Public Housing... More Than Bricks and Mortar

In June, the Public Health Agency of Canada released its Report on the State of Public Health in Canada 2008. One item that caught my eye was a piece on Regent Park in Toronto.

Regent Park is one of Canada's oldest, largest, and more notorious public housing projects.

The chapter spoke of the interrelation between housing and things like education and public health, not simply in terms of bricks and mortar.

One program created for Regent Park is Pathways to Education and it has had some favourable results as can be seen below (from the above cited PHAC report, page 50).

Pathways is now being rolled out to a number of other communities in Ontario and Quebec.

The United Way of Greater Toronto had a big hand in the project and, considering the United Way of Winnipeg's recent Urban Exchange initiative, maybe we'll see something like it here.

The realization hit home decades ago that the public housing "estate" comprising of acres of row housing, or, worse yet, the dreaded public housing high rise, have been a failure. A 'warehousing of the poor'. So much so, in fact, that cities from Chicago to Dublin spent the 90's imploding most of their towers.

In recent years I have been reading a number of good news stories about housing developments as cities try to re-engineer what public housing is supposed to be. From Regent Park in Toronto to Ballymun in Dublin, (where 9 high rise towers in total have been removed), to Colshaw Farm in Manchester, England (redeveloped for mixed use), and ten projects in Chicago.

The April 8 2008 edition of The Economist had a feature story entitled Public Housing: For Richer, For Poorer detailing how US cities in general, and Chicago in particular, is changing the way they create public housing projects. (For some Chicago vs Regent Park comparisons check this CBC Toronto story).

Locally, little has been done to think BIG about public housing, though attempts at improvements are underway. In December 2007 the province released the BUILDINGFoundations Action Plan, a two-year, $84m plan to improve public housing in the province.

One of the first projects to see new money is Gilbert Park. Here are the main goals for the plan:

• Improved safety including a dedicated investigative team to act on confidential tenant complaints and increased building security
• Home renovations including new roofs, windows, doors and energy efficiencies
• Annual inspections of all units and common areas to prevent mould
• Landscaping and children’s playgrounds
• A rapid graffiti removal program
• Community enrichment programs such as adult literacy, a Rewarding Work youth mentorship and new resource centres for tenants;

Compare that to what the jurisdictions mentioned above are doing and it's really putting a new coat of paint on a sinking ship.

Without a large federal government re-commitment to public housing, which is something most of the international examples above share, and a realization that "housing" is more than just bricks and mortar, significant changes for public housing in provinces like Manitoba will be slow going.

More on public housing in future posts.....

- Also see a very good essay on public housing in Winnipeg from Oct 2007 on The Rise and Sprawl

- Update December 2008: The province is doubling its commitment to a total of $48 million to rejuvenate Manitoba Housing stock.

Weekend Update: I Love Manitoba ( 2)

I decided to head down 59 close to the border and then across to Altona. Some great little towns and sights down there.

Roseau River Reserve:

Letellier MB:

The former village of Woodmore MB:

Altona:

St - Pierre Jolys:

I ended up in Altona and recalled story in the paper about a new gallery and garden that had opened recently.

It's called Gallery in the Park, a restored heritage house is the indoor gallery and a newly landscaped garden makes up the outdoor portion. Something I found really nice, especially for a small town attraction, is that it's open until 8 pm most nights, including late on Sundays.

Currently the gallery has two shows.

The main show is paintings and bronzes by Peter Sawatzky. His most prominent works, for me anyway, are Perilous Crossing in Selkirk (above) and the Caribou Crossing at Portage and Main. The upstairs gallery has works by a dozen artists in a show entitled entitled "Through the Artist's Eye". Both are on until September 30th. Altona did a great job on the space. It's one of those 'must get to places' in southern Manitoba !

Here are some more photos of the gallery:

Polar Bear Alert. Part Two

I went to the zoo yesterday to see Debby. I assume issuing a media release about her health just before a long weekend is the city's way of saying that someone will be seeing the v-e-t on Tuesday morning

Debby was the star attraction, as usual. Lots of people and their kids were there to take a last picture. She was slow, a little drooly and unsure of some of her steps. You could tell that the end is coming.

When Debby passes on to that big ice floe in the sky these will be the only polar bears you will see at Assiniboine Park Zoo - the 'Churchills' that have been there for years asking people to contribute so that the zoo can be improved for, well, polar bears.

Update: Debby was put down on November 17, 2008, just weeks shy of her 42nd birthday.

Polar Bear Alert
Part One
Part Two

Weekend Update - I Love Manitoba !

Manitoba is a great place to be, especially in the summer!

On Sunday, I went out to Gimli to enjoy some Icelandic hospitality. The place was hopping!

As enjoyable as the village itself was the drive there. There's something about a prairie drive that I find amazingly therapeutic. Mountains - great. Forests - lovely. You just can't beat the prairie, though, for a peaceful summer drive.

Monday was spent at Assiniboine Downs for the Manitoba Derby. I caught the first four races.

The Downs is an incredible place to people watch! The crowd ranges in age from 9 to 90 and from business-suited executives to hip-hop teenagers. It's the strangest mix of people you will ever see together in one place sharing the same passion!

The price is right, too. Free parking and free admission.

I only do little bets and at the end of the day, (not including lunch), came home just $3.25 down.

Not bad for a great afternoon !

I also checked out the Zoo to see Debby and comrades, (more on Debby later). Everyone was in fine form !

Polar Bear Alert. Part One

"At 41 years, 8 months, Debby, the Assiniboine Park Zoo’s famous Polar Bear, is showing signs of her advanced age and the prognosis of recovery from age-related medical problems is not good." (City of Winnipeg News Release, 31 July 2008.)

In other words, Debby the Polar Bear is dying.

Debby holds a special place in most Winnipegger’s hearts as a couple of generations have been to see her on school trips. It will be a sad day when she goes, but there is some comfort in the fact that she lived for double the life expectancy of a polar bear.

What I really consider disappointing is that we haven't done anything enclosure-wise to ensure that we can have a replacement for her.

It has been recognized for decades that the way animals are housed in zoos, particularly special-needs animals like polar bears, must change. As described in the 1991 article “A wild time at the zoo” in New Scientist Magazine:

Zoos, too, acknowledge (as some of them did not seem to in the past) that animals are sentient beings, capable of being unhappy; that they are not simple machines, with reflexes routinely triggered by standardised stimulations. For their personal welfare, as well as their conservational value, captive animals should be kept in ways that respect their psychology.

These changing opinions toward captive bears and a couple of high-profile cases of mistreatment of Manitoba-born polar bears in Puerto Rico and Mexico led the province, a supplier of polar bears to zoos, to enact the Polar Bear Protection Act in 2003.

The act put restrictions on the export of polar bears and set guidelines for the enclosures in which they could be kept. Ironically, it meant that Manitoba's premiere zoo would not be able to house another polar bear once the already ancient Debby passed away.

Prior to the act coming into effect, the Assiniboine Zoo had already recognized the need for a new enclosure. The Zoological Society of Manitoba states on their website that in 2000:

The Society and the Zoo begin work on the development of a new Master Plan Development Proposal for the Assiniboine Park Zoo. Initial proposals are developed for the redesign of the existing Polar Bear enclosure.

Drawings for a new enclosure appeared in the May 2004 Assiniboine Park Framework Plan, (an updated version, containing the same drawings, was released in 2006).

The drawings for the “Assiniboine Zoo Master Plan, Entry Building and First Nations Walk, and Entry to Gateway to the Arctic, Arctic Research Station, and Discovery Centre Renderings” earned Torre Design Consortium a 2006 Honour Award from the Gulf States Region of the Construction Specifications Institute.

So, what has happened in the past 8 years ?

The last time a new enclosure hit the news was in March 2008 when it was announced that a new group, the Assiniboine Park Conservancy headed by Hartley Richardson, would be put in charge of capital improvements to the Park.

In a Free Press interview Richardson said he would “…personally like to see … a radically improved zoo with a state-of-the-art polar-bear enclosure and an overall focus on Manitoba's ecological zones”.

With the news of Debby’s fading announced by the city in a news release on July 31, 2008, it would have been a good time to give an update on the enclosure issue, but Dr. Robert Wrigley, curator of the Assiniboine Park Zoo, would only say to The Sun that it is “one of the top priorities in the master plan of the new Assiniboine Park Conservancy”.

In other words, we haven't progressed very far in eight years.

We are, of course, not the only zoo in the world with polar bears. There are about 100 of them. In the last couple of years, some North American zoos have spent in the region of $10m - $25m to build new polar bear facilities and often expanding their scope to include other tundra species as well.

According to this list at ZooBeat Forums, they include: Pittsburgh Zoo (2006); Maryland Zoo; Rogers William Park Zoo - Rhode Island (eta 2010); Toronto Zoo’s “Tundra Exhibit” (eta 2009); Louisville Zoo ("Glacier Run"); Columbus Zoo (2008) and Cincinatti Zoo (2000). (See the link for more details and dollar figures).

For Manitoba, the self-proclaimed "Polar Bear Capital of the World", the fact that in a very short time we will have NO polar bears at the zoo for the foreseeable future is a bit mind boggling when you see the effort that other jurisdictions have put into updating enclosures.

Manitoba has an extra economic incentive as it's estimated that the "polar bear industry" in 2003 brought $23m to the Town of Churchill alone, (don't mind the spin offs for Winnipeg itself).

This is another one of those long standing projects in the city that we've allowed to get knocked off the priorities perch.

In the past year we've been able to pull $7m out of the hat for a hotel waterpark, pledged millions for a proposed Upper Fort Garry interpretive centre, and are toying with a $200m - $400m stadium / neighbourhood revitalization project. With each new project a polar bear enclosure gets pushed further back in line.

I hope that we'll give our heads a shake and realize that while we spend our time and money chasing after the latest "shiny object" that there are existing projects and facilities around town that are becoming obsolete and need attention.

Polar Bear Alert. STOP.
Part One
Part Two