Shopping for opportunities
City planners want to revitalize faded community business nodes
In 1945, the Second World War ended. In 1947, they struck oil in Leduc. And in the 1950s and 1960s, Edmonton boomed. In a time when not every family had two cars, when people sometimes walked to get the groceries or run errands, each new neighbourhood generally had a local shopping plaza.
Some were little strip malls. Others were mini-main streets, small shops next to each other. Here, you might find a bakery. A grocery store. A hair dresser. A pharmacy. A hardware store. A dry cleaner. A bank. Or some combination of the sort. Such little commercial nodes formed the social as well as the business centre of a community.
As Edmonton became more affluent and families with two or three or more vehicles became the norm, those little neighbourhood shopping districts suffered. People drove instead to larger malls and power centres to get their groceries and their medicine, suburban big box outlets that offered more selection and lower prices than the mom-and-pop neighbourhood independents. Little community commercial districts started to die. Banks were replaced by high-interest cash stores, pharmacies and flower shops by massage parlours or liquor stores.
Now, though, when there’s a public interest in renewing mature neighbourhoods, when the idea of a walkable community is becoming fashionable again, is it time for those faded neighbourhood business nodes to come back to life?
On Tuesday, city planners are expected to present a report to city council’s executive committee, outlining a pilot program to revitalize small neighbourhood shopping sites in mature communities.
Think of it as a Cinderella makeover. The city will choose three commercial clusters — communities where three or more businesses are willing to pool resources and work together. The city will provide the businesses with demographic analysis and market research advice, so that they can create join marketing strategy and campaigns. It will help each business grouping make its public space, streetscape, and pedestrian access more attractive. Each pilot site will receive $250,000 worth of support — with the option of an additional $30,000 in matching dollars for any facade improvements they want to make.
The plan still needs the official approval of executive committee and then city council. But Paul Ross, the city’s executive director for economic sustainability, says money is already set aside in his budget to fund the pilot study.
Ross says the program isn’t designed for commercial districts that have experienced a successful renewal, but for areas that are struggling to retain good tenants.
“The program is designed for neighbourhoods that could do with an injection of opportunity.”
The goal, he says, is to see whether strong community shopping districts can help to encourage more people to buy houses in mature neighbourhoods that need renewal.
Certainly, there seems to be public appetite for more and better local shopping. An online poll the city commissioned in 2011 found 90 per cent of those surveyed said they had a neighbourhood shopping area. Only 44 per cent said they shopped there regularly, while 49 per cent said their community commercial area needed “significant improvement.” What would make it better?: 78 per cent wanted a grocery store, 60 per cent wanted a coffee shop, and 55 per cent, a bakery. (Pubs and liquor stores came far down the list of desirable neighbours. No one, it seems, admitted to wanting a cash store or sex shop.)
But can public investment in helping community shopping areas really make a neighbourhood more desirable?
It’s a chicken-and-egg question. Often, local commercial districts renew on their own when families move back into a neighbourhood. This proposal is something of an experiment to see if it can work the other way round.
Amanda Meyer is the coowner of Acme Meats in an older community commercial district in Ritchie. She says no city incentives are likely to encourage businesses to move into a dying neighbourhood. But for a neighbourhood on the upswing, a project like this could work, provided businesses and landlords co-operate.
“Lord knows our little strip mall could use some TLC. It could work, as long as everybody got on board and everybody shared the vision.”
Ross says that’s the point of the pilot program: to see what works and what doesn’t.
“We need to start somewhere. We need to learn from this. If we had all the answers, we’d have all the answers.”