We finally were able to take our kids on a vacation this year, and tucking them into their beds in a hotel in downtown Chicago, I’m suddenly struck by a pang of homesickness. I pause to wonder at the feeling, as I love Chicago more than any other city in the world, and then laugh out loud at the realization: It was the sirens from the street below that made me briefly long for my West Broadway home.
Even while on vacation, I attend to the notifications on my phone alerting us to security cameras picking up movement in the yard, on the driveway or in the porch. I’m in contact with neighbours, arranging quick retrieval of parcels delivered, lest the local porch pirates find them first. As in any neighbourhood, we adapt to the lifestyle it demands of us.
No matter where we live in Winnipeg, the discomfort and vulnerability of potential crime is an unwelcome feeling, so it’s unsurprising residents in Winnipeg’s luxurious Sage Creek neighbourhood also feel affronted when someone so much as jiggles a car door handle in the night. Crime rates are a major deciding factor in where people buy their homes, and we all want a safe place to live.
In West Broadway, as in any neighbourhood, we adapt to the lifestyle it demands of us, Rebecca Chambers writes.
But there is no immunity from the desperation on our streets, no matter your postal code. The polarizing view of Winnipeg neighbourhoods as either “high crime” or “no crime at all” is problematic and ignores the reality of our city as an interconnected place. When some neighbourhoods are consistently and increasingly denied the resources necessary to civic health, it’s only a matter of time before the predictable acts of desperation spread outward.
Community organizer Sel Burrows had it right when earlier this week he pointed to the inequity of City of Winnipeg grants in a Free Press story about a youth drop-in program starting up at the downtown YMCA. This good-news photo op with the mayor serves to sugar-coat the pittance being given to downtown recreation while the south end is set to receive a $94-million recreation complex. Mayor Scott Gillingham said at that time he recognized the connections between youth crime and a lack of recreational programming, yet a group of children age nine (nine!), 11, 12, and 14 were taken into police custody suspected for arson and breaking into businesses in the West End this week. This comes just a month after citizens barely managed to get Gillingham to put a hold on city council’s plans to cut program funding for the Spence Neighbourhood Association, Broadway Neighbourhood Centre, Downtown Community Safety Partnership, Art City and others — all youth-centred community resources serving areas already underserved by city amenities, where cuts to pools, community centres and libraries are becoming perennial, and where citizens are wearing out their shoe leather just trying to be acknowledged for being as important as any other proud Winnipegger.
For another example, when citizens in St. Boniface banded together and raised nearly $100,000 to keep their outdoor pool operating this summer, the City of Winnipeg told them they didn’t want their money and that no act of community would succeed in opening the pool. This morally destitute decision now deprives families from escaping the heat of our warming city summers. City council seems to forget that not all Winnipeggers own cabins, nor automobiles.
And regarding our affinity for cars, it appears the widening of Kenaston Boulevard, the major artery serving the southern suburbs, will proceed come hell or high water, while the Arlington Bridge continues to rot, severing a vital motor- and active-transportation route to the North End.
The mayor’s words do not match his actions, because although he acknowledges recreation and crime are inversely related, he continues to bleed the inner-city of these very resources, siphoning funds to neighbourhoods on the outskirts, and exhausting the residents pleading to be heard, valued and acknowledged in the planning of their city.
Perhaps one day city brass will see that providing the same resources to the inner city as the suburbs promotes safety in both. Perhaps one day I too could be struck incredulous by a security-camera video of someone jiggling my door handle in the dark of a quiet West Broadway night. But, until then, like many in the inner city, I will ensure the porch is locked, kiss my kids goodnight and soothe myself to sleep with the sounds of sirens and car alarms.
Rebecca Chambers
Rebecca explores what it means to be a Winnipegger by layering experiences and reactions to current events upon our unique and sometimes contentious history and culture. Her column appears alternating Saturdays.
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