3 mini newsletters in 1.
A short list of things I’ve been thinking about lately.
Good morning! It’s been a few weeks - I hope you folks kept warm through the -40C snap and are keeping cool through the +14C snap. Weird times.
I’m writing this with 4 fewer wisdom teeth than I had prior and, after a pretty gnarly recovery period, am slowly getting back up to speed (not including a fun post-op infection I’m nursing right now). A small word of advice to anyone out there - do not wait until you are an old man to get these things removed.
Today, I wanted to write a quick(ish) hits style newsletter - a list of 3 things that I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last couple months. These things don’t really have a grand unifying theme - moreso just interesting and concerning observations that I don’t think I can make interesting enough as individual newsletters, but together, might be worth your time and attention
In no particular order:
1. Why are there so many empty commercial spaces downtown? And why are they all so expensive?
Realtor.ca’s map function doesn’t do a great job of portraying it (the little dots multiply as you zoom in) but I’m sure if you’ve spent some time downtown, you would have a hard time fighting me on this one.
I had a meeting at the KPMG building on Monday and stopped at Ritual to get a coffee first, then just walked up a few blocks past Victoria - I counted 8 large storefronts with FOR LEASE signs in the window and there were likely more that I missed on upper levels or behind multi-property entrances.
The wild thing is that a lot of these spaces are LONG TERM vacant and I can’t help but wonder who is footing the bill on these properties? I know there’s some tax magic to be done on running losses and without putting too big of a conspiracy hat on (and even moreso because I’m not a real journalist), I just cannot understand how there’s doesn’t seem to be any incentive to fill these spaces OR drop their prices OR maintain them to a standard where they become appealing?
I say this as a small service-business owner who operates out of his basement’s spare bedroom - it breaks my heart. Myself and one of my colleagues in the freelance space have been searching for over 2 years now for something that fits our pretty modest needs (and a relatively healthy budget) and despite these vacancies, we’ve hit only brick walls or wild figures on spaces that fall short of our needs.
And I guess it’s just weird it isn’t talked about more? Or there doesn’t seem to be a ton of political will to pull or bend levers to incentivize these property owners to do something - I know we learned in the Fall that Mayor Yu owns one of the most ramshackle properties down there and so I guess maybe I can understand why the topic is terse.
2. A lack of interest and a lack of options creating a lack of interest and a lack of options.
We’ve talked about this in a few different contexts on here but it’s something that is always weighing on my mind. I saved this Tweet a few months ago because it was pretty close to home for me and harkened back to 2021 when my fiancé and I were on the hunt for a house.
Both of us being very open to multifamily housing but finding the options outdated, lacking sufficient space/privacy, and speaking broadly, falling under our pretty modest list of things we were looking for (relatively modern, room for my business, a small backyard, space for potentially growing a family, etc) - we ended up landing on a single family house in (on??) the Hart.
The problem here is that, by doing so, we have become a +1 on the “PG only wants single-family dwellings” pivot table and when the City goes to report on demand, it can’t really factor in that myself (and many of my millennial friends) are wide open to multi-family dwellings but the options here are really lacking.
And so it becomes this recursive loop - it appears the demand for single-family is high which puts incentive on developers to build single-family, etc, etc. I know most Canadian cities suffer from The Missing Middle (great video - highly recommend watching) and we’re right on track with our development. The reason this is always on my mind is that it’s such a hard cycle to break and requires a pretty bold initiative to put supply before demand, almost in a leap of faith that demand will arrive - a risk not a lot of developers are open to.
This also isn’t just a housing thing - you can see this recursive loop in many challenges the city lives with - protected bikes lanes not being a priority because there isn’t a large commuter population of cyclists here (because the bike infrastructure sucks and no one feels safe enough to cycle), transit numbers being low (because the transit system doesn’t meet a lot of basic needs so people just buy cars) - it’s a turtles all the way down kind of situation.
3. The City taking a toxic positivity approach to the state of downtown.
For folks that have followed me on Twitter (or even long-term newsletter readers), it’s no surprise that I’ve taken issue with some of the City’s messaging. Ultimately, I’ve come to the conclusion that they really believe that this fun, sassy tone is the way to go and I’ve just had to surrender my internal cringe to it.
I use this tweet as an example of this specific brand of toxic positivity that exists alongside that fun sassy tone and it’s an example of something I haven’t quite been able to surrender to. It’s not just this tweet, it’s a theme I’ve noticed in a lot of their responses online in response to people’s feelings about downtown.
Adam Grant does a good job at describing this “organizational toxic positivity” and I think is summing up why I find this attitude to be so irksome:
In hard times, urging people to stay positive doesn’t boost their resilience. It denies their reality. People in pain don’t need good vibes only. They need a hand to stay steady through all the vibrations. Strength doesn’t come from forced smiles. It comes from feeling supported.
I should also side-reference a past newsletter that outlines the kinds of downtown problems I’m talking about here, not the societal collapse that is also happening in tandem to those problems.
And this is not me suggesting we throw up our hands and abandon ship on our downtown or pull the plug on marketing campaigns promoting downtown. I’m trying to say there’s a more careful way of messaging their support for downtown that isn’t just “I know we created a downtown where there’s basically nowhere to sit, no trees, poor walkability, no protected bike lanes, decaying business facades, no points of interest, few street patios and third spaces but guys why aren’t you going downtown and enjoying it???”
This tone is problematic because it feels like a shift of the blame of the state of downtown on to us - not the decades of poor planning, mismanaged budgets (largely associated with eternal sprawl), and this ongoing cycle of paying for really nice plans and consultations and then ignoring them. It makes me fear that they don’t see the problems too.
I go downtown and support these businesses almost every day, not because *the vibes are actually secretly good and we just need to go enjoy those vibes* but because there are truly excellent businesses down there and I feel for the owners who are trying so hard to exist in spite of it all.
I just really want to emphasize again, this doesn’t mean we can’t try to excite people to go downtown and shop/eat/partake in business - I’m just asking for there to be some care in that messaging when it comes from the institution that owns a lot of the responsibility for its current state.
I hope that makes sense.
Alright alright alright. That’s it for today and for this week. I’m going to go rest my chipmunk cheeks on the couch and enjoy some nice mushy mashed potatoes and a Boost shake.
As usual, I want to end the newsletter with a recommendation (or a local thing I think is cool) and this one is a sincere shout out to a friend of mine and his side hustle of custom stained glass.
His name is Erik and he made me the greatest gift a man could ask for - a stained glass Mr. PG who has a very slight mania in his eyes that I just love.
You can follow Erik and his beautiful work here on Instagram and shoot him a DM if you have any custom orders in mind.
To go with the poorly built multi-family dwellings, the lack of mixed zoning makes it even less appealing. Other cities with multi-family dwellings usually come with other perks, like a walkable neighbourhood. Cafes, restaurants, grocery stores all accessible on foot... When PG does it, we seem to cram in a lot of townhomes in an area where you're still heavily reliant on cars (tabor and 5th, the end of 22nd, foothills and 15th come to mind).
If the City is serious about higher density living, we need to have mixed zoning.
Even the developments along highway 16 between Ferry and highway 97 were a swing and a miss. Apartments on one end, crap strip mall on the other end. why couldn't there have been stores/cafes on the first levels, and apartments above?
This article in the Walrus blames speculation perpetrated by wealthy owners as one reason downtowns have so many empty buildings. One solution may be to lobby council for a vacancy tax.
<https://thewalrus.ca/how-empty-storefronts-are-killing-our-neighbourhoods/>