Happy New Year, fellow Scarborough residents!
Toronto’s various neighbourhoods reflect the social and cultural mosaic that is Toronto. Different neighbourhoods offer different built forms, community amenities, and employment opportunities. Different neighbourhoods appeal to different social and lifestyle preferences. This is all good. We are fortunate to live in a place that offers so many neighbourhood choices for people who want to live here, to suit their own preferences.
But there’s a geographical divide that sometimes cuts across all other demographic factors: downtown versus the suburbs.
In November, we saw this play out once again at City Hall, during the lengthy and animated debate about whether to allow retail businesses on neighbourhood streets.
Downtown councillors were mostly in favour. So was much of the downtown-oriented media and the urban thought leaders whose enlightened wisdom adorns those pages.
Scarborough felt differently. So did North York and Etobicoke. Downtowners were perplexed. Why don’t the suburbs want to look more like us downtowners? Don’t they know what’s good for them?
Let’s step back a bit and compare Scarborough’s neighbourhoods to our downtown neighbourhoods.
Most of Scarborough was built later than downtown, using a planning model based on travel by car. Therefore, our retail infrastructure came to be organized differently, with short drives to small, neighbourhood plazas where many of our day-to-day needs can be purchased efficiently, and longer drives to large outdoor plazas or indoor malls to purchase everything else. Presumably Scarborough’s residents, who have chosen to live here after all, appreciate these features.
This model has worked well for Scarborough, with our strip malls and neighbourhood plazas incubating thousands of local businesses, often owned and operated by our entrepreneurial newcomers. That said, retail in Scarborough is in transition. Escalating land values have created market conditions that incentivize developers to build high density housing and nothing else. Hence why our neighbourhood retail infrastructure is shrinking and aging. If the City would provide the planning protections needed to allow our retail infrastructure to evolve and renew, that would help to create the “complete community” model for our neighbourhoods that the City claims it wants to promote. But that’s a discussion for another day.
By promoting a downtown-oriented vision of neighbourhood retail for Scarborough, City staff and councillors presumably envisioned a planning model for us that can replace the neighbourhood strip mall. That’s not likely to happen. Downtown thought leaders can wax nostalgically about a renaissance of neighbourhood retail as it applied in the 1960s, with mom-and-pop service businesses woven into residential streets. But that business model doesn’t work anymore in an era of shopping malls and online shopping. It certainly won’t work in Scarborough. Here, successful retail requires visibility, scale, and co-location to create a critical mass of retail services to draw consumers into a common space. Tucking businesses onto inconspicuous side streets with no visibility, parking, or opportunity to build scale is a recipe for commercial failure.
So here we are. How does City Council create a one-size-fits-all policy that meets the needs of different parts of the City that have different built forms and different social preferences?
You don’t. Instead, you arrive at a hybrid solution, as the mayor brokered at Council, with retail permitted on residential streets in downtown neighbourhoods (where it is wanted), but only on main streets in Scarborough, North York, and Etobicoke.
An inelegant solution? Perhaps. But maybe we’ll see more of this going forward where there are strong urban-suburban divides on public policy matters.
Larry Whatmore
President
Scarborough Community Renewal Organization
A catalyst for Scarborough community progress
Larry.Whatmore@rogers.com
