing Opportunity Partnership, has brought together bankers, builders and realtors to buy, renovate and resell about 60 core-area homes since 1997.

Gousseau acknowledged the St. Boniface group would have a tougher challenge. HOP pays about $60,000 for a house; it would be more than twice that in St. Boniface.

HOP's vice-president, Peter Squire, said it is key to target entire neighbourhoods.

"You can't just pick one house on one street, go three streets over and another block north," Squire said. "You've really got to start focusing your efforts, almost like one house, one block at a time, then one street at a time, then the next street over if you're really going to make difference."

Lubosch, Leo and Gousseau all said governments must come up with a vision for the city that addresses suburban, not simply inner-city, revitalization. In fact, Leo said, the flight of residents, not only in Winnipeg but in other cities, to exurbs outside city limits, means multiple municipalities, as well as provincial governments, must share those urban visions.

On the Prairies, Leo said, that hasn't happened.

"There is somewhat growing political will to look at these problems, but it hasn't gotten very far yet and Winnipeg is way behind," Leo said.