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This article was published 19/11/2014 (2133 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

BY any metric you dream up, the MTS Centre is the most successful sports-and-entertainment venue ever erected in Winnipeg, a city where megaprojects tend to be messed up just as often as they’re managed properly.

The downtown arena is among the busiest major concert venues on the continent. It’s sold out for every Winnipeg Jets game and was instrumental in ensuring the NHL returned to Manitoba.

It generates enough revenue and tax breaks for True North Sports & Entertainment to ensure the long-term viability of the Jets, albeit with help from gaming revenues flowing from the adjacent Shark Club.

No one should understate the importance of the 15,000-seat arena to the psyche of the city as well as to its economy. But there’s also no need to overstate the arena’s role in the revitalization of downtown Winnipeg, a multi-faceted effort that only hinges partly upon a single, $133.5-million megaproject.

When the MTS Centre opened a decade ago, this newspaper proclaimed the rebirth of downtown. This was hyperbole, although the exuberance can be forgiven in the context of the time.

The decade that preceded the arena’s opening was a tough one for this city, marked by the loss of the NHL, the disappearance of downtown retailers and the dawning realization a previous megaproject, Portage Place, was no silver-bullet solution for inner-city decay.

As Winnipeggers know too well, this city spent decades trying to bulldoze money into a bottomless downtown-revitalization sinkhole by erecting one monument after another.

There was the Civic Centre complex, a modernist ensemble of buildings assembled west of Main Street in the early 1960s. It’s now partly enshrouded in chain-link fencing and scaffolding due to crumbly cladding on the Public Safety Building and the structural failure of a neglected parkade.

There was the Manitoba Centennial Centre complex started later that decade, which flattened entire blocks east of Main Street.

There was the razing of Main south of Portage Avenue to create Winnipeg Square, which sucked some of the pedestrian lifeblood of the financial district underground in the 1970s.

There was the wholesale reconstruction of the North Portage district to make room for Portage Place in the 1980s. There was the reclamation of the blighted railway site at The Forks.

All of these megaprojects had both merits and drawbacks. None of them managed to "save" downtown.

That’s because the only way to permanently re-inject life into a city’s central core — especially one as physically massive as Winnipeg’s downtown — is to ensure more people actually live there.

The city started learning this lesson in the 1960s, when tax incentives sparked a wave of apartment construction in the Broadway-Assiniboine neighbourhood. But similar tax breaks weren’t offered for residential housing until the last decade, when the city and province created the first of two packages of development incentives.

The result has been a modest rise in the downtown population to about 15,000, up from about 12,000. Yet, this has been enough to encourage the anarchic and largely unheralded creation of more storefront-level, small-scale businesses that serve as the lifeblood of the economy in any modern North American downtown.

The MTS Centre has helped. The success of the arena and a different tax-incentive program offered Longboat Development Corp. — another Chipman-family business — the confidence to pursue the Centrepoint development across Portage Avenue. There are also downtown bars and restaurants that thrive off the intermittent business from the arena.

Game-day traffic, however, is too meagre to single-handedly drive downtown revitalization. Happily, other forces are at work, both on the megaproject and street-level scale.

Red River College’s Exchange District campus and the expanded University of Winnipeg campus footprint have injected humanity into separate sections of downtown. So have the modest numbers of new residents and the businesses that cater to them.

But it’s way too early to erect a "Mission Accomplished" banner, as too much of downtown remains a sea of undeveloped surface-parking lots and underused office structures.

What downtown needs is even more people, more foot traffic and more small-scale development. In order to make that happen, the city needs more thoughtful planning and better-focused policy.

The true saviour of downtown will be its continued densification.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

The MTS Centre has had 10 years to prove its value. Has it rejuvenated downtown? Join the conversation in the comments below.