Calls for action grow as Winnipeg emerges from record year for vacant building fires
150 fires in vacant buildings over past year in Winnipeg, says firefighters' union president
Winnipeg is in the middle of its worst winter ever for vacant building fires, and calls are growing for the city to crack down more on problem properties while also trying to address the need for more affordable housing.
Community advocate Vivian Ketchum lives near an apartment on Gertie Street that burned last year, and a few blocks from a house that caught fire on Bannatyne Avenue in April.
"[Homeless people are] desperate enough to get in here especially during the winter time, they're looking for warmth, but this is a fire waiting to happen," Ketchum said outside the three-storey boarded-up home on Bannatyne, which had broken or open windows on more than one floor.
"This is a problem easily solvable if we put all our heads together."
One way the city has tried to solve the issue is to make owners of vacant buildings pick up the firefighting tab when those spaces catch fire while sitting empty for long stretches of time.
Fires at empty properties are some of the most dangerous firefighters can face, and they faced twice as many last year as they did the year before.
The president of the firefighters' union says "it's been the winter from hell" in terms of vacant house fires.
"This current winter that we are in has been the worst by far," said Tom Bilous, president of the United Firefighters of Winnipeg.
The city had 125 fires in vacant buildings from January 2023 until the middle of November. The official end-of-year total is not yet available, but Tom Bilous said it's 150.
That record figure far surpasses 2022, which set the previous record with 84. There have already been a dozen this year, said Bilous.
Crews routinely attend fires multiple times at the same vacant properties. On Wednesday, they were called to a vacant apartment building on Furby Street, just south of Ellice Avenue, which was burning for the fifth time in less than four years.
The last three happened while it was vacant.
The city adopted a bylaw in 2023 that makes property owners responsible for the costs of fighting fires in vacant buildings in order to spur them to properly secure them from break-ins.
WATCH | Vivian Ketchum talks about dealing with derelict buildings:
The owner of the Bannatyne home in Ketchum's neighbourhood currently has three open violations against them under the city's vacant building bylaw.
Ketchum said that policy was a good step. Now, she would like to see the city pick up the pace on enforcement so homes that are salvageable can be renovated to address affordable housing shortages.
"Let's do this a lot faster. This [Bannatyne] house is going to get demolished, more fires … and be a waste," she said. I'm worried about the lives being lost because of these fires and vacant houses."
Bilous calls the policy a good step too, but he would also like to see uninhabited buildings torn down if they're unsafe and the rubble cleared away in a timely manner.
"I think politicians need to say, 'OK, enough is enough,'" he said.
Premier Wab Kinew on Friday repeated a pledge from December to give municipal governments the power to expropriate derelict buildings from problem landlords, then fix them and turn them into social housing.
"The vast, vast majority of landlords are doing good work ... [but] we do have some problem landlords in the city," he told Downtown Winnipeg BIZ members during a question-and-answer session.
"There are vacant buildings that, if we're in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, should just be looking at finding a way to bring online as housing units. I don't know how we justify having boarded up buildings with multiple units potentially accessible."
WATCH | Leaders look for answers after rash of vacant building fires:
The far more preferable step is always going to be one where the government works with landlords to find rental units on the private market that can be used to help get people off the street, Kinew said, and his government intends to increase the budget for social housing to do that.
"But in those kind of more extreme cases, where we see dozens of housing units sitting idle, I think we do need to take a stronger step."
Coun. Sherri Rollins (Fort Rouge-East Fort Garry) said she is glad the premier is interested in "leaning into the issue of vacancy and seeing how the legislature can help."
Rollins, chair for the standing policy committee on property and development, said the city is pressing forward with a "tough as nails approach," alluding to the 2023 bylaw targeting owners of vacant buildings.
She said the premier could amend Manitoba's expropriation act as a means of addressing barriers to action at the city level.
"People are pointing to the vacancies and saying we're in a housing crisis, we just can't afford to hold properties like this," she said.
"I know that Premier Kinew is interested in housing, I know that he sees like we do at the city the vacancies, and the fires that are sometimes related to vacancies and dereliction, as problematic, and that we are listening to each other."
Benjamin Simcoe, housing procurement co-ordinator at Spence Neighbourhood Association, said he knows the city has felt "hamstrung by the province" for the past several years and he is hopeful that will change.
"We've gone through many winters where we have watched many buildings burn," he said. "We wouldn't be in this position if there had been stronger action against some of these bad landlords earlier on."
With files from Darren Bernhardt, Cameron MacLean and Meaghan Ketcheson