Quote:
Originally Posted by thurmas
If you were mayor of Winnipeg and you could remodel downtown Winnipeg, what would your downtown look like. Here are some goodies I wish came to be:
1) Large permanent police presence on portage of at least 50 cops making sure portage is free of vagabonds and passed out hobos,and the like.
2) remodeling of downtown bay store where finally uofw leases top 3 or 4 floors of the bay and the bay keeps bottom 2 floors.
3)condos built atop portage place the 2 pads built for them would finally be used.
4) a 40 story marquee office tower built next to canwest tower to fill the large gap between empire and the tower.
5) here we go again but a rapid transit system of any type (preferbly rail) to at least get winnipeg into 20th century!
6) remodeling of met theater into rock and roll museum finally.
7)atleast 2 new large non canadinns night clubs on portage to make portage feel like Montreal!
8)large downtown property tax cut to spur development in downtown!
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First off I would build a huge industrial park outside city limits to relocate all those scrap yards, crane yard seed plant, crane, cp rail yard to name a few that you see in westend and part of the north end; in order to attract more manufacturing and warehouses
at the same time provide cheap housing and apartement, trailer park, some manitoba housing for those who need to work at these low paying jobs therefore they can live near there job.
then I would elevate the taxes in the neighboring regions of downtown that way it could effectively clean up the area where people certainly to this day can't afford to upkeep there house let alone afford a home. It would probably push away the crack addicts and slum lords.
Move the salvation army shelter and some but not all the soup kitchen to there. I am sure moving them there some may have the incentive to work rather panhandle
Boost the incentives even more to rebuild or renovate existing housing by the core.
I know this may take a few years for this time happen but it will clean up the area.
Once that is done you will see more houses renovated back to there prime with newer housing (hopefully not the cookie cutter style) where you will see more white collar people relocate to.
Make the taxes lower for B class office buildings and etc for lower types that way you can be as just as competitive as for the office spaces available in the suburbs.
Downtown will be denser with a higher population thus eventually you will have all the shopping and restaurants move in and there you have a Urban Oasis.
I am not quite finished for ideas here I will come back to post some more like reducing lanes on portage avenue to make portage more pedestrian friendly.