Cause to symptom: it's your fault!
While I applaud any effort to get Mr. Herman Holla to clean up the junk from his property at the corner of Higgins and Annabella (which, incidentally, was the home of the Ackland family), I wonder: since when has the City of Winnipeg, at any point in its tragic 137-year history, cared about visual order and livability in Point Douglas?
After all, a junk pile fits quite well in Plan Winnipeg's vision for Mr. Holla's neighborhood of South Point Douglas as a commuter corridor flanked by heavy industry. What is wrong with his little patch of blight--what has raised the righteous action of the City of Winnipeg bureaucracy--is that Mr. Holla didn't ask for the correct permits, variances, or pays the right taxes to keep it.
Large scrap yards and industrial storage lots that encroach residences persist elsewhere in Point Douglas. All of Mr. Holla's neighborhood is zoned exclusively for heavy industry. The City is essentially re-building the same Disraeli disaster that quartered the neighborhood in 1959, and is set to turn Higgins Avenue and the Louise Bridge into even more of an obnoxious truck route that races mere feet past Mr. Holla's front door.
For the City of Winnipeg to say to one property owner that he is degrading South Point Douglas is a little like Joseph Stalin calling Hugo Chavez a totalitarian monster.
Proven quite capable of bringing the heavy hand of by-law enforcement down on lone, slightly eccentric property owners in the name of neighborhood livability, the City should perhaps next attempt to their own stifling impediments to quality of life in South Point Douglas.
After all, a junk pile fits quite well in Plan Winnipeg's vision for Mr. Holla's neighborhood of South Point Douglas as a commuter corridor flanked by heavy industry. What is wrong with his little patch of blight--what has raised the righteous action of the City of Winnipeg bureaucracy--is that Mr. Holla didn't ask for the correct permits, variances, or pays the right taxes to keep it.
Large scrap yards and industrial storage lots that encroach residences persist elsewhere in Point Douglas. All of Mr. Holla's neighborhood is zoned exclusively for heavy industry. The City is essentially re-building the same Disraeli disaster that quartered the neighborhood in 1959, and is set to turn Higgins Avenue and the Louise Bridge into even more of an obnoxious truck route that races mere feet past Mr. Holla's front door.
For the City of Winnipeg to say to one property owner that he is degrading South Point Douglas is a little like Joseph Stalin calling Hugo Chavez a totalitarian monster.
Proven quite capable of bringing the heavy hand of by-law enforcement down on lone, slightly eccentric property owners in the name of neighborhood livability, the City should perhaps next attempt to their own stifling impediments to quality of life in South Point Douglas.
posted by The Rise and Sprawl at
7:46 AM
1 Comments:
it's one thing to care about organic and liveable neighbourhoods in winnipeg, and another to insist that our whole history is "tragic." if you really care about this city, what makes you so sure that positive change can be effected by a constant stream of long-distance name-calling, complaining, and acid critique? go throw a flower bomb or something.
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