[Authentic_City]

My experience meshes with Esquire's anecdotal timeline. For sure, the decline of retail downtown in the 1990s was pivotal moment, but downtown had long been seen as somewhat seedy and unseemly even in the 1980s when I was a young person coming downtown for the first time. The old Portage Village Inn across from Eatons (now Centrepoint) and the Hamburger House restaurant (MEC now) were hubs for drug dealing and a lot of rough characters were on the street back then.

The most recent concerns about downtown safety conflate disorder and fear of crime with actual crime. I find it interesting that the new report by Asper singles out panhandling, even though it's not a safety issue per se, but rather an issue of social disorder and a perception issue. We have to be clear that fear of crime is not the same thing as actual crime, but fear can certainly drive behavior and can negatively impact perceptions of downtown. Magically getting rid of the homeless and panhandlers is a way to try to address the perception problem, but doesn't change the actual crime problem or the causes of crime which are probably driven by substance abuse and other factors.

The fairly large population of flood evacuees who moved into downtown Winnipeg hotels several years ago and became essentially a permanent idle population downtown had shifted the perception of downtown too. After dark, there are a lot of idle folks just hanging around on the streets, and this can make folks uneasy, even if they aren't in any real danger. Downtown in the 1990s was a very different place than today. There isn't much reason to be on Portage Ave after dark now, so it feels pretty menacing. In the 90s at least there was shopping and even movies downtown.

I'm not really sure what can be done, but it feel like we don't have much upward momentum right now.