Michel Durand-Wood: Building an Affordable City for Everyone, Forever

Stuart Murray  0:00  
This podcast was recorded on the ancestral lands, on treaty one territory, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe Cree, Oji Cree, Dakota and the Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Metis nation.

Amanda Logan (Voiceover)  0:20  
This is humans on rights, a podcast advocating for the education of human rights. Here's your host, Stuart Murray,

Stuart Murray  0:31  
Michelle Duran wood, better known online as Elmwood guy, is a Winnipeg based writer, community advocate and the author of You'll pay for this how we can afford a great city for everyone forever. He also is a blogger that writes Dear winnipeg.com and is my guest on humans on rights today. Michelle, welcome to humans on rights.

Michel Durand-Wood  0:56  
Hi, Stuart. It's great to be here.

Stuart Murray  0:58  
So Michelle, just for those listening, give us a sense of who you are, introduce yourself a little bit that might lead us into why you decided that you thought it was important to write the book you'll pay for this, how we can afford a great city for everyone forever?

Michel Durand-Wood  1:13  
Well, that's a pretty long story, but yeah, I mean, I always, I mean online I use, I use the moniker Elmwood guy on purpose, because I really wanted to put out there that I'm just a guy from Elmwood who just, you know, wants, wants a better place for for my family, my neighbors, my friends, my my kids, my eventual grandkids, sort of, you know, to put it out there that, that anybody can can start making change. And it started for me at least, probably a decade ago, and just again, noticing things. You live in a you know, downtown, adjacent neighborhood, inner city neighborhood, you see the decline in a lot of city, city facilities, and you see that there's a little bit of neglect. And you ask yourself questions, why is this happening? And for me, that that was sort of the beginning of it, that I decided I wanted to do something about it. It kind of led to, I think it was, you know, I'd been working in my neighborhood for a couple of years, and, you know, trying to make improvements. And it was 2018 when we did the plebiscite on port of Germaine, where, to me, having done the work, done the research, and educated myself on city planning, on transportation, all kinds of stuff, how it all fits together. That, to me, was an obvious of course, we had to open it. Of course, it was a yes. But when the vote came back, 65% No, or whatever it was, two thirds No, it was, for me, sort of the beginning point of, Oh, wow. There's a lot of people who don't know all the things that they need to know to make this decision. And so I was took it upon myself to say, well, I'm going to, you know, try to educate my fellow Winnipeggers on on all of the factors, so that, you know, we may not agree on on the end decision, but at least that we're starting from the same set of facts and information. And so I started my blog, and yeah, over the years, it has grown. It now reaches, I mean, 10s of 1000s of people every time and

Stuart Murray  3:14  
internationally, right? Yeah, most of them pay internationally also, yeah, that's the

Michel Durand-Wood  3:17  
thing that was shocking to me, because I was writing about Winnipeg. To Winnipeg, right? Dear Winnipeg is exactly what it's called. I'm writing letters to Winnipeg. But what came out of it is essentially that, you know, most cities in North America are facing the same struggles and and so a lot of people were reading the stuff I was writing about Winnipeg, but they were seeing their own city in what I was writing. And so, so now, like probably two thirds of the people who read my blog are from somewhere other than Winnipeg, which is really, really cool to see. And so, yeah. And so it has built up over years and years. And then last year, Great Plains press here in Winnipeg approached me with a project that you know I was very interested in, and didn't take me long to say yes, so yeah, that's where the book came from, the way they pitched. It was a TED talk, but in book form. So something that it was easy and accessible, something could get through in a Sunday afternoon, right? And have a good grasp of, you know, a particular, particular topic, right? In my case, it was, was sort of municipal finance is, you know, nominally the topic, but it's really, you know, money is what ties everything together, right? Because, you know, cities, they provide, you know, they provide all kinds of really critical life sustaining services, like clean drinking water, like, you know, sanitation, like public safety, all of these things that are critical to to, you know, living a prosperous, healthy life. And in addition to, like, a lot of of quality of life stuff, right, like libraries and and recreation. And critically, they need to do this, not only today, not only tomorrow, but they need to be able to do it, you know, sort of forever, right, for all time, and for them to keep doing that. Like all that stuff costs money, and so we need to be able to know as as citizens, as as residents of our city, is our city able to pay for these things, not only today, not only tomorrow, but for all time? And so to me, like that the finance, that finance part is what just sort of ties all of that together, and it's what sort of colors our sort of decision making process, because it's easy. It's easy to have an opinion on bike lanes or an opinion on transit or an opinion on forestry or or zoning, but if that conversation is happening sort of disconnected from the financial repercussions of those decisions, and the decisions aren't super valid or valuable anyways, in, in how we approach our city. So, you know, imagine going to a restaurant and the menu has no prices, right? Everybody's going to choose the lobster or whatever, right, but, but, you know, when the prices are on there, then, then you make different choices, right? The prices affect your preferences. And so that's kind of with the blog and with the book is, I kind of want to explain how that money flows, how it all fits together, so that we can have discussions about bike lanes, about transit, about zoning, but being conscious of what those long term financial impacts are in those decisions. And so maybe we'll have different maybe we'll make different choices. Maybe we won't, but at least we'll be making informed choices. And

Stuart Murray  6:21  
I love the way they kind of phrase that Michelle, because we are going to obviously get into the book and talk a little bit about some of the specifics in the book, but before we even jump into that, you know, the fact that you're so passionate about Elmwood and passionate about, you know, how Elmwood flows into what is Winnipeg, just, you know, share with us A little bit of your your personal journey, your background from, you know, through you know, were you did you grow up in Elmwood? Is Elmwood your kind of, your your hood?

Michel Durand-Wood  6:48  
No, actually, I moved. I moved here as an adult about 20 years ago, okay, and, yeah, I had moved. I always, I sort of grew up outside the city. Then my, my young adult years spent in the sort of south end of the city, Fort Garry San, vital kind of area. And then, yeah, it was 2006 I think that I moved, I moved to Elmwood. I bought a house, about a duplex in Elmwood. And, yeah, I don't know, I don't know what it was about the area or the people, or what it was, but I just, I got connected to it. And I, you know, I just, I kind of felt, found my found my place, I think, and, and it was funny because, you know, I moved here, met my wife, we got married, and then shortly after, my brother moved to Elmwood, two blocks away from from where we live. And then six months after that, my other brother moved in two blocks in the other direction, and then a couple years later, then my parents moved so we all live within like, three blocks of each other, which is really great, because now all of our kids, you know, the cousins, can, like, just walk to each other's place or go to the park together. We can, they can go to grandma and grandpa's. So it's just a really nice, really nice setup, and it feels like, feels like a small village, almost, right, which I think is, is part of, you know, in what I've seen is, is part of the built environment. Is how it was built. It was built, you know, over 100 years ago, that's how we built cities. That's how we built neighborhoods. Back then, it was meant to be this self contained village and they, you know, they say that about New York, that it's a, it's a city of a city of neighborhoods, right, right, right? And that's sort of the thing. We have a lot of those very same bones in in most North American cities, including in Winnipeg. And you do have that sort of neighborhood pride. You go to the forks, and they have all of these, you know, neighborhood specific merchandise that you can buy, T shirts or mugs or whatever. And I think there is that, that little sense of of neighborhood pride, what's where, where it becomes important, I think is. And what I found is the more you travel your neighborhood, on foot, on bike, you know, not protected by an outer shell that you're really touching and feeling your neighborhood and interacting with the people, the businesses, the the pets, the the nature that is in your neighborhood, it really connects you. It really grounds you to that place, and it gives you kind of a sense of ownership, or a sense of stewardship that you wouldn't otherwise have. And you want to, you want to, you want to take care of it, and you want to contribute to it, right? And I think for me, a lot of it came from that as just walking my neighborhood, seeing the people that are in there, seeing the needs, seeing, you know, oh, this been this bus bench is broken, or this branch needs trimming, or, you know, this person needs help with, you know, whatever it is, right? When you, when you see your neighborhood up close like that, it's hard to it's hard to not want to do something right, and so,

Stuart Murray  9:48  
but on that point, though, Michelle, there are a lot of people who might have this conversation, but they actually, I mean, this isn't throwing shade. I'm just suggesting that a lot of people have the conversation, but they they don't. Do anything they choose. I don't know. It's, you know, who am I going to talk to? It's a lost cause, you know? I mean, I'm just one voice. I mean, all of those things you, on the other hand, sort of said I am one voice, and I'm going to make that voice loud and proud and heard. What drives you? Where did that come from? To make you that kind of person that you see a bench that is a transit bench. You may never use it yourself, but you know that somebody does. And if it's not fixed or it's not something somebody can sit on, you obviously look at that and say, I have to alert somebody. Let's do something about it. Get it done. Where did that come from?

Michel Durand-Wood  10:35  
The narrative might be that, oh, there's just some people that are special, like that, but I completely disagree. I think it's something that you learn. And you know, the way I see things, and I a lot of people see things, is that, yeah, there are a lot of, a lot of issues out there that, you know, the problems seem like mountains. They seem unsurmountable in a lot of ways. But you know, how do you climb a mountain? Or how do you, you know, when you climb a mountain one step at a time. How do you how do you eat an elephant, you know, one bite at a time. And I think we have this tendency in in our society, to want to completely solve something, whatever the issue is, and so we'll study it, and then we'll try to figure out what the complete and perfect solution is to it before we do anything. And that approach means that we often end up doing nothing because the problems are too complex or too big, whereas a different approach is, well, I may not get it perfect, I may not completely solve it, but I can do a little bit right? Maybe I do one small thing and it makes it 1% better. It didn't solve it, it, you know, it's not perfect. But if I do that tomorrow, again and again and again and again, eventually we're making real progress, right? And at the same time, you don't have to be perfect because you're because you're acting in such small increments. You can readjust as you go. If something hasn't, you know, unforeseen circum you know unforeseen outcome, you're like, Oh, that was the wrong thing. No problem. We'll just redirect. And I think when you act in that way, when you when you start thinking in smaller steps, and start thinking of like, well, what can I do? Well, really, just humbly observe where the needs are, identify what the next smallest thing you can do, and then do that thing, and then repeat, right? And the next smallest thing really is the next smallest thing, right? So what can you do? Yeah, the smallest thing. So whatever you you can do, do that thing, and then just keep going. And what you find is when you act that way, is that you have small successes, right? And they give you a little hit of dopamine, and you're like, oh, yeah, that was good. I did make a difference, right? And it keeps you going to keep doing the next, the next smallest thing and the next smallest thing. And so I think it's something that is learned right through experience, that you can, you can have an impact. And even beyond that is that you don't even realize the impact you have. I actually wrote about this last month on my blog about the unknown impacts that people can have. You don't know the impact you'll have on someone else, to the point that the people who truly were probably the beginning point in getting me to to blog didn't even know that they had been that influence, right? They're just people who were at in the exchange district one evening in 2018 handing out pamphlets about why it was a good idea to open port Germaine to pedestrian crossings. And it was seeing them there being like, Wow. They're just people who decided to do something that inspired me to do something, right? And I said, I'm going to start writing about this. And then, you know, I get emails all the time about people who say, Oh, yeah, you've inspired me to do X, Y or Z. But the reality is, I didn't inspire them. It was, you know, those two people I had met in the exchange district who, through a chain of, you know, Butterfly Effect, inspired, inspired that, you know, that end result. But you'll never know what that entire chain entails, right? So even the smallest thing that you do, you know, may not have the impact you were looking for, but it may have some other impact somewhere else, at some other time that you could never predict.

Stuart Murray  14:11  
I don't want to, you know, we're going to get to talk to the book, you know, good to threaten twice already, but I just, you know, I'm just curious on a couple of things, Michelle, you know, when you talk about something that you know what, how you personally looked at, how you could try to make a difference. And as you said, it's something you can learn. You use the term, I think it's something you can learn. How do you you know, there's a difference between learning and the difference between teaching. So when you say is something you could learn, just give us a kind of a sense of what did you mean, or how do you interpret that when you say, wait is something you can learn. Learn how

Michel Durand-Wood  14:47  
well it's learning by doing right? Because when you take that first step to from not doing something to doing something even it's a very, very small thing, not only you change. Changing the world, changing your neighborhood, changing your place, you are changing yourself as well, right? It your your actions have impacts on yourself as much as on others, and on on your environment and and that change is what is, you know, essentially learning, right? You're learning that when I do these things, I can be impactful, or I enjoy these things, and therefore I'm going to do it more, right? And then again, a lot of stuff like I've all of the stuff I've done is been through experience, and then, and then through doing stuff, you meet other people who have been building experience, and you learn from them as well, right? And so you end up making connections and and just building this entire repertoire of knowledge and of experience that you then, when you meet somebody else who's starting out, where you started out, you have something to offer them to, to help them out, right? So it's, it's kind of an ecosystem, yeah, that builds on itself. Yeah,

Stuart Murray  16:00  
nice. I appreciate, I appreciate, sort of where you kind of take that perspective. So thank you for sharing that. Hey, you wrote a book. You wrote a book. You'll pay for this how we can afford a great city for everyone forever. How did you come up with that name?

Michel Durand-Wood  16:18  
Well, that was a lot of back and forth. My wife is, is my my editor. She she goes through everything I write, and we have a lot of discussions all the time. That's one of the things in our household. We, you know, we're always talking about this kind of stuff, how we can improve the neighborhood, how we can improve the city, and just talking through different ideas and trying to figure things out together. And, yeah, the title of the book came out sort of the same way. I mean, I'm new to the book writing thing in the whole industry, but I don't know if you know this, but the title and the cover and the book jacket, that's all done months before the book is even written. And so, yeah, so we were, this was really out of, like, you know, deciding on an outline for a book and deciding on a goal for what we were trying to and what I wanted to say out of that book. And, yeah, it was, of course, meant to be a little cheeky and a little bit a little bit funny, but also, you know, with the subtitle to talk about, like, the idea that, you know, we want to be sustainable in our choices, and we want to be inclusive, and that, you know, cities are for everyone. And I think it's, you know, Jane Jacobs is, you know, the cities are, the cities are at their best when, and only if. They're created by many hands, right? And that's what we are. You know, this is what I'm trying to sort of convey, but from the financial perspective, so that we can understand the repercussion, repercussions of our of our preferences or our choices. Yeah, so

Stuart Murray  17:48  
let's, let's talk about some of the issues in the book and and as I was saying before we hit record on this, Michelle, that that you'll pay for this, it doesn't explicitly focus on human rights, but the implications in the book are deeply relevant to them. And I was thinking about three or four that we should touch on the sort of the right to equitable public services, housing, mobility, participation in local decision making. So let's kind of just break a couple of those down. From your perspective, the right to equitable public services. And again, I'm, you know, there's a human rights lens there, but you're also looking at it from sort of the financial perspective. Again, I want to put this in, I thought it was a beautiful way that you kind of phrased the notion that, you know, we are basically co we're not taxpayers or customers. We're cohabitating in this environment, and those are my words. I think you've got a better way of saying it. But when you look at sort of those questions from that perspective, share the right to equitable public services. Why? Why you think that's important and and how can we make sure that we have those forever? Yeah?

Michel Durand-Wood  18:59  
Well look, yeah, that's kind of the thing. I think I describe it in the book as we're the CO owners of a cooperative nonprofit organization that is the city, and it exists to provide services to us that we couldn't provide on our own. Right, necessarily, right? So can't all afford to have our own fire truck, or we can't, you know, can't all afford to, you know, have have our own hockey arena or whatever, what have you right? And so, and so, yeah, so we sort of pull our resources together in this nonprofit organization that is the city to provide these services to all of us, right? And we contribute, you know, membership dues every year through our taxes, and we vote for a vote in a board of directors, which is Council, and this cooperative organization is there to provide services for everybody, right? That's, that's the goal. Problem is when we face financial struggles, which we have been for decades, and if we don't identify where that's. Coming from, what we've seen is the first place we start cutting is in those things that are, that are, you know, quality of life, and eventually, you know, critical to life, we start cutting right? I give the example of the park by my house. Elmwood Park had a full time gardener from its inception all the way up into the mid 60s. But then, you know, we had to start cutting into all of these things. And so now we have parks that aren't as nice as they used to be. And then eventually that led to other cuts and other cuts, and just a steady decline, cutting into, you know, recreation services, libraries, etc. And now we're at a point where we're cutting in so deep into all these services that you know, we're having necessarily impacts on everybody, of course, but what we find is that these impacts aren't spread out equally, right? It's always the most vulnerable. It's always the ones on the lower end of the income ladder that are impacted the most when, when we start cutting into these services. And so there's definitely, you know, an equity lens to this, that that that when we don't have our finances order in order, we absolutely are taking away from the most vulnerable. And what we're seeing nowadays is that we've, we've gone so deep that there's, you know, when we talk about the homelessness crisis, you know that that doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? It, then we have to look at what we've done as a city that has contributed to that complex issue. And so, you know, want to talk about housing, you know, you know, the housing, zoning, transportation, all of those things fit into what kind of housing we build and where or not, right? And so, you know, we have to understand, again, from the financial perspective, what does it mean when we say that this neighborhood cannot have anything but single family homes, and what does it mean when it is completely separated from services from from recreation services, from employment centers, from from grocery services. The way we've been building our neighborhoods, you know, since the 50s, essentially, where we separate all the uses out, which is completely municipal control. It's municipal bylaws that we decide that. What does that mean for somebody who maybe can't afford a car. What does that mean for their economic opportunities about being able to get to a job? What does it mean for their family to be able to get groceries or not? What does it mean, you know, for all of those kinds of things, right? And these are all municipal choices that we make, right? And that over decade or years, over decades, work as a slow grind, right? And worsening the problem over over time, to the point that we get where we are today, right? It's not the only thing that we say, Oh, we fix these things, and we'll, we'll have solved homelessness, right? We'll have solved poverty. No, that's not that simple, but it is absolutely a contributing factor that we have control over, that we should discuss and see how we can, we can fix, right?

Stuart Murray  23:04  
Yeah, so when you're in your book, I mean, I think you you really sort of, you know, talk about, how do you ask the right questions and and, you know, how do you get to that point understanding that, you know, you're looking at this with a financial perspective, and we talked about kind of a human rights lens, but on the financial perspective. You know Michelle, when you look at this again, I'm not asking you in this podcast to solve housing, but I am wondering, however, is to say, I mean, you've identified some of the concerns, some of the issues, which is fair, but what would you say if I'll just say the mayor of Winnipeg, who currently is Scott Gillingham, if called you and said, you know, Michelle, I've been reading your blog. I'd love to meet with you. Can you give me some thoughts, or you, can you give counsel, or just the, as you say, kind of the board of directors, some thoughts on how we can better approach from asking better, intelligent questions around the financial structure, the issue of housing.

Michel Durand-Wood  23:59  
So, yeah, I mean, that's, that's, it's hard to say in one short podcast, but, but there's a, there's actually, there's a lot, and there's some of it that we're already doing, right? Because what's good for the city financially is to have a lot of development tightly close together, because that creates a lot of taxable value. At the same time, it requires much less infrastructure to service. And infrastructure is actually the big blind spot that we have as cities. It is what costs us the an enormous amount of money, and is what costs us because, because a road has a lifespan of, you know, 5060, years. A pipe has a lifespan of 7080, 100 years. Once we make that decision, we're committed to it for a very, very long time. And so when we make these kinds of massive mistakes where we have more infrastructure than we can afford, it's going to have long, long, long term impacts. And so what we want to do is design a city that is a lot more efficient from an infrastructure perspective, which means we need to put more stuff close together. So. That we have more taxable value and less infrastructure, so more income, less expense, right? And and what that looks like from a human perspective is neighborhoods that you can mostly walk around in, because you can't condense a city and still have everybody do every trip in a car every single time, right? There's just not enough space for that. And so we have to have more people that are meeting their needs on foot, on bike, on transit. And then, of course, we need to to mix these uses together so that you can get your groceries on foot, right? You don't have to walk three kilometers or five kilometers or whatever to bring some groceries home. You need to have that, like, close to home, within a within a reasonable walking distance, and then, and then, of course, you know, you have to have multiple types of housing so that all kinds of people can be in these neighborhoods. And so that means, yeah, single family homes. Of course, it means, you know, high rise apartment buildings, yes. But it means all of this sort of, what is missing from our housing arsenal is, is a lot of these duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes. If you look in in our older neighborhoods, in the Woolsley, in the West End, in the Elmwood st Boniface, what you find is that we have this mix of these small scale types of housing solutions. You know, a couple of units. My own house is a single family home, but upstairs in one of the bedrooms, there's what we can tell is remnants of what used to be an upstairs kitchen, right? That used to be allowed. We have, you know, in our in our in our sort of quest to control everything, we've put down so much regulation for everything that we've built neighborhoods that can evolve. And as humans, we evolve. You know, our needs as we grow older change. They evolve as as you know, the economic cycle has impacts. We have different needs as technologies are developed. We have different needs. And we used to be we used to build cities that could evolve and adapt to that, right? So if the economy took a turn. Well, you could easily, you know, renovate the upstairs to make it a an income an income suite, so they could take a border in or something. You used to be able to do that, and then, oh, the economy gets better. Or your family grows and you need more space. Well, you turn it back into one unit. That was incredibly easy to do for a very long time, and right now it's very difficult. So we've taken some steps so that the zoning changes that they they approved a couple months ago under duress from the federal government, some would say, but that, you know, regardless of that, it is actually a good policy direction is to bring back that flexibility so that our neighborhoods can adapt and evolve over time. So that is, that is a big part of it, because we need to intensify our neighborhoods for the good of the financial good of the city, so they can pay for the services that we need. But also we need it to be adaptable for for everybody, to be able to to live in these in our neighborhoods, right? And so it's that that's part of the direction we need to be going. So there's more to be done. But like I said, we don't need to solve everything at once. We just only to keep going. Keep going every, every day, right?

Stuart Murray  28:05  
Yeah, no. And I mean, one of the things that you talk about in your book is infrastructure versus affordability, and you kind of just touched on it in this, in this, in your response to my question, Michelle, I guess the question you know is, when you look at, you know, you invest in roads, you invest in sidewalks, you invest in, as you say, infrastructure. It seems that the one of the concerns would be, and maybe one of the criticisms is that there is no sense that this is a 60 year lifespan, and during the 60 years, there should be some ability, potentially, to maybe set up a little bit of a savings to understand that at the end of 60 years, you may have to pour some money into that infrastructure versus just starting from zero. And you know, the simple things like sidewalks. You know the number of people that require mobility, that need sidewalks to get from point A to point B. But you know, some of them are decrepit, some of them are buckled. Some of them, I mean, they're just not the way they were when they were first built. And so, you know, one of the things that I wanted to kind of come back to, because you raised these issues and, and I think you talked a little bit about, you know, in their in your book, sort of learning to ask the right questions. So when you you know teaching those citizens that might have either be listening to this podcast, Michelle, or read your blog or read your book, when you talk about teaching citizens how to sort of ask the right questions, what what are you looking for for them? What would you like them to somebody said to you, Michelle, how do I Well, tell me how I should ask the right questions. What should I be doing?

Michel Durand-Wood  29:42  
I talk about it in the book. Most people are not accountants, right? Like, I think it's point 5% of Canadians are accountants. 99.5% of us are not right. So I do go into, like, just the very basics of, you know, capital versus operating, just so that people can understand what we're talking about. But, yeah, I. At its core is, I think what it comes down to is, like you said, when we build a piece of infrastructure, it comes with obligations, right? You can't just build a new road or a new pool or a new anything, and just, you know, we, we're pretty good at finding the money to build something, but then we really suck at finding the money to maintain it, right, and and so we have to think about this, these pieces of infrastructure, almost like a debt, right in that when once we build it, as soon as we build it, there's going to be ongoing maintenance, right? There's going to be just like a debt you borrow money, there's gonna be ongoing payments. The key difference, though, is that a debt, once you reach the end of the term, your debt is paid and you're done. But with infrastructure, it just needs to be replaced. You know, the debt clock starts over again, right? It's just a never ending debt. So once you build a bridge, you got to maintain it till the end of its life, and then at the end of its life, you're not done. You have to completely replace it and then start over on the maintenance for another cycle and another cycle, another cycle and and, you know, we've, we have this idea that infrastructure we talk about infrastructure investment, right? We use the word investment instead of infrastructure spending. But, and so by calling it infrastructure investment, it kind of has this halo of like, oh, this is, this is good. We should go to putting a lot of money into this, right? But we forget that infrastructure investment, and it is an investment. But infrastructure investment, like all investments, there are good investments and there are bad investments, right? You can invest in a Ponzi scheme. That's not a good thing, right? And so and so, that's kind of the idea. We got to start asking more questions about, you know, anytime we are adding more infrastructure, is this a net good, right? Are we? Is this going to increase our ability to pay for services, or is this going to ultimately decrease our ability, keeping in mind that we have to maintain it forever and then also periodically completely replace it. So if we have a billion dollar road expansion, well, that's not the end of it, right? We then have to maintain it for 25, 3040, years, and then we're gonna have to spend that money all over again to replace it, and then we're gonna keep going. And so the idea is, is there going to be enough income to sustain that for as long as we need to keep going forever?

Stuart Murray  32:17  
Is there something, yeah, I mean, just so Michelle on that. Is there something that you know, somebody listening to this might say, you know, Michelle, I agree with everything you're saying, but at some point, is there a balance between, when you look at infrastructure and affordability, that the affordability piece starts to find its way so that it's no longer an affordable city to live in. Because, you know, there's so much being looked at from the infrastructure. Do you have sort of share some thoughts on on how you see that balance?

Michel Durand-Wood  32:51  
Yeah, so there's a couple of things there. So one is, what we find is when we look at the infrastructure that actually pays for itself, and not only pays for itself, but generates more more gains to the city than it actually costs. Those tend to be the things that are very human centered. They're the stuff that that enables a lot of people to meet their needs on foot, very close by that stuff is very, very economically productive. Now, what we find, and when we look through North America, places that look like that. They are currently very, very expensive. But it's not because that's an innate trait of them. It's because they're very desirable. We as humans, we all want to live in places like that, and so they, you know, we end up pricing out everybody of those places, but in a city that focuses itself on just doing that for everybody forever and continuing to grow. In that way, every place becomes as desirable as the next. And so you don't have a place that prices people out. You have a place that meets people's needs, which is actually where we want to be headed, right? And again, on an infrastructure basis, those those actually end up being the most affordable, because they end up being the most productive, and the cities that are able to provide the most public services, right? And so nobody needs to have, you know, you have a lot more public pools that are have a lot more free hours. You can have a lot more stuff that, you know, that is available for people without it costing them something from privately right that it is a public good, a public amenity for everybody, versus when you build in a way that is more expansive, that requires a lot more infrastructure, what you what you end up finding is that you have a place that just gobbles up all of its resources trying to maintain the stuff it already owns, and eventually not Even keeping up with that, and has no other resources to provide any public services to anybody.

Stuart Murray  34:45  
So, Michelle, did you? Did I understand sort of from your background? Did you have, like, a personal with a community, sort of involvement with a community center that you you know that you wanted to stay open, that did not stay open as that, did I get that? Right?

Michel Durand-Wood  35:01  
There was a community center that closed in my neighborhood, and it was a couple of years before I really was awakened, I guess, to these kinds of issues. And looking back on it, I can, I can see, you know, all of the same narratives around it, and I can understand it, but I was not particularly involved in that one at the time, but throughout the years, yeah, I have been involved in, in my the Glen elm neighborhood association. I've been involved with the Chalmers neighborhood renewal Corporation. I've been involved just at the neighborhood level, in all kinds of capacities, but no, not a particular community center. No, yeah.

Stuart Murray  35:35  
Okay, no. Fair enough, because I just was going to, sort of, you know, when I go through your book, you know, the notion that you you really want, you know, talk about sort of advising or encouraging people participation in local decision making. You know, we've seen in the city, and I'm again, this isn't a podcast to sort of, you know, kind of attack city councilors or the mayor or anything. There's no percentage in that. But I would, I'd love to get your thoughts. Michelle on, you know, when a pool, say a community pool is going to be closed, and the comments come back and say, Well, there's two pools within, you know, x kilometers of each other, and we can only keep one. And I know some of my this goes back to St Norbert. I know some of my friends that were involved and said, but as citizens, can we allow us to sort of try to see if we can make this work for a two year period, you know, and kind of working with city councilors, and at the end of the day, they were Shut, shut out, and the pool was, you know, you know, has disappeared. Thoughts on, on those sorts of processes from your perspective, when you see that, how would you say to somebody who's been trying to fight to keep a pool, but in the city looks and says, we just can't afford it.

Michel Durand-Wood  36:47  
Here's the thing, with pools in particular, but with everything, one of the things is to remember is we're not here to lay blame our city. And again, most cities in North America are kind of at various stages of the same kind of financial crisis. So this predates this current Council by decades and decades and decades, right? We're talking like 80 years here of decisions that have led to this. And of course, infrastructure decisions have that kind of lifespan. And even we're not even looking at blaming prior councils because everybody who came before us was just doing the best they could with the information they had, making decisions that they thought at the time were were good, right? We now have the benefit of hindsight to be able to highlight, oh yeah, this was a mistake. This was a mistake, but, but the goal is not to to lay blame. The goal is we're here now. So what can we do about it? Right? And it's it's critical to understand how deep we are, because it's easy for a lot of people to think, well, then the province or the Feds need to help us. The issue is, this problem is so big that even the province and the Feds don't have that kind of money, because they get their money the same place, the city gets it, and that's us, right, right, as a community, as a society, and there's not enough money in that economy to pay for what we need to pay to maintain what we have. Now, when it comes to pools, for example, is a good example, because when we look at pools, we are looking at things in a very siloed kind of way, right? So the Community Services Department is looking at the pools that it owns, and it's looking at the money that it has to to operate and maintain those, and they come to the conclusion that we don't have enough money for X amount of pools, so we now need x minus one pools. And so that's, that's, you know, from that sort of closed up lens, it's easy to think like, yeah, that's that's a natural, you know, outcome that, of course, that's where we want to head with that. But when we zoom out to a city level, when we look at all of the services that the city provides, what we find is that two small pools that people can walk to cost less money than one big pool that everybody has to drive to. So is that a fact? That is a fact because roads, roads and pipes, right? So roads are the things that connect everything, and the pipes go everywhere the roads go are the single most expensive part of our infrastructure. They make up 88% of all of our infrastructure, right? So 12% is everything else, all the pools, all the community centers, all the arenas, all the civic buildings, all the fire trucks, busses, laptop computers, like everything 12% 88% is roads and pipes, right? So anytime we make something that everybody has to drive to, we are adding more road space because we need more capacity, and that is extremely, extremely expensive, way more expensive than a pool. And on top of that, those people need a place to park when they get there, so we have to set aside all this land that is not paying taxes for people to store their vehicles, which pushes buildings further apart, which requires more roads and more pipes, right? So this is a never ending cycle, so it actually. But when we look at it on the big, big picture, when we try to see everything that feeds into it, that's what we recognize, is that small neighborhood pools that that people can walk to are a lot less expensive for a city than large ones that, yeah, fascinating, yeah,

Stuart Murray  40:14  
thanks for sharing that so So Michelle, you know you, you've got a tremendous passion. You've obviously have a tremendous understanding of the financial requirements that that go with infrastructure and affordability. And you were involved in trying to get Portage and Main reopened. It was open, as we know, and Mayor Juba made a decision, closed it and and there was a it was this interesting. I'm going to ask you this question. It's a bit of a pointed one, because, you know, there was a plebiscite to see whether we should open Portage and Main and, of course, you recited the numbers accurately, that you was just kind of trounced by people who probably never come down to Portage and Main but got a chance to vote on a plebiscite. So so let me kind of come at you and ask you this question. I'm sure you've been asked it by numerous friends, family, neighbors. Is politics an opportunity for you to sort of show your leadership in some of these areas? Because I just want to come back and say that the difference between leadership and plebiscite is either keeping Portage and Main closed or opening it. And I just think that plebiscites, you know, allow people who really aren't engaged in in in in the issue to cast a vote without a lot of education in it. And I think if somebody leads and lead strongly with a very common, well thought out. Again, not everybody's going to agree we get that, but I think people are looking for people who want to communicate thoughtfulness with a sound understanding of the finances, the logistics, all of those elements that go into it, the mobility, all of the things that you mentioned. Did you ever give any thoughts to that you don't have to make bread? Breaking news on this podcast? By the way, I

Michel Durand-Wood  42:05  
am much more interested in the policy than politics. But I mean, I mean, I guess, in its most rudimentary form, I guess any action you take at the community level is politics. Politics comes from the Greek, Greek word polis, which is city, if you are interacting with your city, if you're working in your neighborhood, then you are, I guess, doing politics, which I guess, in that sense, I am. I am not going to run for council, because that would require me running against my wife, who is running for council right

Stuart Murray  42:41  
now, so that would be an interesting, you know, that would make for another interesting book, yeah,

Michel Durand-Wood  42:47  
but, yeah, but, but, like I said, I think, I don't think making change requires being on council. I think people can have a lot of impact without being on council. But, yeah, your point of of, you know, public site versus Council making decisions. It's true that we do elect this board of directors for us because they will be able to have access to more information than we will, yeah, so that we can trust and trust them with the, you know, making informed decisions on things. Because, like we said, the more we know about things, and what we know about things cost. It changes our opinions, right? And I think, I think a major struggle, not just in Winnipeg and a lot of cities, I think, is communication. I think a lot of cities struggle with communicating with the public, not only what they're doing but but why they're doing it, right and the reasoning that came behind it. Because there's a lot of decisions that get made that people get angry about but once you talk to them about it and say, well, actually, there did you know that you know this and this and this came into it? You know, a lot of times they're like, Oh yeah, actually, that's a good decision. Or even if they disagree, if they know how you came to it, they know what the trade offs were, they can be like, Well, okay, I would have made a different decision, but I can see how someone might have made that decision. And, you know, they're, they can be more accepting of it, right? I think, I think people just want to feel respected and and that, you know, people are actually, you know, taking everybody's best interests at heart, which is generally the case. It's just, I think, not, not communicated in the most effective way. And so, yeah, and you can understand, again, how finances affects that as well, right? Because you, you know, need more money. Where do you start cutting? Well, maybe in communications. Maybe in, you know, you have an extra planner or an extra engineer on staff who's, you know, the only job is to put out press releases or put out, you know, public education campaigns. And you're like, well, we don't have the money same as the pool decisions, right? When you look at it from a departmental standard perspective, you're like, well, we gotta get rid of one pool, or we gotta get rid of one planner, or we gotta get rid of one com staff, and over years and decades, you end up with what we have today, right? So yeah, it's again, recognizing this. Didn't happen overnight. This is, this is a very long term.

Stuart Murray  45:03  
So Michelle, just before we get ready to hit the as they call it, the old off ramp, on our conversation, two questions. One is, have you given some thought when you talk to people about, you know, encourage people to participate and really, to give them an understanding of just rudimentary financial as you say, 95% of us, point five, are not accounts, and that's fair. But you know, one of the questions always is that when you get into the crunch, the so called budget crunch, it's all about cutting. And it just seems to me, have you ever given some thought and given some ability to maybe shape some some conversations with people who say, Look, before we cut, let's look at how we can actually increase revenue, how we can sort of make revenue a generator versus always going to the cut. Let's look at how we can sort of grow thoughts on that, that you might have been able to share with people.

Michel Durand-Wood  45:54  
Yeah, we I have been and yeah. The reality is we have to do all of that. We have to look at increase, increasing our capacity, our financial capacity, our revenues. We also have to look at cutting expenses. But cutting expenses, where we tend to focus is in the operating budget. We tend to look at like, how do we shave a couple of hours off the library opening times? Or, how do we, you know, down here we're looking where, where we're our major savings are going to happen in our infrastructure, right? So when a road comes up for renewal, if instead of having three lanes, we make it two, two lanes in a bike lane, we're saving money, right? If we even, even if we have two lanes, and we make it two lanes that are a foot narrower, so that we can make the sidewalks wider, that's that's saving money over the long term, right? So that's, that's where we're gonna have the largest impact, right? And and then at the same time, there's a lot of stuff that happens outside of the budget that has budget impacts. So when we talk about these zoning discussions, where stuff can be built, what kind of stuff can be built, that's, those are decisions that cost no money, right? We're just changing bylaws, right? They cost no money, but they have a financial impact on on our, you know, our long term future. So there's a lot again that goes into it, and I think none of us are accountants, but that, I feel that there's, there's, there's still a kind of a bare minimum that we are able to learn that actually will have a massive impact. You don't have to become an expert on it. You just have to know a couple of key concepts, which is what I try to do in the book, is try to explain that, you know, those two couple of key concepts, you can be sort of an informed owner of this municipal corporation that we own. And then we can, you know, together, we can have informed discussions about what our decisions mean, right, right? And again, we may not agree on everything, but at least if we can start from a point where we're we're starting from the same financial reality, then then we can go forward. Because the reality is, again, with these infrastructure, decisions have been made. They have impacts for decades, right? So even if we started doing everything perfect today. There's still some impacts that are going to come in the following years that we haven't felt yet, right? So things may even get worse before they get better. Fair

Stuart Murray  48:10  
comment, you know, fair comment. And normally, at this part of the podcast, Michelle, I would say, you know, if somebody was listening to this and wanted to get involved, you know, what should they do? Well, let me just answer that for you. They should go out and buy You'll pay for this. How we can afford a great city for everyone forever, a book that you've written, and it's a great read. It's a it's, as you say, it's a TED talk in words, which is fantastic. It's well done and and as I said, I had two questions. I've asked you one, my last question is, is Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wanted to have a chance to talk about in this podcast?

Michel Durand-Wood  48:46  
Oh, I don't even know. I feel like I've been talking so much. No. I mean, I think we covered a lot, a lot of ground. But I think if there's, if there's a key takeaway after they've read the book, if people still want to know where, where to turn. And, you know, I said, like, there's always something anybody can do, right? And maybe that is running for council, or maybe it's, you know, something else, but you know, if you don't know where to start, just go for a walk in your neighborhood and just observe and see where people are struggling, see where things need addressing, and then figure out what the next smallest thing that you can do to do that, to address that, does it need to be perfect? Does it need to be complete? What is the next smallest thing you can do to make it a little bit better and just do that thing, just do it, and then start over, right? And just keep doing

Stuart Murray  49:35  
it. I love it. And, you know, just to kind of put a bow on it, Michelle, you know, this isn't what you just said, really. And I want to kind of come full circle to the fact that this is a human rights podcast. What you just talked about was just, you know, treating human rights with respect and dignity by simply just walking through your neighborhood and seeing how you can interact, and, and, and I think it's, it's a great way for us to to end our podcast. So. Michelle, I just wanted to say thank you so much for jumping onto this human zone rights podcast. Thank you for writing a book, thank you for writing a blog, thank you for being passionate about Elmwood and Winnipeg and sharing it and unabashedly so, because we need more people like you to love our community, and I think we're blessed to live in Winnipeg, we have lots of issues, but the point is, is that we'll get through them as a community and and you've you've shared that. So thank you so

Michel Durand-Wood  50:26  
much. Well, thank you, Stuart. This is this was wonderful.

Matt Cundill  50:31  
Thanks for listening to humans on rights. A transcript of this episode is available by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode. Humans on rights is recorded and hosted by Stuart Murray, social media marketing by Buffy Davey, music by Doug Edmond. For more, go to humanrightshub.ca

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  50:52  
produced and distributed by the sound off media company you.