Good policy; even better if it worked

Don't get me wrong: I want to believe. I want to believe that $20-M in tax dollars will buy more residential units downtown than what will get built over the next five years anyway. But I have a hard time joining in on today's teeth party on Waterfront Drive.

Because the rule of economics still apply even when they are ignored, and economies are driven by consumption, not production.

Until there are stronger advantages to consumption in the Exchange District (and not just buying on spec), the city will not see anymore than the same slow rate of progress (I mean slow when compared to any other city on this continent) in new housing than what downtown has seen over the past five years.

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Edit: Brian Kelcey says it better than I could.

In da club

According to Facebook (which is never wrong), the Whiskey Dix nightclub at Main near McDermot Ave. are intending to close their patio adjacent to the club, and convert that corner lot into a "VIP" surface parking lot for their customers and staff. If they think that this is all going to happen after the 3rd, they are in for a surprise.

(Were the club to go ahead with this, they would quickly find their customer base of loutish urban cowboys and cowgirls disappearing, as the people in Winnipeg who plan their nights according to parking availibility or "safety" are already at Pembina Highway clubs, and are not about to pay to get a spot in the VIP lot. At the same time, existing patrons will quickly find a club that does have a patio in the summer months.)


Courtesy of the University of Manitoba's Winnipeg Building Index

Not that the club owners are complete fools for thinking they could just put up a parking lot on Main Street; they are already surrounded on either side by surface parking lots that line the historical heart of Winnipeg, including a sprawling source of civic shame, the Canwest-owned gravel lot where the the McIntyre Block was torn down needlessly in 1979. And as this blog has pointed out ad infinitum, creating new off-street parking is the primary focus of public downtown renewal efforts of late. Everyone else is putting up parking lots: why can't this nightclub?

Well, because their patio is not zoned for parking, and the City has said that creating new surface parking lots (that are zoned as such) is no longer permitted downtown. Free Press reporter Bartley Kives called the City's Property, Planning & Development department about this today, and told me that PP&D has yet to receive an application from the owners of Whiskey Dix to convert it to a parking lot, and would not have permission to do so anyway.

This looks to be a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Here's to many more proposals for new surface parking lots being turned down.

University of Potemkin

How did this borderline critical article on the University of Winnipeg get past the editors? Is U of W Chancellor and Free Press owner Bob Silver out of town? Were they too busy polishing the shrine to His Lloydship upstairs to notice reporter Nick Martin squeak this one by?

Anyway, University of Winnipeg vice-president Bill Balan downplays the operating budget crisis, confident that the Province will come through to save the day. Besides, he explains, most new buildings just pay for themselves. It's just that easy.

Among other expansion projects, Mr. Belan did not mention the U of W's planned makeover and expansion of its largest and most used building, Centennial Hall. It is hoped that this project will be completed by 2012, when the building celebrates its 40th anniversary. The vision is that the hall will not only be restored to its original 'glory' as a landmark of the late Modernist period of architecture, but also have improved entrance points, enhanced "communal space," and a Library that wil be expanded by building and addition to Centennial Hall along Balmoral Street toward Portage Avenue (thereby obstructing the 115 year-old Wesley Hall).

The way things are going, this makeover is going to have to involve more than a fanciful celebration of the "engineering aesthetic and the democratization of culture and education" (this according to the handout). After years of defered maintainance, the University notes that the exterior cladding of Centennial Hall is rusting, and windows are leaking. Water dripping down from the ceiling in the Library and elsewhere on the fourth floor has not been uncommon over the past year, and right now there are whole bookshelves in the Main Stacks of the U of W's Library covered in platic sheets to keep the water from damaging books.

The less said about the state of bathroom facilities on campus, the better.

This is what universities look like when the operate within a broken system: students pay next to nothing to go there, and they get every cent they pay for by being taught by an underpaid grad student on a campus that is falling apart. Governments pay the difference, however they know it looks better in the news to "transform Portage Avenue" than it does to keep the Library fully operational. If the U of W doesn't like this system, they should say so. Unfortunately they don't, since they, too, are more concerned about how good the University looks on the TV news and the page of the newspaper, rather than how it looks for the student looking to sit in a chair that is not broken, under a ceiling that is not leaking, and at a University that has its priorities straight.

Unsurprising story of the week

Capitalism and religion makes societies kinder and more civil.

And if you don't believe that, then spend the night walking (or riding a bus or a cab) around Winnipeg, and see what decades of state paternalism has done to this once great city.