Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
^ Well, yes, Winnipeggers may be suburban-minded, but we've basically stacked the deck in favour of suburban living by spending immense amounts of money over the last 75 years to make it so. New infrastructure everywhere, de facto social segregation by keeping the poor and mentally ill in the inner city areas for the most part, zoning and tax systems that minimize the value of urbanity, failure to properly develop transit... these things have pushed people out into suburbia.
I think you and Pinus are on two entirely different wavelengths. You see the city as it is (and to some degree you have to, to make a living... you'd be out of business tomorrow if you began to entertain pie in the sky notions of Winnipeg as urban dreamworld), but Pinus sees what could be. And we need to have that vision because cities change over time. Look around us at other Canadian cities... most have changed for the better, with healthier, more populated central cities than was the case 25 years ago. There is nothing inherently different about Winnipeg that it couldn't move in that direction either.
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The deck wasn't stacked that way for any other reason than that everybody
wanted the deck stacked that way. Living on tiny lots in rickety houses in the inner city has always been seen as the poor man's way of life in this city. So when peace time rolled around and the government was initiating a housing boom for both the purposes of stimulus and as a way to remunerate veterans, the choices were very clear. People wanted into what were the suburbs at the time - River heights, Riverview, East. Ft. Garry, Garden City, etc... And they surveyed out 50' lots and they built primarily single family homes. Remember, we're talking about the mid-40's and 50's here. A lot of these veterans were people who only knew the poverty of the 30's and eventually war time. They weren't spoiled suburbanites who wanted their old lives. They grew up on Atlantic or something equally as undesirable.
I've said it before, but there is almost nothing new under the sun. What I mentioned above actually signaled the death knell of the well-developed electric trolley system that used to serve Winnipeg. And it was starved because good economic times allowed for people to purchase vehicles - 2 usually - and live on sizable lots in places they could easily commute. And that was even as the CBD in Winnipeg was more important than ever. People
still chose to drive.
The thing that's different about Winnipeg is that it doesn't have any hope for any sort of boom. It's also not a politically strategic province in any capacity so it will never be the favoured son reaping the benefits of a federal government in search of votes. And those are the only two ways you get significant changes to a city because our population can't afford it on its own. There are only 1.2MM of us. And since there are no significant issues now or likely pending in the future, people will most likely continue to opt into the way of life that most do in reasonably successful Western economies. Public transit and dense populations are what happens when the values of luxuries (land, vehicles, etc...) start to outstrip the average population. We're a long ways from ever needing those and nobody is settling for them otherwise.
Don't forget: a lot of Riverview would have once been thought of as a far flung suburb facing all of the same criticisms that things like River Park South and Bridgwater do today. And some of those lots in Riverview are a lot bigger than the average lot in Bridgwater.
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