Will Ottawa's downtown ever be the same? In a word, no
"Downtown is the heart of Ottawa. Without a vibrant core, tourism, for example, dies, along with a host of affiliated enterprises."
Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen
Oct 06, 2022 • 6 hours ago • 4 minute read
How will downtown Ottawa emerge from the worst of the pandemic? Will it again be a’bustle with white collars and pot shops? Will residents move in to fill the void? Or will Ottawa Centre MP Yasir Naqvi’s fears of a dystopia, à la Detroit in the 1990s, be realized?
Downtown is the heart of Ottawa. Without a vibrant core, tourism, for example, dies, along with a host of affiliated enterprises: hotels, convention centres, tour operators, restaurants, the ByWard Market. Businesses won’t want to locate here. Professional athletes, looking for safe, clean cities in which to raise their children, will play elsewhere.
A boarded-up world capital invites little but trouble.
And it’s one thing to encourage workers to return. Janice Charette, clerk of the Privy Council, did as much last month when she urged that department’s employees to return to the office two days a week, suggesting that full-time remote work be allowed only under “exceptional circumstances.”
Likewise, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson wrote to Treasury Board President Mona Fortier last spring, asking that public servants return to the core, ostensibly to support the businesses hurt by their absence.
But such steps, legislated or not, are like sticking your finger in a dike that’s already crumbling. The way we work has changed, and attempts to return to 2019 ignore the diversification that was already underway. You might as well try to bring back 8-track tapes and semaphore.
Workers appear content at home. An ongoing workforce analytics survey of almost 14,000 public servants, conducted by Ottawa-based Agile Work Evolutions Inc. (which this year was acquired by U.S.-based commercial real estate conglomerate Cresa), indicates that most don’t particularly want to return to the office.
The percentage of those who prefer remote work has jumped from 23 per cent in March 2020 to 73 per cent today. Those favouring office-only-based work fell from 43 per cent to six percent during that period, while those who want a hybrid also dropped, from 34 per cent at the pandemic’s start to 21 per cent today.
The survey also cites savings realized by a work-from-home or hybrid system, including reductions in commute times and office space requirements, as well as favourable environmental impacts.
But there are other considerations. Following Watson’s letter, for example, Fortier suggested that downtown could be revitalized by repurposing vacant office buildings into housing.
Naqvi, meanwhile, in July announced the creation of the Downtown Ottawa Revitalization Task Force to look at such issues as affordable housing and supporting local businesses.
“Hybrid work is here to stay,” he said.” It is our job to adapt to this new reality.”
How the feds respond should interest whoever becomes mayor: the national capital is, after all, also a municipality, and the vibrancy of downtown is crucial.
Mayoral candidate Catherine McKenney (who uses they/them pronouns) says they’ll work with the task force — a group that includes community and business leaders — to find innovative and ambitious ideas.
“We need to be realistic. All workers are not coming back to work all the time, so we’re not going back to those days.”
Mark Sutcliffe, also vying for the city’s top job, notes that the pandemic simply accelerated a shift to remote work, a move that was facilitated by the arrival of such technological advances as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, allowing easier collaboration.
“There’s no easy solution to that,” he says, “We need to get everybody together — the federal government, the provincial government, community leaders, business leaders — and work on a plan.
“Ideally, we should have people working downtown because it’s the right place for them to be, and not just for economic reasons,” he adds. “I see it as part of a broader strategy of what Ottawa is going to look like going forward, and how do we attract the best talent to the city.”
Sutcliffe on Monday released a plan to revitalize downtown and the ByWard Market, including converting office space to residential, adding more festivals and events and developing a plan for an unspecified “new major international attraction in downtown Ottawa.”
Both Sutcliffe and McKenney — Bob Chiarelli did not respond to requests for comment — recognize the value in working remotely, but agree that there are times when collaboration works better when people share the same space. Both think that city employees’ work locations should be determined on a departmental basis. Some workers, Sutcliffe say, prefer office work because their homes may not be ideal.
But also concerning, he adds, is just how remote remote working could become.
“If your job is not tied to a desk in a government department in Ottawa, then you could potentially live anywhere in the country.”
This, McKenney says, could benefit the feds and other Ottawa-based employers that could hire workers who don’t necessarily want to move to Ottawa. That, however, doesn’t address the downtown issue.
“It’s an opportunity and a challenge,” McKenney says. “The challenge is that we have some businesses in our commercial district that count on the commuter population, the federal office workers.
“The opportunities are to look at our commercial sector and those buildings. Certain floors in some can be converted into housing, mixed-use retail, commercial housing, artists in the ground floor. I really think that it’s going to take serious thinking about what downtown is going to look like.”
Sutcliffe adds that if people working for Ottawa firms or departments can live anywhere, the key is to give them reasons to call Ottawa home. “Ideally, we want Ottawa to be such a great place to live that even if the federal government says you can live wherever you want in Canada, you choose to live in Ottawa because you like it here.”
bdeachman@postmedia.com
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...e-in-a-word-no