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Originally Posted by Winnipeg Grump
Yeah, I didn't flesh out my original note well enough.
There's ongoing complaints about illegal student housing in Fort Richmond and other locations just off campus. Well, if you had attractive options that were on campus that would be somewhat mitigated.
Those two campuses I cited were very nicely compact and relatively self-contained. You can walk/bike pretty much everywhere and get to the services you need. UBC is different than UWash, as it's off on the point and fairly isolated from the rest of the community. Heck, they have their own high school on campus! UWash isn't physically separated from the surrounding community, so you have the immediate neighborhoods serving almost exclusively the housing, service, and entertainment needs of the campus.
The Southwood development is, in typical Manitoba fashion, decades behind the curve.
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The complaints of illegal housing have been mostly in the last few years, from a popular media standpoint. As previously mentioned the U of M already has projects on the go and probably can’t be reactive to build additional student housing on a whim, particularly not to the scale of the Pembina hall residence. I’m sure some preliminary plans are cooking but that could be years before ideas are ready and funding is secured.
This has left a void to fill which developer have capitalised on, as we can see with the new multi-storey apartments now being built along Pembina and University Crescent.
That being said, I know the U of M has been making sure the redevelopment of the Southwood golf course is well thought out, but I feel that they are losing opportunities to take that huge amount of students in Fort Richmond and put them in housing that can generate revenue for them, as opposed to having them housed off-campus.