New mayor must make downtown priority

Opinion

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This article was published 15/10/2022 (838 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Downtown is a place that belongs to everyone. Each municipal election, we look to the candidates vying to be elected to council or to be our mayor to promise a plan of action for improving our downtown, for making it more like the vibrant, walkable central cities we like to visit around the world.

This time, the successful candidate for mayor is facing an even more daunting challenge: to reconstruct the fabric of our downtown after the ravages of COVID-19.

Directing more of the city’s new housing development to the downtown may be the single most impactful action our city can take to help downtown recovery. Not doing so would mean ignoring the changing patterns of work in our city resulting from the pandemic — changes that are likely to be sustained, affecting the economics and image of our central city.

Downtown Winnipeg has more than 70 per cent of Winnipeg’s office space, and in 2019 roughly one-third of Winnipeg adults worked downtown. During the pandemic, we saw most of those workers stay at home, leaving our downtown buildings, shops, parks and streets nearly empty.

In turn, we lost the sense of safety and camaraderie among strangers darting to meetings, grabbing a lunch, lingering after work for a concert or a game. And in the desolation, we also saw more clearly the hardships facing the most vulnerable citizens of Winnipeg, with poverty, homelessness, mental illness and drug use becoming more visible on our streets and in public spaces.

This has exacerbated a negative perception about the vibrancy and safety of our downtown. And, when coupled with the shift in where people work, it could set in motion a downward spiral that will be hard for the downtown to overcome without bold action.

In September, a Probe Research poll found roughly two-thirds of workers have returned downtown, but about one-quarter of those are working with a hybrid model — some days at home and some days in the office. Ten per cent of workers say they will not be returning downtown, opting for 100 per cent remote work, and most believe that some level of hybrid work is here to stay.

This means tens of thousands of people are still missing from our downtown on any given day. And while it’s starting to feel better, our downtown streets still aren’t the same.

So how do we replace all those people, to bring back life to downtown Winnipeg? This is a familiar question, one asked by city planners and policy-makers when we saw in most cities an exodus of shoppers to suburban malls in the 1960s and 1970s.

At the time, lessons were derived from cities that maintained vitality despite the major shift in where people shopped: downtowns with a higher density of people living in them, 24 hours a day, continued to succeed. It became conventional wisdom in city planning.

And during the pandemic, the results have been the same: downtowns with more people living in them have fared much better, despite the major shift in where people worked.

Winnipeg was on this path of understanding prior to the pandemic. For the last two decades, an ebb and flow of programs and tax incentives were put in place to reduce barriers and lower the cost of housing construction downtown. This has resulted in more than 4,500 new homes built downtown.

But at an average rate of only 225 units per year, it is only a small percentage of the new housing units built every year across the city. A much bigger, more sustained shift to the downtown will be required to replace the office workers we’ve lost, to bring back our retail storefronts, and to achieve the hustle and bustle that great central cities possess.

We judge other cities by the vibrancy of their downtowns. There is no reason to believe Winnipeg is not judged by the same metric by tourists, by job recruits and by companies looking to set up or expand. In 2021, Probe Research found 70 per cent of Winnipeggers are worried about the future of downtown and feel government should invest in its recovery.

The mandate for the new mayor is clear. And where new housing gets built in our city is one of the biggest levers they will hold when fulfilling that mandate.

Angela Mathieson is president and CEO of CentreVenture Development Corporation.