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This article was published 31/3/2016 (1632 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

There is a growing consensus that infill development is a smart way for Winnipeg to grow. It supports local amenities, promotes active transportation, reduces car dependence, and offers housing choice. It is also seen as a key to reducing Winnipeg’s infrastructure deficit: the more people live in serviced areas, the less need there is for new pipes and roads on the city’s fringes.

As the city builds out to its boundaries, annexation of neighbouring municipalities remains politically unrealistic. In the coming years, infill development will not only be the smart option, but the only option.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS files The areas south of Corydon Avenue often resist change if it means changing the nature of the district.

In this discussion, downtown development gets much of the attention. Downtown is an easy place to support increased infill and density because it is a place where most citizens of Winnipeg do not actually live. Most Winnipeggers instead live in the many layers of established suburban neighbourhoods outside of downtown. Here, any modest attempt at infill development typically faces an uphill battle, and the many theoretical benefits of infill suddenly pale compared to more pressing practical concerns, such as parking.

Sometimes, even planning for infill faces opposition, as is the case in the tree-lined neighbourhood south of Corydon Avenue, in a wedge of Fort Rouge bound by Corydon, Pembina Highway, Grant Avenue and Stafford Street. Here, rezoning to permit the most modest forms of infill, duplexes and secondary suites, has sent some residents to the barricades.

While downtown’s residential projects, even in their speculative phases, get the attention, infill development has become commonplace north of Corydon Avenue and toward Osborne Village, where numerous Edwardian-era clapboard mansions have been torn down to make way for voguish low-rise condos. This trend is beginning to move south of Corydon Avenue.

Responding to this development pressure, and to help meet Winnipeg’s long-term planning objectives, planners are developing the Corydon-Osborne Area Plan. In order to make this new plan workable, the zoning of the neighbourhood south of Corydon would be changed, from permitting only residential buildings for one family (R1), to permitting residential buildings for two families (R2).

As if on cue, a sweeping NIMBY litany is being uttered by some area residents. Rezoning will draw greedy condo developers, they say, yet the neighbourhood will also become a low-rent slum. Secondary suites and duplexes will manage to destroy not only the area’s unique historic character, but also its amount of parking.

Even under its most liberal application, the Corydon-Osborne Area Plan would barely permit development south of Corydon to mimic building patterns established there in the first half of the 20th century. Design reviews, which would be required for any new secondary dwelling under the new zoning, would ensure new development is in keeping with the area’s built form.

While downtown and the Exchange District struggle to lure a supermarket and lessen the market gap between development costs and buyer demand, neighbourhoods like Fort Rouge are an easy draw, since they are a bundling of the seemingly contradictory consumer preferences for suburban character and urban amenities in close proximity.

Two-family zoning can create greater housing choices and affordability in the increasingly desirable neighbourhood. This means more young families do not have to choose between raising children in a busy highrise or a far-flung suburb.

Rezoning can also more easily allow aging residents to continue living there, even after occupying an entire single family house becomes superfluous. My great-grandmother, who moved to a sapling-lined Warsaw Avenue in the 1920s, was able to stay in the neighbourhood long after her husband passed away and her sons moved out, only because she rented a secondary suite in her brother’s house around the corner.

This simple living arrangement that allows an aging widow to remain in the neighbourhood she watched her children grow up in should not require a public hearing and a review by city council. Under the current R1 zoning, it does.

There is no question that Winnipeg’s under-built downtown should be a major focus for infill development and increased population density, but the discussion should not end there. Allowing existing, beloved residential neighbourhoods the opportunity to adapt over time would show that Winnipeg is ready to get serious about building upward instead of just outward, even in the parts of the city we actually live in.

Robert Galston is a master’s candidate in the city planning department at the University of Manitoba. He lives on Corydon Avenue.