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Old Posted Dec 5, 2019, 4:55 PM
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esquire esquire is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LilZebra View Post
Listening to Geoff Courier right now on CJOB, and you know, its the same old same old. I remember Adler and Cloutier talking about the same topic "Do you feel safe in downtown Winnipeg?" ... has been going on since 1997.

Well, it's just been getting worse since the 90s.
Purely anecdotally:

-it felt like things got worse in the mid/late 90s...it was around this time that large scale downtown retail sort of petered out with the decline and closure of Eaton's and a bunch of storefronts, and Portage Place went downhill too as a retail destination. So the armies of old lady downtown shopping diehards mostly disappeared during that era, making the rougher element more prominent.

-it felt like things were improving a bit later in the 2000s as downtown residential very slowly started to take root... there were more people around and more programs designed to tackle some of the social problems.

-it feels like there has been another pronounced decline in safety and order on the streets over the last few years. I'm not sure if it's meth driven or what, but things feel more menacing than they were 5-10 years ago. Not dramatically so, but the trendline is moving in what I'd consider to be the wrong direction. Some things have been positive like TNS and the continued improvement of Old Market Square, but other areas have not been improving in a similar way and it's hard to imagine that this is not holding back downtown development as many people don't consider it an ideal place to live.

Anyway, that's a totally anecdotal assessment but I wonder if anyone else's experience meshes with mine?
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