Waverly West revealed

One paragraph in in a story by Mary Agnes Welch of the Free Press, "Schreyer delivers geothermal blast", caught my attention. It read:

"The province, which owns the northern half of Waverley West, calmed fears it was promoting urban sprawl by promising to make the suburb natural gas-free."

Urban sprawl is urban sprawl. The first half of Waverly West could have been built to be a solar-powered re-creation of Brooklyn Heights and it would still be sprawl. It would still be of tremendous cost to an already thinly-populated city in the way of new services (roads, sewers, high schools, transit, etc.) and would still greatly outpace the city's population growth.

Anyway, I wrote an article about Waverly West being just another suburb, which appeared in The Uniter today:

"The news that the first houses built in Waverly West will end up not having geothermal heat came as a surprise to no one this week. With construction set to go ahead this summer, it is clear that the giant government-led subdivision, once hailed as Winnipeg’s “suburb of tomorrow,” is shaping up to be just another Linden Woods.

Geothermal heating in every house was the last of three big promises for Waverly West that the provincial NDP government touted relentlessly over the last four years. One by one, these have been revealed for what they probably were all along: hollow gambits used to placate Winnipeggers and get this massive suburb built as quickly and controversy-free as possible..." (more)

I should point out that in the three years this blog has published, I, along with any critic with an ounce of integrity, have never doubted that Waverly West was anything more than government-led urban sprawl that will end up looking like any other cheapo suburb slapped together by a private development corporation (who operate without the benefit of City and Provincial planners--go figure). Our "fears" were never "calmed", and as it turns out, we were right all along.