Downtown Ottawa Revitalization Initiatives

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by acottawa

So is the idea that you can replace the economic impact of 100k office workers with a few thousand residents.

Agreed though I guess 100k office workers could be replaced in total spending by 10k new residents though the businesses will be different. As you say though they are in different areas. There is a new Metro doing a booming business on Rideau where there are lots of residents it doesn't help the sandwich shop on Metcalfe.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

Downtown and Centretown are pretty well weaved together. There's no reason why someone in Tribeca couldn't chose Sparks over Bank for a morning coffee or an Indian restaurant in L'Esplanade over Somerset.

If you live in Tribeca you are going a lot out of your way for coffee on Sparks. And Tribeca is at the very north end of Centretown, for most Centretown residents downtown is even less convenient.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

Agreed though I guess 100k office workers could be replaced in total spending by 10k new residents though the businesses will be different. As you say though they are in different areas. There is a new Metro doing a booming business on Rideau where there are lots of residents it doesn't help the sandwich shop on Metcalfe.

That isn’t really a new Metro, it was temporarily closed when the condo was built. It was there long before there were condos in the area.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by acottawa

If you live in Tribeca you are going a lot out of your way for coffee on Sparks. And Tribeca is at the very north end of Centretown, for most Centretown residents downtown is even less convenient.

Some people like to take a morning walk.

Much of the new density in Centretown is along the north border. Sure someone on Somerset might not be as inclined to go to the CBD for whatever they may need, but someone who lives at The Met, The Loop, SoHo Lisgar, Gotham, might.

[passwordisnt123]

Originally Posted by acottawa

The "Central Area" (downtown, market, lebretton) has a population of 14,350, which is about the size of Napanee. How many sandwich shops and happy goats do you think this area can support with local residents?

I'm wondering where you got that number from? Centretown alone, excluding downtown, market, lebretton, has a population of 25,687. I'm not sure what the population of the others are but the federal riding of Ottawa Centre has a population of 113,619. Now admittedly, that includes Glebe and other central areas, but in any case that's close to 10x the size of your figure.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by passwordisnt123

I'm wondering where you got that number from? Centretown alone, excluding downtown, market, lebretton, has a population of 25,687. I'm not sure what the population of the others are but the federal riding of Ottawa Centre has a population of 113,619. Now admittedly, that includes Glebe and other central areas, but in any case that's close to 10x the size of your figure.

You can look up by postal code.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=9810001901

K21P is 18k. North of 417 between Kent and Canal. That would cover most but miss the dense residential between Kent and Bronson.

K1R where that is inlcudes another 20k but that includes all the way through Le Breton and ChinaTown.

If you add the market and Sandy Hill at K1N you get another 26k.

[passwordisnt123]

This whole push to return centretown ottawa to its pre-pandemic state with all workers crammed downtown is just bizzare to me. I live in centretown so I remember what things were like before the pandemic. It was lamentable. Nothing was open in the evenings or the weekends because all businesses catered to the lunchtime public servant crowd.

Jane Jacobs is still to this day the author who has destroyed this line of thinking better and more succinctly than any other author. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills and nobody in Ottawa has read Chapter 6 of Life and Death of Great American Cities. I'll share a few passages from that chapter that explain why going back to the pre-pandemic way of doing things won't be enough to help businesses.

The extreme condition of currently unbalanced spread of people through time of day in lower Manhattan illustrates a number of sobering principles that apply equally to other city districts: No neighborhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled, and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity. Funhermore, a neighborhood or district perfectly calculated, it seems, to fill one function, whether work or any other, and with everything ostensibly necessary to that function, cannot actually provide what is necessary if it is confined to that one function.

The significance of time spread can be seen especially clearly at the downtown tip of Manhattan, because this is a district suffering from extreme time unbalance among its users. Some 400,000 persons are employed here, in a district embracing Wall Street, the adjoining law and insurance complexes, the city's municipal offices, some federal and state offices, groups of docks and shipping offices, and a number of other work complexes. An undetermined but considerable additional number of people visit the district during working hours, mostly on office or government business. This is an immense number of users for a territory sufficiently compact so that any part of it is readily accessible on foot from almost any other part. Among them, these users represent a tremendous daily demand for meals and other goods, to say nothing of cultural services. Yet the district is miserable at providing services and amenities proportionate to the need. Its eating places and clothing shops are
pitifully inadequate in number and variety for the demands on them.

And then there's this passage:

Meantime, outside of the big offices that form the breathtaking skyline of lower Manhattan is a ring of stagnation, decay, vacancies and vestigial industries. Consider this paradox: Here are plenty of people, and people moreover who want and value city diversity badly enough so it is difficult or sometimes impossible to keep them from scooting away elsewhere to get it. And here, cheek-by-jowl with the demand, are plenty of convenient and even empty places for diversity to grow in. What can be wrong? To see what is wrong, it is only necessary to drop in at any ordinary shop and observe the contrast between the mob scene at lunch and the dullness at other times. It is only necessary to observe the deathlike stillness that settles on the district after fivethirty and all day Saturday and Sunday. "They come in like a tide," the New York Times quoted a saleswoman in a clothing store. "I always know when it's a few minutes after noon." "The first group floods the store from noon to just before 1 P.M.," the Times reporter went on to explain. "Then there is a short breathing spell. A few minutes after 1 P.M. a second group spills in." And then, although the paper did not say so, a few minutes before 2 P.M. the store goes dead. The business done by consumers' enterprises here must be mainly crammed into some two or three hours a day, some ten or fifteen hours a week. This degree of underuse is a miserable inefficiency for any plant. A certain number of enterprises can cover their overhead and φake a profit by exploiting the midday mob operation to the hilt. But there must be few enough so that each reaps a capacity mob at that time. Restaurants too can live on lunch and coffee breaks, instead of lunch and dinner, if there are relatively so few that they do a quick-turnover business in their too few bonanza hours.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by passwordisnt123

I'm wondering where you got that number from? Centretown alone, excluding downtown, market, lebretton, has a population of 25,687. I'm not sure what the population of the others are but the federal riding of Ottawa Centre has a population of 113,619. Now admittedly, that includes Glebe and other central areas, but in any case that's close to 10x the size of your figure.

City of Ottawa website, which uses the term “central area”

Centretown and downtown are not the same thing, nor is the Ottawa Centre riding (which goes quite far into the West End).

Centretown had strict height limits until very recently, which is why it is primarily residential and weird low rise compared to its proximity to downtown.

[Admiral Nelson]

Originally Posted by passwordisnt123

This whole push to return centretown ottawa to its pre-pandemic state with all workers crammed downtown is just bizzare to me. I live in centretown so I remember what things were like before the pandemic. It was lamentable. Nothing was open in the evenings or the weekends because all businesses catered to the lunchtime public servant crowd.

Jane Jacobs is still to this day the author who has destroyed this line of thinking better and more succinctly than any other author. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills and nobody in Ottawa has read Chapter 6 of Life and Death of Great American Cities. I'll share a few passages from that chapter that explain why going back to the pre-pandemic way of doing things won't be enough to help businesses.

Thank you for bringing this perspective into the conversation. I don't know why we'd all want to return to the pre-pandemic business state in downtown Ottawa - it was dead outside of a few select hours.

Let's encourage more residential towers and office conversions, that way we'll bring about real progress in a sustainable and interesting commercial scene. Losing a few redundant coffee shops and Marcello's is hardly the end of the world.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by Admiral Nelson

Let's encourage more residential towers and office conversions, that way we'll bring about real progress in a sustainable and interesting commercial scene. Losing a few redundant coffee shops and Marcello's is hardly the end of the world.

Say you convert 10 marginal office buildings and bring another 2000 downtown.

What “sustainable and interesting” commercial scene” do 2000 people support? Maybe a shoppers and a convenience store.

If condos were a key to vibrancy then the west side of downtown along Laurier should be thriving. It is not.

[rdaner]

Originally Posted by acottawa

The "Central Area" (downtown, market, lebretton) has a population of 14,350, which is about the size of Napanee. How many sandwich shops and happy goats do you think this area can support with local residents?

Isn’t this area adding a ton of new units soon?

[lrt's friend]

I definitely favour more residential development, however vibrancy requires that downtown be a magnet to draw people from the whole city to work and play. 14000 people ( the same as my neighbourhood) or even 20000 is not going to support a wide range of businesses and attractions.

100000 jobs may support coffee shops and lunch places, but they also support retail before they commute home. Those 20000 local residents cannot maintain all that retail and in the longterm, some of that retail will wither away. Even the move of public library to the periphery is too far away from the existing retail area.

Yesterday, I walked through Zibi. Maybe, I was not observant enough, but I didn't see one open business. Residential alone does not attract much.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Say you convert 10 marginal office buildings and bring another 2000 downtown.

What “sustainable and interesting” commercial scene” do 2000 people support? Maybe a shoppers and a convenience store.

If condos were a key to vibrancy then the west side of downtown along Laurier should be thriving. It is not.

Yes and we will spend $30 million converting an office building worth $25 Million into a residential building worth maybe $40 million.

Mixed use is great but we have lots of empty lots near transit. Many not used for even parking but simply scurb land or low quality "green" space. Let's build there first.

[phil235]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Say you convert 10 marginal office buildings and bring another 2000 downtown.

What “sustainable and interesting” commercial scene” do 2000 people support? Maybe a shoppers and a convenience store.

If condos were a key to vibrancy then the west side of downtown along Laurier should be thriving. It is not.

It’s a lot more than 2000 people just in the units under construction in the area that you describe. And these are 2000 additional people, not 2000 people in a vacuum.

From a vibrancy perspective, all residents are not created equal. These are 2000 apartment and condo dwellers who will generally spend more time outside their homes, are more likely to travel on foot and are more likely to spend on meals and entertainment. It may not be the whole answer, but it’s definitely part of it.

The west end of downtown is under-served for sure, but that is already changing pretty quickly.

[rocketphish]

'Buy nothing': PSAC wants federal workers to boycott downtown Ottawa businesses

Toula Mazloum, CTV News
Updated Sept. 11, 2024 4:49 p.m. EDT | Published Sept. 11, 2024 2:41 p.m. EDT

A union representing federal employees is asking its members to bring their own lunch to work, in an apparent retaliation against downtown Ottawa businesses as new return-to-office protocols begin.

"Buy nothing," reads a post by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) on Instagram(opens in a new tab). "The needs of the downtown core shouldn’t fall on the back of workers and the federal public service. How workers spend their money on in-office days will send a clear message to politicians."

PSAC is asking its members to minimize spending on in-office days and buy from local businesses in their neighbourhoods.

The union says working conditions should not be shaped by politics and politicians' "commercial interests."

The move comes after members of Canada's business community have been asking the government to bring its employees back to office. The request is meant to help local businesses and revive downtown core.

Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe took to X to voice his disappointment. He says downtown local businesses should not be blamed for the government's back-to-office mandate. Sutcliffe suggests keeping local businesses out of the "line of fire," pointing out the suffering they've encountered since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Let's support them and support a thriving downtown," Sutcliffe's post reads.

The Ottawa Board of Trade (OBOT) also voiced its disappointment on X, noting the importance of keeping the capitals' downtown vibrant.

"Our public servants are also committed residents who know that supporting our family, friends and neighbours who work at, or own local businesses is what makes Ottawa so great!" OBOT's post reads.

Federal employees in the core public service will be required to be in the office a minimum of three days a week,(opens in a new tab) and executives will need to be on-site a minimum of four days, starting this week. The new requirements apply to 282,152 employees in the core public service, with the government recommending that departments and agencies outside the core public service adopt a similar strategy.

Rolla Hanna, owner of Gabriel Pizza on Metcalfe, says it's unfair to put the blame of the new return-to-office mandate on restaurants.

"They don't feel like they need to come back to work because they feel like they can work efficiently from home," said Hanna. "I just don't believe that the battle between the government and the union has anything to do with the small businesses. We shouldn't be penalized for them coming back to work three days a week."

Morning Owl coffee shop manager, Brynmore Jones, also said a boycott of downtown businesses is unfair.

"A lot of these are small businesses. And I think that we deserve jobs too. I understand that people don't necessarily want to be buying lunch every single day, but like that wasn't required pre-COVID. It's not required now," Jones said.

PSAC, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) and other federal unions organized a rally in downtown Ottawa for the first day of the new hybrid work requirements Monday.

Some downtown business owners said this week they are pleased to see more federal workers milling about.

"Having more people come in and sharing our food with them makes us happy. It's like a win-win for everyone. People will have good food, and good times. We will have good business as well and we'll have more hours for everyone," said Nour Sakhniya, manager of Mr. Fez Shawarma.

"It's not just the lunch rush for us. We get the outside dinner rush because people leave their work, and they might grab something on their way home."

With files from CTV News Ottawa's Josh Pringle and Dave Charbonneau

https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/buy-nothing-ps...ott-downtown-ottawa-businesses-1.7034142

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by rocketphish

[B]'Buy nothing': PSAC wants federal workers to boycott downtown Ottawa businesses

https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/buy-nothing-ps...ott-downtown-ottawa-businesses-1.7034142

I mean I get frustration at back to work being linked to help downtown businesses. It's a but weird for a federal civil service to organzie their work schedules around the lunch and dry cleaners surround office buildings. But PSAC asking their members (if they even use that word) to boycott is pretty bonkers. The union leaders don't just live on another planet but another universe.

[DTcrawler]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

I mean I get frustration at back to work being linked to help downtown businesses. It's a but weird for a federal civil service to organzie their work schedules around the lunch and dry cleaners surround office buildings. But PSAC asking their members (if they even use that word) to boycott is pretty bonkers. The union leaders don't just live on another planet but another universe.

Completely agree, seems totally offside unless they truly believe this type of boycott will somehow reverse RTO directives. Shows how much union officials and the public servants who support this pettiness are out of touch in their understanding of regular folks whose incomes aren't guaranteed by tax revenues.

To be clear, as a downtown resident, I'm not necessarily saying that saving these breakfast/lunch spots that have extremely limited hours and only cater to office workers are the key to improving downtown vibrancy. But it definitely further sours my taste towards the PS and its union(s), which seem to continually set a new standard of entitlement and whininess at every opportunity.

Get a grip. Normally when people are this dissatisfied with their employers' directives, they would polish up their resumes and start searching. Their reluctance to do so, in favour of whining, only emphasizes how trapped they are. They realize their Lambo pension/benefits, handsome pay, and lax work culture are pretty irreplaceable, even if they have to go into the office a whole three times a week to earn it (something which most private sector folks have been doing for a while now).

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by phil235

It’s a lot more than 2000 people just in the units under construction in the area that you describe. And these are 2000 additional people, not 2000 people in a vacuum.

From a vibrancy perspective, all residents are not created equal. These are 2000 apartment and condo dwellers who will generally spend more time outside their homes, are more likely to travel on foot and are more likely to spend on meals and entertainment. It may not be the whole answer, but it’s definitely part of it.

The west end of downtown is under-served for sure, but that is already changing pretty quickly.

2000 was a hypothetical of a very optimistic scenario, there are nowhere near that number of units in the pipeline. The Wikipedia lists the downtown population as 5000. That’s a little over half of Blackburn Hamlet, which supports maybe a dozen local businesses.

Condo residents may spend more on restaurants and services, but there is still a limit on how much they are spending on a daily basis. How many businesses have a catchment area of 5000? They also aren’t particularly limited to keeping their spending in then downtown area and will likely spend in the Market, Centretown, etc.

If you convert an office building you are probably replacing 7ish office workers who are geographically limited with one resident that is not very geographically limited.

How is the Laurier condo district changing pretty quickly? Certainly nothing is visible, but maybe there are permits in the pipeline.

[Acajack]

Agreed generally though Blackburn Hamlet doesn’t have a couple million tourists and business travellers going through it every year.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Agreed generally though Blackburn Hamlet doesn’t have a couple million tourists and business travellers going through it every year.

That's the point though. New residents are not going to save a city's CBD.