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This article was published 22/8/2016 (1491 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Earlier this month, Kate Downing, an attorney living in Palo Atlo, Calif., caused a stir in urbanist and tech-industry corners of the Internet when she posted an open letter in which she tendered her resignation from the city’s planning commission.

Tired of having even the most moderate recommendations for increased density ignored by Palo Alto’s city council, Downing was not only resigning, but she and her husband, a computer programmer, were leaving the city because they could not afford to raise a family there.

Palo Alto is one of Silicon Valley’s many municipalities unwilling to add housing density to the booming region, making housing options increasingly unaffordable to just about everyone. Modest bungalows that would not be out of place in East Kildonan or St. James are routinely sold there for $3 million or more. Hemmed in on three sides by Stanford University and Google and Facebook’s respective headquarters, Palo Alto’s council and a few homeowners still pretend they are a quiet suburb on the way to Santa Jose.

The housing imbalance that plagues Silicon Valley is a long way from Winnipeg, where house prices north of $1 million are the exception rather than the rule, but even here, there are increased tensions between new demand for new housing and transportation options and a reactionary wish for things to stay the same.

Things are not staying the same. Last week, the City of Winnipeg released a 25-year growth forecast wherein the city’s population will increase by more than 200,000 people by 2040. The report noted an aging population and decreased affordability will see the construction of new multi-family housing units outpace single-family housing by an increasingly wide margin.

The nostalgic vision of Winnipeg the provincial town of 15-minute commutes and unchanging, solidly single-family neighbourhoods will only seem more quixotically outdated with every passing year. This is not just a matter of economics and demographics, but of geography. Within a generation, Winnipeg could run out of big swaths of open land at its edges. With no current desire for another Unicity-style amalgamation of surrounding municipalities, Winnipeg needs to start thinking about where projected growth should go.

Development that is gradually occurring downtown and in established residential neighbourhoods is essential and should continue at a greater pace, but this alone won’t meet demand.

Large, obsolete industrial sites, such as the former Canada Packers site in St. Boniface, are easy options to identify, but tougher to plan. Redevelopment would require agreements over who pays for new services such as roads and sewer lines and whatever soil remediation is needed. These sites may one day be the only places inside city limits left for conventional master-planned subdivisions, but many of these sites are far from existing transit and commercial services, making them less desirable to many potential renters and condo buyers.

A second new opportunity for infill exists in plain sight on the many under-built regional corridors that windingly radiate from downtown, such as Portage Avenue, Main Street, Henderson Highway, St. Mary’s Road and Pembina Highway. Originally used as fur-trade trails, these corridors later served as streetcar routes, linking distant suburbs to Winnipeg’s central business district.

In the postwar years, these corridors were refashioned as highways to funnel motorists in and out of downtown as quickly as possible while also attempting to be commercial streets in the new automobile age.

Today, many sections of these corridors compose a dreary cacophony of urban form that seemingly came about through decades of selectively applying design or traffic standards. For visitors, they give the impression Winnipeg is an ugly and treeless town of jerry-built strip malls. For commuters who travel them every day, they quietly reinforce a sense of civic self-loathing and parochialism.

To attract development, regional corridors have the capacity for higher densities than what is politically feasible in residential neighbourhoods, or along smaller commercial strips such as Corydon Avenue. To attract residents, a moratorium on new strip malls and driveways would create a more welcoming and safe environment while also improving traffic flow. Vehicle traffic could be calmed, or at least buffered, with wider sidewalks, trees, protected cycling lanes and safer crossings at intersections.

In a traditionally sprawling city burdened with a yawning infrastructure deficit, infill development has slowly become the preferred policy option in recent years. It will one day be the only option, and Winnipeg will have nowhere to grow but up.

Robert Galston is a master’s candidate in the city planning department at the University of Manitoba.