Winnipeg is growing, whether we like it or not. Housing is at a premium and affordable housing is in a crisis. Everyone agrees we need to do something. How we do it is always contentious and up for debate.
The how and where Winnipeg grows was once again a hot topic at City Council recently, sparked by the federal government asking the City to change its Housing Accelerator Fund application to to allow for three things:
1) 4 units per property, as of right,
2) 4 storeys within 800 meters of transit,
3) Mid-rise development on commercial corridors & mall sites.
As always when these types of zoning changes are proposed, there was a lot of debate, and hyperbole. While some decried that this change will lead to the wholesale destruction of communities, others said it was a necessary change to solve the housing crisis that Winnipeg, and every other Canadian city, faces.
In the end, neither outcome will be realized. This is but one small, important, step in the evolution of our city.
One meaningful change occurred on the Council floor that is worth exploring further and could have a far greater impact on Winnipeg’s growth and sustainability. A stipulation to the above changes was added:
“urban servicing capacity requirements (including land drainage, water services, paved roadway and laneway service, and sufficient wastewater and flood protection capacity….)”
The changes, with amendments, passed Council on November 23rd by a vote of 13-3. That means this will all come back to Council for an official land use bylaw change in early 2025.
While I agree that these changes were required and are an important step to addressing the housing crisis we face, I want to concentrate on the servicing capacity requirement.
This is meaningful as it directly addresses the cost of growth. It implies an understanding that facilitating growth has an implicit cost to the city. When we are building new communities, we need to build roads, water, and sewer pipes. We need to build parks, libraries, and recreation centres. We need to add transit, fire, and police services to the new communities. All those things have a direct and ongoing cost to the City of Winnipeg. Those are all “servicing capacity requirements” for new residents.
While we concentrate on the cost of servicing new areas of growth on the suburban edges of the city, we are ignoring the “servicing capacity” of our existing neighbourhoods. When it comes to existing neighbourhoods, Winnipeg is again, no different than most other Canadian cities. Our older established communities have seen population declines as we have expanded at the edge of the city.
Looking at the last 50 years of census data we see that of the 201 current communities in Winnipeg, 146 of them are below their peak populations. While Winnipeg has grown by 214,507 people over that time, those 146 established communities have seen a population decline of 134,439 residents. That means that over 160% of Winnipeg’s growth the last 50 years has been in new suburbs. While the suburbs have been expanding our older established neighbourhoods have been emptying.
In a very real sense, our suburbs have been cannibalizing our established neighbourhoods. This is a very big reason we find ourselves in the financial challenge we are in right now at the City. As we continue to expand outwards, needing to build more and more new infrastructure, our established neighbourhoods are falling further and further behind.
I won't go into that in here, so I will direct you to the Dear Winnipeg blog that explores infrastructure, growth, and city finances in detail. There is a lot to dig into and more than a few laughs.
What this means is we already have the infrastructure in place in the city to accommodate 134,000 more people without having to add one water pipe or sewer line. The schools and parks are already there. They already have served a much greater population than they currently do. For example, Wolseley is currently 4,260 people fewer than it had at its peak in 1971. Windsor Park, with the biggest population decline, is sitting at almost 5,000 people fewer. That is a lot of room in the water and sewer pipes not being used.
The point is that as the City of Winnipeg commits to building more housing, all forms of housing, to meet the housing crisis, the opportunity to do it in a sustainable and affordable way is there. We have the “urban capacity requirements” available for more people in West Broadway, Earl Grey, Minto and 143 other communities.
That doesn’t mean the growth is without cost. There are required infrastructure to support this growth as well. We need a better transit system to accommodate people within the existing transportation infrastructure. We need investment in the public realm such as maintaining sidewalks and parks. We need investment in our natural environment such as our urban canopy to make sure that our neighbourhoods are livable in a climate changed future.
All of these things have a cost, but they are all less expensive than building exponentially expanding roads and pipes. What this means is a shift in priorities to support the commitment we are seeing from City Hall to aggressively get more housing built. We need to take advantage of what we already have in place, currently being significantly underutilized. We have already invested in all those pipes and roads, let’s get our money’s worth.
One last spreadsheet for you before you go. Here is all the census data for the last 50 years. This is all population counts for every census community. This is a complete list of every community that has been counted since 1971. You will see there are several that no longer exist or have been combined with others over time.
Brian
ps. All this data is publicly available on the City of Winnipeg website. Census data is tracked by “neighbourhood cluster” of which there are 23. None of those clusters align with any other way the city is divided up. In the end, the information was spread across hundreds of spreadsheets covering the 234 communities over 50 years.
b