STAY CONNECTED TO VIBRANTVICTORIA
WHAT'S HAPPENING ON CITIFIED VICTORIA
http://www.dv2020.ca
Vibrant Victoria gets a nice mention in the report, and a link from the website.
Read the rest of the report at http://www.dv2020.caDOWNTOWN VICTORIA COMMUNITY ALLIANCE
MAY, 2008
ANNUAL REPORT No. 3
This annual report embodies some interesting and important milestones: the fifth anniversary of the DVCA; the near-culmination of the Downtown Plan Review; the quarter-mark (four years) of the elapsed time between our first downtown conference and the year—2020—by which time we hope to see our collective, emergent vision for downtown come true; and, on the horizon, a Victoria municipal election.
Before launching into the details of downtown activities and trends, let’s reflect for a moment.
The DVCA was created in 2003 at the instigation of former City Manager Joe Martignago who believed that, apart from any City initiatives and programs, downtown would benefit from a higher level of stewardship, engagement and concern from a broad-based coalition of community interests working independent of, but in collaboration with, the City. Those of us who were there from the beginning spent many a meeting discussing how a new, unofficial organization could make itself relevant, while being careful not to duplicate the work of other interests, or raising concerns about entitlement or ‘turf.’
We hit on the idea of the Downtown 2020 conference series, which brought in some out-of-Victoria speakers to enrich our own thinking, and which attracted an astonishing four hundred people to talk about their own visions for downtown and to work together to consolidate good ideas into a unified vision. These attendees represented input from individual citizens and almost every organization with a real and perceived stake in the state and future of downtown.
Forming voluntary communities-of-interest, people worked in committee or group format at, and after, the conferences to articulate detailed visions, recommendations, and plans of possible action in nine different focus areas. As these materials came in during the weeks and months following the conference, they were presented in formal and informal ways to City staff and Council. Honestly, it was a prodigious and heartfelt effort by an extraordinary range and number of self-selected citizens.
Much of this work is archived on our DVCA website and can be viewed at http://dv2020.ca/archives.html.
On reflection, we believe it may have been useful to have had more of an explicit understanding with the City as to the relationship between the DVCA and the City; too often, things seemed to fall into ‘receive and file’ mode, and while there was generous acknowledgement for our good work, there was little sense that the City wished to engage in an active partnership, or that the City had given much thought to how the conferences and all of our follow-up work fit into larger City intentions.
Specifically, there was an unfortunate disconnect between the highly successful and inclusive public process of Downtown 2020 and the approach of the Downtown Plan Review, initiated by the City the next year. Certainly, in our view, an opportunity was lost to work collaboratively and for the City to utilize the demonstrated capacity and credibility of the DVCA to animate the public process portions of the Downtown Plan Review. Effectively, over time, we were taken to be just one more constituency—not an organization that spoke with the unified voice of all downtown interests.
With that said, it’s also important to remember that much of what the DVCA has been all about—many of its concerns, much of its scope—has been embodied in some very significant changes made in the last two years within Victoria’s Planning Services Division. Planning Services now has a team dedicated exclusively to long-range planning and urban design—features that were clearly identified as required within the City’s planning structure.
With all of this history noted, we report that the DVCA as an organization has had a low-key, rather than a highly public, year…mostly, a year of monitoring; which doesn’t mean that this has been a quiet, issue-free year for downtown. We record the following highlights.
Homeless and Related Street-Life Impacts on Downtown
It is likely that no single issue so dominated (and continues to dominate) the media or the wider public conversation about downtown. This has been a year featuring the opening of the Our Place housing and social facility on Pandora Avenue; the crisis surrounding the Cormorant Street needle exchange, and its (to-date unsuccessful) search for a new home; the insertion of new social housing in a Rock Bay location, to vociferous concern about flawed process, lack of consultation, and outright opposition to the site; the highly heralded Mayor’s Task Force on homeless issues, featuring a largely unfulfilled pledge to find housing for 60 or so of the core needy; and more.
Media commentary has asked, with increasing frequency, why organized responses have been so late in coming and so underwhelming. Much of this commentary has observed the Victoria tendency to form task forces instead of action plans, and has noted the negative impacts on downtown business and social tone.
Housing Affordability
One positive development is the recent opening of the new Youth Hospitality Training Centre at 679 Herald Street, an innovative, preventative approach to downtown youth related street issues, general youth unemployment and to mitigating the effect of the current labour shortage in the hospitality industry.
While not limited to downtown, or identified specifically as a downtown issue, housing affordability throughout the Capital Region has been, and remains, a tremendous challenge in rental and ownership markets.
Housing affordability challenges create several conditions that impact downtown directly.
First, new downtown condominiums purchased either by investors or non-occupying owners carry, if rented, fairly lofty rents—manageable by some in Victoria’s incredibly tight rental market, but well beyond the means of those seeking rental accommodation at a modest cost.
Second, the emerging rental market downtown does nothing to meet the needs of the low income service community and, of course, those who require government assistance to meet their shelter needs. This only intensifies street issues in and around downtown.
Last, the current affordability situation tends to push many working people toward the suburban periphery to find relatively affordable market housing; and this puts additional pressure on the road network and downtown parking infrastructure.
Clearly, some form of housing innovation is necessary in and around downtown, especially at a time of historic low unemployment. Some experiments are being undertaken to create stylized small suites (‘the housing equivalent of the Smart Car’), as a way of introducing significantly lower affordability thresholds, but it would be early now to try to measure the impacts of this option.
Current and Planned Downtown Residential Development
Significant new development is in various stages ranging from proposal to completion in and around downtown. Projects include: Bayview, the Roundhouse and Dockside Green in Vic West; the Hudson and Radius (currently stalled and seeking new financing) at the north end of downtown; Centro, the Juliet, 834 Johnson, and 819 Yates in mid-town; 930 Fort Street and the recently completed Wave in Harris Green; the Aria, the Falls, Chelsea, Cherry Bank, and Parkside at the south end. An excellent source for complete information is the valuable website www.vibrantvictoria.ca.
