Introduction
We have all heard the saying: “God only helps those that help themselves” and it has never been truer than in today’s economy.
In Canada and the US, national governments have announced massive stimulus and rescue packages but their efficacy has yet to be proven. Personally, I think the word ‘massive’ is misplaced. In Canada, the GOC (Government of Canada) is planning to spend around $30 billion over the next two years to get the economy going. That sounds like a lot of money but in Canada’s economy that works out to about 1% of GDP per year—big but not really massive. The US stimulus is proportionately bigger but still how much impact will it really have? No one knows. The US situation is more critical but we will just have to wait and see.
I think that former Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s approach to the last Canadian recession in 1993 and 1994 was more nuanced. He announced a (relatively puny) $2 billion infrastructure program. Then he went around Canada and made hundreds of speeches saying: “Canada is No. 1. The UN says so.”
Between his sunny optimism, his confidence in the nation and himself, the leverage that the GOC got from his modestly-sized infrastructure program, the financial discipline he and his Finance Minister Paul Martin put in place for the GOC itself, he reduced a $42 billion deficit to zero in three years, set the stage for lower interest rates and higher growth rates, placed Canada into a national budget surplus and trade surplus for the next 12 years.
Recessions are largely caused by psychological factors often compounded by economic shocks—oil price changes, war, real estate bubbles, other asset class bubbles, financial engineering, fraud, inflation, deflation, bad monetary or trade policy and poor leadership. Guess what, the US has had ALL of that for the last eight years. It was obvious some time ago that running an annual US National Accounts deficit of $300+ billion and a trade deficit of the same proportion was untenable.
For most of us, there will be little impact from the so-called rescue packages. Maybe a few tax cuts here and there. But in Canada, the stimulus package passed by the GOC with the co-operation of the Liberal Party of Canada depends in large measure on the co-operation of the Provincial and Territorial Governments together with municipalities to match Federal spending in tripartite agreements.
Speaking of the City of Ottawa, our Council can’t agree on anything so the likelihood of Ontario, the City of Ottawa and the GOC doing anything that will benefit Ottawa is quite small in my view.
Let me finish my introduction by telling you a joke that a Priest once told so I feel alright about repeating it here.
A man is warned by a police cruiser: “Get out of here! The flood is coming.” The man says: “No way, I’m not leaving my home. Jesus will save me!”
The next thing you know he is on the second floor of his home with the flood waters raging below. A boat comes by: “Hop onboard! You’ll die if you stay here!” “I’m not leaving. Jesus will save me!”
Finally, he is on the roof. A helicopter flies by. “Climb up the ladder or you’ll drown.” “Jesus will save me,” he shouts back.
The next thing you know he is at the Perley Gate. St. Peter looks up and sees the man approaching. A surprised St. Peter says: “What are you doing here?”
“I thought Jesus would save me?”
“Gosh, he tried to, three times!” a frustrated St. Peter replies.
Urban Catalysts
I have been asked as an urbanist how we can revive main streets in small and large towns. Many Main Streets have been hard hit by competition from massive big box stores. One small Ontario town has practically nothing worthwhile left on its main street—it has a girlie club, a pool hall, a XXX store, about a dozen vacant and boarded up retail locations, a liquor store, a pawn shop, a GOC Coast Guard base that closes up shop at 5 pm and is in any event gated and set back from the street so it forms another ‘Black Hole’ on the street.
On the second and third storeys, there are a few residential tenancies but many of the buildings are vacant. Some have not been heated in years.
Some municipalities believe they can revive their main streets by repopulating them with retailers or by adding paving stones, street furniture, sculpture, flower pots, statues, fountains, classic street signs, kitschy lamps, speed bumps, banning cars, allowing cars, allowing on-street parking, banning on-street parking, narrowing roadways, expanding roadways, putting in medians, taking out medians, putting in street trees, making roads one-way, making them two-way, allowing all turning movements, banning left hand turns, allowing more road cuts, restricting ingress and egress, implementing setbacks, going back to zero lot lines, reducing building heights, building pedestrian enclosures to protect people from the elements, removing glass enclosures to unveil the storefronts hidden behind them, what have you.
None of this works worth a darn. I just can’t see how a local hardware store can compete against the giant big box chains or how a general merchandise store can compete against the ‘everyday low price’ regime of a major US-based chain of superstores.
This strategy must fail and will fail.
There is ONLY one way to address the problem of main streets in North America—and that is to have people living there.
What makes Manhattan such a success commercially is that there are 300,000 to 400,000 people living in a tight confined space. Want your local coffee shop to be a success? You need people with some resources living within a ten minute WALK.
If you want your main street to work, you need to get people to live there. They need to be able to rent or BUY their accommodation. There are a lot of people who want to live in a place where it is possible to walk to a store, buy a litre of milk, grab a coffee with friends, WALK to their friend’s house for dinner, set up a small business to work from home, have a couple of employees work with them without fearing a knock on the door by a By-Law enforcement officer telling them that they can’t have any employees working in their apartments or condos.
I hear from local Councillors all the time—“We can’t do that! We need more commercial assessment and if we let people live there, our tax base will erode.”
I would recommend trying hard to get rid of the undesirable uses and work with building owners and the local community to put in place totally flexible zoning that would allow some of the old stock of commercial buildings on these traditional main streets to be used for residential uses (including the storefronts at grade—I would rather have a bohemian couple with a kid living in a storefront than a boarded up place or a XXX shop), offices, shops, studios, co-ops, …
I would recommend mandating:
1. People can live and work at home. We make more intense use of our structures that way (by using them for work and as homes) and add life to our towns after 5 pm and on weekends.
2. People can shop nearby.
3. There is a mixing together of folks from differing socio economic strata.
4. People build close to the road.
5. They have front porches.
6. Roads are narrower.
7. Densities are higher.
8. Elders can stay in their communities.
9. The gardener, nurse, school teacher can find affordable housing in the neighborhoods where they actually work.
10. In-home apartments and granny flats and apartments above the garage increase property values not decrease them.
11. Live-in students are tolerated.
12. Apartments above shops are built.
13. There is a tolerance for diversity.
14. Problems are solved at town hall meetings and not by confidential 1-800-RAT-LINES.
15. Schools, government offices, post offices, libraries, places of worship get the best sites in town not the worst.
16. Roads are grid based.
17. Every road is two way.
18. On-street parking is allowed.
19. Left turns are permitted.
20. Connectedness is the underlying principle of town design.
21. Everyone suffers some through traffic so that no one suffers all of it.
22. Gridded systems prove that the slower the individual vehicle goes, the faster you move traffic over the entire system.
23. There are no beggar-thy-neighbour policies whereby you put speed bumps, no through traffic, no left turn, one way and other self defeating traffic management policies in place.
24. Rediscover vertical transition lines that differentiate uses as you proceed up the building elevation.
25. Care for the public room as if it were your own private space—don’t tolerate litter, graffiti, petty crime (or any other form of crime), when stuff breaks, fix it right away.
26. Start a festival.
City building is essentially a positive exercise by positive people. According to James Howard Kunstler (Home from Nowhere) if we want great cities, burn the zoning codes and allow your city to grow organically.
Today, people drive 100s of kilometres and take a ferry to park their cars to wander around a place like Nantucket. Why? Well, they like the walk-about feel of the place. They like to see people sitting on their front porches. They like that there are sidewalks and that houses are close to the street and each other. They like the fact that there are trees overhanging the street providing shade in the summer and some protection from winter winds.
Main streets are incredibly valuable places—for some reason that absolutely defies explanation—we just can’t build ’em like we used to. I mean it would be a simple matter of measuring how street patterns and the built form were constructed in the 1930s and then just duplicate that, more or less. But we just can’t seem to get away from our zoning books and its rules long enough to allow that to happen. So if we can’t do it, let’s at least not rip down a three storey street-fronting near-heritage building on main street and put a mini-mall with front yard parking in its place.
And when we do have new development on main street, let’s remember how they built towns in the 30s and do our best to come as close to that as we can. Let developers build more density and let them mix in residential and commercial uses. Relax height limits—unless you can get people living there, no main street will work worth a darn.
You can pack a lot of density in buildings that are three to eight storeys high. Scandinavian countries have shown with the right urban design, you don’t need 40 storey towers to get to the critical mass you need to make city services and commercial uses viable and cost effective.
And you can make five to eight storey buildings quite human scale if you step back floors 4 to 8 from the street. This gives the impression that the buildings are three storeys and allows more light at grade.
Remember—if people don’t live there, the community is not viable.
The NCC
The National Capital Commission (aka, the No Commitment Club) has been trying for years to make Sparks Street (a pedestrian only street/mall) in Ottawa work. They have tried just about every useless (and costly) remedy that I described above, all to no effect (other than to drain taxpayers’ wallets and purses).
In 1985 (!), I proposed to the NCC that if they wanted to revive Sparks Street, they had to do five things:
a. convert some of the vacant or underused office space nearby to residential uses;
b. allow some of their land holdings in the area to be developed for residential uses;
c. give a density bonus to developers to add a residential component to their office towers;
d. open the mall to car traffic again;
e. add a charity casino.
Of course, they did none of these things, opting instead to rebuild the mall at a cost of several millions with new pavers, street furniture, fountains and other lipstick-type stuff.
26 years later, Sparks Street is still pretty much a useless urban wasteland.
Stratford, Ontario
Walk around the old town of Stratford, Ontario, home of the internationally acclaimed Stratford Theatre Company, and you see a quaint little town with elegant eateries, cute toy stores, neat bed and breakfast places, linear parks along the waterway, comfortable apartments above shops, gridded streets where every block unveils a new vista and a brand, spanking new office tower with mirrored curtain wall that comes down to grade.
The whole block is dominated by this modern abomination. It is like the town allowed someone to build a black hole on this lifeless part of their core.
When there are no vertical transitions and there are no doors onto the street, when people can’t see into a space and even if they could, they would have no access to it anyway, you have created a dead space. At night, it is a dangerous place to amble by. It’s just occupied 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. You might as well as make this the HQ for your local motorcycle gang. It would have more life even if it would scare away everyone except chapter members.
Help Yourself
So if your main street needs help, start by helping yourself:
1. Form a BIA.
2. Make sure it is staffed by volunteers—keep its cost to a minimum.
3. Get the local business community, community association and town Councillor onside.
4. The BIA should encourage a team approach—an affirmation of the character of the street and the community.
5. Relax and change your zoning code.
6. Do the real things and forget about lipstick.
7. Be flexible in your approach—if something is working, do more of it. If it isn’t, change.
8. Get the town to lower or grant a holiday on costs for new construction such as development charges. For example, when former Ottawa Mayor, Jacqueline Holzman, pressed her Council to rescind Development Charges for developers of residential units in the downtown core of her city, building activity there took off.
9. Become neo-urbanists and embrace the principles of neo-urbanism as expressed above.
Copyright. Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, B.Eng. (Civil), M. Eng.-Sci., PhD., Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa; Founder, Ottawa Senators; Real Estate Broker and Mortgage Broker, Partners Advantage GMAC Real Estate, Brokerage. Ottawa, Canada February 2009.