Every community struggles with how to make its downtown core vibrant and attractive to both businesses and their customers. St. Albert has been dealing with that problem since the late ’70s and has had a number of incarnations of downtown improvement plans during that time.
Today, the city continues to battle with how to bring life and business back to its core. Taking a walk in the city centre, one can’t help notice the numerous empty storefronts and buildings. This has a psychological effect and leaves the impression of a struggling economy and of an area where businesses fail. That image can deter new storefronts as easily as higher taxes.
The city’s economic development office is working to fill those empty spaces, using some creative initiatives launched this month. Aside from seminars on leasing and investment, it is also working with the Northern Alberta Business Incubator (NABI) through the Gen Y CEO program in July. That program will task city youth to help bring residents downtown by a summer-long series of events.
In the end, whatever is done needs buy-in from both the business community and the public at large. Politicians don’t make communities, they simply help create an atmosphere where they can thrive. That means being adaptable. Strict controls and expensive changes without a tax base to support them are deterrents.
While it is a worthy goal to create a strong downtown business community, perhaps the strategies over time were flawed. In the late ’70s, council made the decision to clear the downtown of single-family homes in the hope a developer could be enticed to create a commercial centre. Later, when that failed to materialize, a subsequent council drafted a plan that outlined a downtown core resembling Whyte Avenue with coffee shops and boutiques. In fact, if your business plan didn’t fit the concept it wasn’t welcome and downtown business hoping to expand, actually left the downtown.
The city can’t drive business. Only the free marketplace has that kind of power. Trying to force St. Albert’s downtown to fit a certain image is a very difficult challenge. It can and has been done in cities including Vancouver and Chicago, but it is unlikely St. Albert’s downtown will ever have the appeal of either of those.
Successful planning concepts thrive on convenience and a variety of amenities that appeal to residents living nearby. St. Albert’s downtown competes not only with other commercial areas of the city, but also with Edmonton. That means to be successful there are difficult hurdles to clear, starting perhaps with encouraging higher densities to provide the customer base downtown business needs to succeed.
We need a healthy mix of residential and commercial space in the downtown, which comes close to being a community in itself – a place where one can live, shop and entertain. Projects such as the Grandin development, which will increase residential density, are vital to a vibrant downtown.
Realigning roads, adding pretty park benches and lampposts add value to the area, but only when significant numbers of people are walking the downtown will the vision become reality.
