Walking around dt this morning had me thinking a lot about how our downtown is still missing culture, and how our districts don’t have personality. This project tried to address this with the attraction of river landing that for sure will attract people from the burbs, but it doesn’t retain enough people to downtown that will join the committees that will ensure our downtown stays vibrant. If you’re visiting river landing from the burbs, you’re maybe thinking in awe about how beautiful it is, or are jealous of how rich a select few are in saskatoon.
My thoughts on how to address this? I think that we need to subsidize more affordable condos more. No1 River Landing’s condos definitely brought in a few more residents to downtown, but with psf prices of 3-5x that of a house in the burbs, it was definitely largely treated as investments / possibly as short term stays, which means it’s not fully condos for residents that will live work and play downtown, but steal business from hotels.
1. Address our crisis of short term rentals downtown with our condos - it limits the supply of long term condos for residents to rent in Saskatoon, and it stops investment of new hotels downtown. A strict short term rental policy will lose condo investment on spec buyers looking to do rentals of an additional condo, but will encourage new development of hotels downtown which studies show greatly offset the damage airbnb’s do to city’s hotels. The moral of short term renters in condos is also a huge driver of moral disatisfaction of downtown living, when your neighbors treat your condo like a hotel (based on my experience living next to two short term rentals that are stealing business from hotels, down with short term rentals - I want neighbors that will actually join our board.
2.Create committee districts for each section of our downtown. Our city councillor downtown lives in Nutana, which i’ve only visited like twice in my ten years here in Saskatoon. They are not areas with the same economical, commercial, residential, social issues by a long shot. It would be more fair to have city park as a part of downtown’s city council district.
2a. Subcommittees with residents in each district which still need to be more clearly defined, proposing:
-a 4 block radius around 25th and 5th, the most populous block. This area holds ~60% of Saskatoon’s downtown residents, and soon to be higher with Baydo’s development. Baydo’s development won’t even be considered downtown which is nutso from a policy standpoint.
-the warehouse district whereas the center of it surrounds the police station - this area of north downtown, the old dilapidated john deere building, the new 303 cafe that’s amazing. Huge potential for this area.
-downtown, which the center is midtown mall/scotia center. This area should see either a dramatic change or a massive shut down in the near term. The mall seems to be thriving, but the entire scotia center is empty. This is a great opportunity for condo development both via renovations of existing commercial buildings, and new buildings in the envision draft plans of condos attached to the mall
The new Arena and new Library should be as centered as possible in all three of these, to allow for smooth flow of residents and incentive for development in all areas. That’s why I think the library is in a perfect location, and the arena should be in the north parking lot of midtown (highlighted blue!). This is my vision for downtown
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