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Signs are apparent that core being abandoned

From the Winnipeg Free Press – August 8, 1995

Christoper Leo

THE SHOOTING of two boys on the streets of Winnipeg’s inner city has evoked shocked reaction, and once again the problem of crime in the inner city is high on the agenda.

Most of the suggested responses to the problem have focused on the justice system, the place of aboriginal people in Winnipeg’s society and the actual or possible role of various social service agencies.

All of these avenues need to be explored, and all of them are helpful in understanding the problems and seeking solutions.

But there is another aspect to the problem that has not received attention: A city planning perspective that asks, What is the connection between lawlessness on inner city streets and the way we are building our community? Our neglect of this question lends a special urgency to it.

Human beings are a violent species, and no one is truly safe from violence anywhere in the world, but, outside of war zones, no group is more exposed to violence than the residents of North American inner cities. Their exposure does not result from some inevitability of social or city development. It is a product of our failure to manage the growth of our cities.

Given the management practices that we are following, decay is inevitable. Winnipeg’s inner city is not yet very far advanced on the road to ultimate decay, but it has completed the first leg of that journey and there are no signs of any serious attempts to turn it around. Crime is part of that process of decay.

What are the signposts on the road to decay? The journey begins with uncontrolled suburban growth and proceeds with further uncontrolled growth beyond the boundaries of the city, into adjacent small towns and rural areas. In the absence of provisions for equitable sharing of the costs of maintaining city services, those who leave the city are able to settle on a more desirable property at a saving in property taxes.

They are getting the best of both worlds: They live near the city and have full access to the city’s jobs, shopping, entertainment, cultural facilities and sometimes even such city services as sport programs and public libraries. But they don’t have to help pay a city’s bills for infrastructure, policing and social services.

Even within the boundaries of the city, uncontrolled suburban growth usually involves extension of suburban infrastructure at a cost so high that the deterioration of downtown infrastructure and services ultimately becomes inevitable. As a result, most people who can afford to live outside the inner city do so. Predominantly among those left behind are the people who cannot afford to move out. Poverty is not necessarily accompanied by social problems, any more than wealth guarantees the absence of social problems.

But when a metropolitan area is divided into neighborhoods where poverty predominates and others where comfortable circumstances are the rule, it is inevitable that there will be a concentration of social problems in the poor areas. At the same time, the exodus from those areas makes it inevitable that, as the problems escalate, the resources for dealing with them will dwindle.

Where social problems predominate, lawlessness follows. As lawlessness grows, law-abiding people are faced with the Hobson’s choice of becoming accomplices or victims. Thus lawlessness spreads.

At about this point, downtown neighborhoods begin to be red-lined. Insurance companies refuse fire and theft insurance, banks become reluctant to lend money for mortgages or renovations. That, roughly, is as far as Winnipeg has travelled on the road to inner city decay.

It gets worse. Many American cities have travelled farther down the road than Winnipeg, and a number have reached its end, so we know in detail what happens. Following is a compilation of some of the way stations. These are not exactly the same in every decaying area, but they run roughly as follows.

Typically, the spread of lawlessness in residential areas is soon accompanied by visible signs of its triumph, such as graffiti and destruction of public property. Before long, petty criminals rule the streets As one walks down the street, broken glass crunches under one’s feet. Drug dealers openly hawk their wares. Along with drugs and violence comes disease. The shared needles that go with heroin and the indiscriminate sex that is part of the crack scene lends to a variety of venereal diseases, and to AIDS, the death toll from which has become horrendous in some American inner city neighborhoods.

By this time, absolutely none who can afford to leave — other than saints or fools — are still living in the decaying area. With tax revenues dwindling and potential political support for downtown services fleeing the area, the maintenance of even the most basic municipal services becomes problematic. Streets become pot-holed, destroyed park benches are no longer repaired. Fire and police services no longer provide adequate protection.

Inevitably, buildings catch fire and burn down. Homeless people move in. With homeless people camping out in abandoned buildings, more fires are inevitable. Those fires threaten adjacent buildings. Eventually the entire neighborhood is abandoned. In the South Bronx in New York city, some former residential areas are entirely abandoned, with most buildings crumbled to dust, resembling a Second World War bomb site. Needless to say, decay in residential areas is accompanied by business flight. Most of the former commercial part of Detroit is abandoned, the buildings empty and boarded up. Substantial parts of downtown Baltimore are the same.

Nothing as complex as urban decay can be traced to a single cause, or even a single set of causes. But there is a predictable association between uncontrolled spread of a metropolitan area and downtown decay.

Social services, policing and community reconciliation are important keys to dealing with the problems we face in downtown Winnipeg. But in the absence of planning and land measures, they will remain Band-Aids on sores that are bound to spread. The care of the social community must go hand-in-hand with measures to sustain the physical community.

There are many possible sets of measures that can play a part in better management of city growth. We can look to Toronto and Vancouver; Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis; and many European cities for ideas that will necessarily have to be adapted to our circumstances.

Since the problem is a metropolitan one, neither Winnipeg nor any other municipality can deal with it on its own. Necessarily, the provincial government will have to be involved.

To anyone who has paid attention to the way North American cities have developed over the past generation, there is a bleak inevitability about the events of the past week. We are part way down the road to decay, and there is no question where we are headed. The only question is: How far will we go?

Christoper Leo teaches political science and urban politics at the University of Winnipeg.