Dr. Seuss once wrote, “A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.” The Lorax, although a reminder for kids to be more conscious of their environmental footprint, is still proving to resonate since its publication in 1971.
If you look closely enough at Winnipeg neighbourhoods, you’ll see the overwhelmingly alarming rate at which green space is being taken over by urban sprawl. The park you may have played in during childhood has been demolished, or perhaps the tree you used to sit under was cut down to make way for yet another infill home.
Bland infill homes are devoid of personality and life, consisting of monotone beige and an everyday sameness that fuels my insomnia past the point of reality. Although, these infills may seem like a good idea on paper, as old homes require a lot of work and it’s a lot easier to tear down a home and build a new one than it is to fix one — or is it?
I view houses as their own entities, as beings with impressions and memories. When people leave homes, I think they take a little of that home’s lifespan with them. When a house dies, those memories are retained in the minds of the people who lived in it.
Some people say, when a goodbye hurts, you know you spent your time well. I see myself saying goodbye to more and more houses on my block in Wolseley — houses I used to play in, and the neighbours who have long since passed away, whose memories still linger in their old homes, whom I catch glimpses of when I pass by their old house windows — to make way for the everyday trudge of modern housing.
Infill housing is not a solution to the ongoing housing crisis. When you tear down a single-storey home in a neighbourhood predominantly of middle-class workers, students and hippies and build a three-storey million-dollar home, you are fundamentally altering the neighbourhood.
A few suggest that it is not the homes that matter but the people, and I agree with that to some extent. But when your neighbour used to be a 90-year-old woman who would make you cookies in exchange for mowing her lawn, and you get Jeff, the Porsche-enthusiast AI developer who races down the block past children and chains his pit bull to your neighbour’s fence, I’m going to say that was, indeed, not a good trade.
The big problem is that we don’t care enough to learn who used to live in these houses, instead we build new homes to list at a million dollars. I also agree that neighbourhoods need to change and evolve, but when the infills destroy trees, park their trucks on the boulevard and siphon water from the fire hydrants for these construction projects, that’s not creating a solution to the housing crisis, it’s fueling a deep problem.
“People make neighbourhoods” is true to an extent, but I think homes hold memories, souls, if you will. When we destroy homes to build multi-million-dollar houses for single families, often spanning three storeys, we create undue harm and push neighbourhoods toward gentrification.
Protect old homes before you decide to bulldoze.
