Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
Purely anecdotally:
-it felt like things got worse in the mid/late 90s...it was around this time that large scale downtown retail sort of petered out with the decline and closure of Eaton's and a bunch of storefronts, and Portage Place went downhill too as a retail destination. So the armies of old lady downtown shopping diehards mostly disappeared during that era, making the rougher element more prominent.
-it felt like things were improving a bit later in the 2000s as downtown residential very slowly started to take root... there were more people around and more programs designed to tackle some of the social problems.
-it feels like there has been another pronounced decline in safety and order on the streets over the last few years. I'm not sure if it's meth driven or what, but things feel more menacing than they were 5-10 years ago. Not dramatically so, but the trendline is moving in what I'd consider to be the wrong direction. Some things have been positive like TNS and the continued improvement of Old Market Square, but other areas have not been improving in a similar way and it's hard to imagine that this is not holding back downtown development as many people don't consider it an ideal place to live.
Anyway, that's a totally anecdotal assessment but I wonder if anyone else's experience meshes with mine?
|
I think this is about right.
I would add to this, however, that while downtown in the late '90s had a high level of criminal activity (hello, Times Nightclub at Portage and Hargrave) and a lot of abandonment in areas where there's more activity now (the Exchange, obviously), there was not nearly the same amount of unsettling social disorder there is now. Lots of that kind of stuff was up on the North Main skid row, but you just didn't see it on and around Portage Avenue. Development activity obviously picked up in the late 2000s, but on the street level, Portage Avenue was worse in 2009 than it was in 1999. And it's vastly worse in 2019 than it was in 2009.
My wife (whose perception of safety is a little more meaningful than mine, given I'm a young-ish man) has worked around Portage Avenue for ~eight years. She says it's never been this bad. This is a woman who has lived and worked in and around downtown her entire adult life. I've been walking around all areas of downtown since the mid-1990s. We aren't paranoid suburbanites who can't handle seeing a homeless man.
I really wish Winnipeg could have an honest conversation about this kind of thing. It's possible to meet somewhere in the middle, between the only three positions there seems to be:
1) the unreasonably paranoid suburbanite who will never like downtown until it resembles a Scottsdale lifestyle centre anyway;
2) the woke Marxist pedant who thinks you're perpetuating genocide and colonialism for even talking about this;
3) the downtown booster who doesn't want to talk about anything other than building projects.