POVERTY, DRUGS SAD PART OF LIFE IN INNER CITY

Report Calls For More Cash To End The Cycle Of Despair

When an eight-year-old boy offered to sell her crack, Christina Paul
knew something was very wrong in Lord Selkirk Park.

"I said to him, 'You should be in school, kiddo. If you were my kid,
you'd be in school,' " said Paul, who used to live in the Manitoba
Housing complex and returns there every day to check on her mother.
"People can't walk around here at night or during the day. There's too
much drugs, too much violence, too many drunks, too many hookers. I
can't even walk down the street without someone asking me 'how much?'
"

Lord Selkirk Park, a 1960-style collection of row houses just west of
Main Street and south of Selkirk Avenue, is known as "the development"
or "the D." In a report on the inner city released yesterday, Lord
Selkirk Park was singled out as the neighbourhood with one of the most
"entrenched and intractable" crime and poverty problems. Some
residents quoted in the report recommended the government bulldoze
"the D" and start fresh.

In its "state of the inner city" report, the Canadian Centre for
Policy Alternatives revealed an inner city with plenty of new and
successful community groups working to improve housing, combat crime
and set up training programs using a myriad of government grants.

But the CCPA's report says the inner city is still gripped by a cycle
of unemployment, poverty, scarce and substandard housing, gang and
drug problems and a marginalized aboriginal population. Among its nine
recommendations, the left-leaning CCPA wants the province to spend
more on subsidized housing, especially rental units for very
low-income people. It also wants existing Manitoba Housing stock
repaired and renovated, more money for adult education centres and
targeted funds for day cares in the inner city.

Christine Melnick, the provincial family services and housing
minister, said yesterday the province's latest contribution to a
$35-million tri-partite housing fund was meant specifically for
low-income housing and that the province routinely tries to spend more
on maintenance of Manitoba Housing units. But she conceded more must
be done to combat inner-city poverty.

The report's authors also rejected a recent suggestion by Coun. Gord
Steeves that the city may have to abandon community policing in order
to target scarce resources to hard-core crime such as gang activity.

Instead, the report calls for more beat police officers who can get to
know a neighbourhood, earn the trust of residents and identify
problems before they become crimes.

"We don't agree with the reactionary approach to crime," said Shauna
MacKinnon, director of the CCPA's Manitoba office. "It's all about
prevention."

Paul, a mother of three who fled Lord Selkirk Park when gang members
began trying to recruit her son, said a beat officer patrolling the
housing complex is the only thing that will help curb vandalism,
muggings and the drug and sex trade.

The CCPA's report suggests that Lord Selkirk Park has seen so little
improvement because it is a neighbourhood of transient, troubled
people who have been placed there by social services or Manitoba
Housing, creating an artificial community of people who move out as
soon as possible. And, many seniors in the D are scared to venture out
alone, making it tough to foster the kind of community activism that
has helped revitalized the Spence neighbourhood or West Broadway.

But resident Jennifer Seaton says some in the neighbourhood have begun
to get active. At a recent meeting of a neighbourhood advisory group,
Seaton met her next-door neighbour for the first time, and a
collection of more than 40 agencies working in Lord Selkirk Park have
recently agreed to be linked together through a neighbourhood resource
centre.

"We're a community but we don't have a sense of community," said
Seaton, a 23-year-old mother of two toddlers who is now in a
job-training program. "There are so many different issues to deal with
that I'm pretty sure that will take a long time."