Quote:
Originally Posted by wardlow
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.
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alright, let's hear your "middle" position then? if you don't think colonialism and racism aren't a huge cause of poverty than you're the one who is not being honest.
also, buzzg is right. crime is related to a lack of services, something that the Pallister government is defunding.