Expectations
David Connors at the Free Press had an interesting feature on the current state of the Main Street, roughly between City Hall and the CPR tracks. According to Neon Factory owner Mike Wolochuk, his longtime neon sign-making business is going under because the neighborhood didn’t turn out quite the way he had hoped—becoming a drab bureaucrat ghetto rather than the fledgling arts district it seemed poised to become. While it would be a great stretch to blame the Neon Factory’s business travails on what has (or has not) gone on on Main Street, Wolochuk does make a good point:
“The people here make big salaries, eat lunch at their desks and drive home to Lindenwoods at 5. That’s life downtown.”
As a proportion of the total workforce, downtown Winnipeg is doing great, with 68,000 workers coming downtown every work-day. Another 10,000-15,000 students come to go to school. That’s fine, but it is foolish to expect that office workers and students from the suburbs will suddenly start living like urbanites.
At a very practical level, this makes no sense. People generally do not have time to hang out in the neighborhood they work or go to school in in the evenings (nevermind weekends), in addition to living their own lives in their own neighborhoods. People do most of their living in the places where they live, not where they work. This is why even the City of Winnipeg ostensibly recognizes that a stronger residential population is needed downtown, and it is why—though no one seems to recognize this—existing residential neighborhoods that are adjacent to downtown matter.
In building a downtown based on the business-park-with-homeless-people model, the City ends up inhibiting the potential residents and entrepreneurs that are essential to any neighborhood. They are the ones that will actually turn around and create a neighborhood that its secondary users (ie, office workers in from the suburbs) would enjoy getting out and walking around in.
Nevermind that, let’s just try this all over again. And again once more: “Without a doubt, control should be with the folks out there,” Centre Venture boss Ross McGowan told the Free Press. “Our feeling is, it is time for them to lead, not us. We’ve got the key pieces in place. Our expectation is, the private sector will infill around them.”
That sums up the expectation of the City of Winnipeg, which unquestionably props up Centre Venture and their mandate: our latest schemes can incentivize complex markets; new buildings inspires confidence, no matter what they look like or how they function; build it and they will come.
This works well as the tagline of an ’80s baseball movie, but has had embarrassingly poor results as guiding principle of downtown revitalization in Winnipeg. McGowan’s expectations were held for far more ambitious projects on Main Street: the Concert Hall, Public Safety Building, City Hall, and Manitoba Theatre Centre more than 40 years ago.
But voodoo expectations aside, as this blog noted previously, here is what has happened on Main Street in the last five years:
The number of businesses that opened or relocated to Main Street between City Hall and the CPR tracks between 2006 and 2008: five.
The number of businesses that opened or relocated to Main Street between City Hall and the CPR tracks between 2008 and 2011: zero.
