Main Street Mosaics: Piecing together investments for complete communities

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to events@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Mary W Rowe Hi, everybody, it’s Mary Rowe from the Canadian Urban Institute. Thank you for joining us from wherever you’re coming in from. We encourage people always to go into the chat, and tell us where you’re signing in from. And, if you haven’t, if you’re a frequent City-Talker, of which there are many of you I know, and you haven’t ever joined the chat, you know, you’re missing a lot because these chatters chat to each other. They share experiences, anecdotes, research links. I always joke that we have a sort of firestorm of people in a parallel universe of the chat. So, if you haven’t ever dipped your toe into the chat, please, just put it on. You can watch both. You can listen and watch the webinar and you can also chat. Just take a moment, if you can. We did this exercise yesterday here at CUI, we had all our staff in from across the various cities that they work in for a workshop yesterday. And we did an interesting thing. We asked people at the beginning to just to remember their first awareness of a First Nations community or a First Nations person in their l… when they were young. What was that first experience? So just take a moment and think about that, could you? We always do a Land Acknowledgment here, but I also am conscious here at CUI that we’re trying to deepen our awareness and our experience of what the real significance is of ancestral, territorial histories and how we do truth and reconciliation … what that looks like. And so if you want to put into the chat what your particular memory is, mine was – I was in London, Ontario, and my boyfriend’s mother, my boyfriend at the time, his mother was an occupational therapist and she was working in craft, and was in touch with lots of folks who were on the Munsee First Nation, which is just outside London. It’s, I think, part of Six Nations. And, I remember that. But again, I was, a formative age. I was a young teenager, but I remember … and I don’t remember much before that. And, that’s part of the legacy that we live with is that we don’t have that much familiarity. And, and even now, you know, maybe kids get more exposure in the schools, but how do we actually deepen our awareness and our understanding? And how does that inform how we do city building? And one of the things that we’re going to try to tackle here at CUI, with our indigenous partners, is what are the implications of placemaking, particularly when it’s not your place. So, if you want to put into the chat some thoughts on that, that’d be great. And we’re, as I say, always interested in continuing to deepen our understanding and our learning and our practice. Thanks for joining us. We’re going to talk this morning about … or this afternoon or whatever times on you’re on, about, main streets and about this as a fundamental piece of infrastructure. And I’m really excited to have the folks joining us on the session today, because they are deeply embedded in thinking about streets and main streets. And we actually, last week, launched our Measuring Main Streets, a mapping tool which is a year and a half of work, which Greg Spencer is going to talk to you about right now, which visually gives an extraordinary picture. And we’re happy to have Michael here from Seattle to talk about the American experience. But in our case, 75% of Canadians live within walking or rolling distance of a main street. And we are making the case that this is a fundamental building block of every kind of infrastructure that generates the kinds of social, economic, environmental and cultural outcomes, and in every city and every community of every size … as you’ve heard us all say this many times that every community, even a rural community, can pretty much tell you what their main street is, even though it may not be quite a street. Or maybe it’s a strip mall, or maybe it’s the back of somebody’s shop. You know, it’s the place where people gather. I’m going to ask Greg to come on and just run you through the measuringmainstreets.ca tool. You can have a look at that and feel free to go crazy with the tool, but Greg’s going to sort of walk you through that and what it looks like. And then we’ll have our other panelists join us to talk about what they’re seeing on their main streets, how these tools can help inform, what do we think the obstacles are to advancing this conversation about main streets as being so critical? Just a couple of heads up … remember that we tape record these sessions. Listen to me … I’m in a stage in life where I still say we “tape record” these sessions, we record the chat, we publish it all. And we look forward to people being really active in the conversation. And if you hear things that you don’t agree with or you have a different perspective, please feel free to put them into the chat. Okay, Greg, nice to see you. Congratulations for getting this project over the line. Although I know it never really ends! But I’m sure everyone with me is looking forward to your presentation. So, we’re excited to hear what you’ve got to show us.

Greg Spencer All right. Thanks very much, Mary. I also wanted to give a shout out to our team here at CUI, in particular, Alex Tabascio and, Sharon, who were instrumental in building this platform, as well as our partners on the project, Environics Analytics, who’s Noter is with us today. And, Open North, who’s also a project partner. And this project was funded by the federal government, specifically, through IFC’s Research and Knowledge Initiative. And they’ve been great as well. Also, there was many people along the way that helped shape how this turned out. And as we were saying, I think in our workshop yesterday, that innovation is a lot like city building is that it’s best done when it’s bottom up and involves everybody. And we have tried to involve as many people in helping us create this tool. And we hope that’s going to continue going forward. We’re always wanting to try and figure out better ways of doing these things. And hearing from all of you is a big part of that. So, I wanted to just give a brief introduction to the platform itself. So as Mary said, this was a project that started two years ago, and was recently formally launched. It was originally intended to measure the impact of civic infrastructure and main street environments, particularly from a resiliency perspective. This project kicked off, you know, sort of peak-COVID, at least, the grant application was written during that time. And so we were concerned primarily with, you know, the drop off in people coming to main streets and all of the potential negative consequences of that, and the negative cycles that sometimes get created and how to turn those around, especially through public investment. I’m going to share my screen and I’m going to just quickly take you through the basics of the platform. This is measuringmainstreets.ca. It’s now publicly available for, for anyone to, to see and use and interact with. It’s comprised of four main elements: A Main Street map, a pan-Canadian Main Street map. So one of the biggest challenges we had in this project was simply even defining in a consistent way what a main street is, and identifying where all of those main streets are. And then we could say, you know, all of the different characteristics of every main street across the country. We do a lot of different kinds of comparisons of main streets and help to explain sort of different kinds of outcomes from Main streets, both in terms of how they benefit complete communities, how they support complete communities, but also in sort of the shorter term, how some streets were hit harder by the pandemic and how there were different recovery trajectories and trying to explain the various aspects of that. There were also a series of case studies. So we went into much more detail in some places. We focused our efforts in the regions of Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton, and we did ten detailed case studies in each of those. And that involved also observational research. So not just data, but we actually went to all of these places. We took pictures, we walked around, we recorded various things – how people were interacting and using the streets. And then there were another set of data only case studies, which also went into more detail, but without the actual observational research. And we used those then to help inform some analytical reports which covered a range of themes, from resiliency to community building, to equity, especially infrastructure equity at a neighborhood scale across these places. And then finally there’s a set of data visualization tools that you can look at anywhere in the country, and apply many of the same sorts of metrics from place to place. So we don’t … I’m not going to go into all of the detail. I encourage everyone to explore it on their own. But I wanted to give a sort of a quick flavor of the kinds of things that this tool does. So this is usually what grabs most people’s attention – Is the main street map. So again, anywhere from, you know, the biggest cities all the way up to some of the smallest communities in the north and everywhere in between. You can zoom in and have a look at where main streets are. And basically, this was done by looking at what was on major roadways in terms of Main Street businesses – that’s retail, restaurants, local services as well as civic infrastructure and that sort of broadly defined … could include anything from, you know, a library branch to a rec center to a doctor’s office. Anything that has somewhat of a public service component to it or a community building component to it. We’re looking at a density of those things in relation to major roadways, and ultimately defined main streets in that way. So here we are in downtown Edmonton. And what you can do is click on any segment of street, and what it does is, first of all, highlight that segment, gives you some information about what’s actually there. So, what kinds of civic infrastructure is there, what kinds of businesses are there, as well as things like to what extent are the businesses independent or part of a chain … things like estimated retail sales. So, you can get that about the street itself. And you see as I clicked that street segment, it also drew sort of a catchment area around that street … basically that’s a kilometer or so away from that street, and then it’ll give you sort of a neighborhood characteristic. So what are the … what are the characteristics of the people that live within a kilometer of that main street? So how many people are there? How many people work in the area? What is the average income? And so on, so forth … Commuting modes, shares, housing, information, all kinds of things that you can imagine. And I’ll also just say this is sort of the basic tool that we’ve created. We’ve really created more than that in many ways in that we’ve created this framework for analysis, assessing main streets and assessing the communities that they serve ultimately. And there’s a lot more that we can do here. These are just sort of the top-level kinds of indicators. We have a lot more sort of in our back pocket. So anytime we want to do any more detailed analysis for any community across the country, we’ve got the ability to do that fairly quickly. So, you’ll also notice that some of these areas are shaded green. And those are the places where we did detailed case studies. So, we can also click on some of those and it’ll take us over to what a detailed case study looks like. And in this case, what we were ultimately trying to do is create more of a narrative, more of a human sort of scale narrative about each place and sort of their characteristics, what makes them tick, what makes them special? And basically, you can see all the text to the left, and interactive data elements. You can scroll around and look at these things in different ways, there’s additional information in the case studies, things like public transportation, buildings bungalows and whatnot. And as you scroll through, it’s kind of like a story format right now, format where you scroll and different elements change as you, as you go down. And again, you can you can have a closer look at some of these things and you can add and subtract layers. There’s a lot of different functionalities. And again, I’ll encourage you to explore those things on your own. But, you know, anything from the business profile, the employment profile, a lot of different kinds of housing information. So housing, like in the neighborhood. Demographic characteristics, which we can map. And then this is the part that often gets a lot of attention. One of the key things that we did, in terms of measuring the vitality, the resiliency of these places is that we used, data from Environics Analytics, mobile scopes data from their portfolio, which is essentially derived from cell phones. And so, what we can do is see how many people are coming to that main street at certain points in time and how that changes, but also where those people are coming from. So, this map, for example, is showing that most of the people for this street are coming from close by, but you can see other hotspots and you can also see over time how that changed. So pre-pandemic, during the pandemic … most of our geography shrank quite a bit during the pandemic. We stay closer to home. And those are the kinds of things we can explore. But ultimately, we have data of this kind going back to the beginning of 2019 so we can see what it looked like before the pandemic. And then as the pandemic hit, how hard did individual streets get hit and how fast they bounce back or not? And I think it’s important to point out that this is really important work for us and the people we deal with because we know a lot of main streets, especially ones in downtown environments and central city environments, are still not anywhere close to the level of vitality that they were pre-pandemic. There’s still a lot of work to do. There’s still a lot of issues in our cities and on our main streets, and we’re continuing to try to help to solve some of those issues and problems for the people we work with. I’ll also just quickly show that we did a series of reports. I’m not going to go into these in detail. You can read them on your own time. But essentially, we looked at different themes. We also then looked at each region. Sort of wanted to understand some of the internal dynamics and the placement of streets within city regions, and how that had an impact on their recovery trajectories. Finally, there’s a set of tools, again, that you can do … basic visualizations and mapping. So anywhere in the country, essentially any major city region in the country. And one of the things that we’ve done is, you know, a typical sort of map will show you statistical areas of the neighborhood level that don’t necessarily mean much to people’s lives. What we’ve done is mapped these variables relative to the main streets, which I think gives people a better sense of how things fit into the urban structure. This particular map is showing infrastructure access at a neighborhood scale. And where there are, you know, potentially infrastructure deficits to help understand where investments going forward may be better targeted. So our hope with this tool is that people will begin to use it. And then, you know, maybe spark further ideas that we can work on together. And as we progress, we’re also going to be working quite a bit with this tool and really the base behind it to better help communities that we’re working with. This is already starting to spin out into other projects. So, we’re working with the City of Toronto, for example, with 11 BIAs, looking at the impact of the Ontario Line subway construction on those particular areas and how they’re experiencing that and potentially then informing what kinds of mitigation efforts can be put in place, for example. We’re also doing a project with the CMHC on housing on main streets, and where there’s opportunities to do some infill. And I’m sure we’re going to have a number of new projects to announce in the coming weeks and months. So. I’m going to stop there, give everyone else, a chance to sort of reflect on some of this work. Thank you.

Mary W Rowe Thanks, Greg. You know, I feel like this is a baby that was being born over a long period of time. So, I appreciate all the blood, sweat, and tears that you put into it with all your colleagues and staff, and now we’re, just as you just suggested, now we’re just the beginning. So, I’m going to ask all the other panel folks to put their cameras on and open their mics and people that are putting into the chat specific questions. I’ve just asked the producers to give you an email address where you can direct those questions, those very specific questions about where did the data come from, what about this? What about that? Rather than us using the webinar to do them case by case. But it’s great if you do want to put the questions in the chat so everybody can see what are we asking about and what do we think? You always know that when you put something up that’s about data there’s going to be people that are going to come back and say, wait a second, why didn’t you measure this or this is wrong? And that’s the whole idea that we’re making this open source for everybody to have access to it, to figure out whether the glitches are right or not, or where there are mistakes, or is there bias, or are there assumptions that were made that shouldn’t have been, etc., etc. We want this to be, you know better and better and better and better. So, the more users we get, the more questions you have. The better that the tool will be. But what for me is interesting is for us to even just take a first step in getting people to visually understand this as a unit around which you build investment, community, economic life. I see Pandita nodding. So, I’m going to go to Nader first because a lot of this is your data and I’m a non-data person, I admit it. And so, I depend on people like you who help me understand why data matters. But let’s go to you first and then Paneer I’ll come to you. So Nader you go first. And just talk to us a little bit about how Environics collects all this data. And how do we … Is it data? Is it dAta? Can you tell me whether I said it … how do I say it? Which is it?

Nader Shureih As long as you’re understood Mary, it works.

Mary W Rowe It really doesn’t matter.

Nader Shureih It really doesn’t matter.

Mary W Rowe But you’re in the you’re in the data world and trying to … We’ve become increasingly aware here … thanks to AI that you can have a ton of data and not really know what to do with it. Right? So talk to us when you were approaching this project with us, how do you decide what can count, what are the concerns you have about how data is used or not used? Just give us a perspective as the person who helped us co-develop this.

Nader Shureih Sure. So, I think the first thing to talk about is … And I did not coin this. Okay? But I heard it a long time ago, and it stuck with me. But everything happens somewhere, right, Mary? And it’s a very simple statement, but it’s actually deceivingly profound, I think. And that, you know, geography plays a foundational role in our understanding of human behavior. Right? And so there is a relationship, a direct relationship between people and places. Places influence people. People influence places. And that’s the point behind these main streets. So that’s ultimately what the data is looking for is the relationship of influence between people and places here. What I really love about this platform and the work that CUI did, is actually defining very clearly, empirically, what a main street is by virtue of density, by virtue of presence of business, by virtue of density of population surrounding the area, by virtue of level of visitation and things like that. And that’s something I don’t think that’s been done in Canada yet. So this is a new and very, very exciting thing as far as I’m concerned. And that that comes from understanding where things are and what people do and where they do them. Right? And so, you know, linking together the presence of business by different business type. Linking together the presence of a local population and what that local population looks like from not just a demographic perspective, but also, I think, you know, we need to see it from a lifestyle perspective. Right? From the perspective of how they behave in their local environments and how they get around and how local is their relationship to work versus their social relationships and things like that. Right? And so in a big city like Toronto, for example, you’re going to have a much more complex set of relationships between main streets and residents, right? They’re going to be people who live there, people who work there, people who visit there. Right? And more rural spaces it’s going to be a much more simple but more defined relationship between, live, work and visit, and the local population and the main street and so on. But what I love about this is, you know, since the pandemic we have seen a really fundamental shift in the way that the demographic distribution of the country has changed. There’s been an increased urbanization, but also an increased population density in Canada, smaller cities and towns. At the same time, you’re seeing, you know … there has never been a point in Canada’s history where more people have lived alone, where more people are aging in place and where there are more people who are 65 and older. I mean these three pieces … Oh, and the rate of newcomers as well. Right? So, immigration as well. So, this combination of implications on communities and therefore main streets is something that needs to be measured very, very well and with a … with not just a descriptive lens, but I think we need to start thinking about it from a predictive lens as well. And I think that’s where the platform is going to start helping.

Mary W Rowe I love this, even though you can’t attribute it to whoever it was. I love this idea … Everything happens somewhere.

Nader Shureih I think it’s an old Esry tagline honestly [laughs] …

Mary W Rowe Somebody will find it and put it in the chat. You know, please put your questions in the chat because what we’ll do is publish an FAQ or something. We should get that out, because I know every person on this call who asks the question, there are 40 other people that are asking the same question. And the other thing is, this is not a static tool for us. It’s not like we’re done. We have to continue to figure out how do we maintain it. And I always think of these things like a mannequin, you know, we’re layering. So we’re going to put on the undergarment, then we’re putting on the overcoat, then all that stuff. So that’s what we’ve tried to do, is create a kind of skeleton against which we can continue to make this case. And so thanks for everybody’s questions about did you measure schools? Also, people that are identifying glitches. I’m sure there’ll be a gazillion like Dorval’s listed as Montreal, it’s actually not, etc. … So, let’s just get all … we need all your help to fix this. I know a lot of you are digging in for the first time now, and you’re saying, wait a second, what about this? What about that? We want a tool that’s useful, and I’m going to come to you first Puneeta, because I’m sure there are glitches on the Edmonton side of this. But we were able to, we had funding to do deeper dives in a handful of these communities. But we would love to do more. And we had the original funding came from Infrastructure Canada, now called Housing Infrastructure Communities, it’s been renamed in the last few days. But, that’s where the initial funding came from. And we have some … hopefully some ongoing funding. But anybody on this platform with us, if you see a way that we could build on another layer, then reach out to us, let’s figure out how we do that so that we continue to make this … I know there’s an expression in the data world about this, about how rich you want it to be, but let’s see, what does it say about placemaking? What does it say about health outcomes? What does it say about the social determinants of health? What does it say …? We have a couple of other parallel projects – we’re doing something on how do we intensify housing and affordable housing on Main Street? And we also have an ongoing piece, on what’s happening to faith spaces that used to be anchors on main streets and are being repurposed. So again, great … The chat is, of course, blowing up, which it always does. Great. Put your questions in there. We’ll publish an FAQ. If you’ve got ideas about other partners that might want to be able to add on, that’s the great thing about what you’ve built, Greg and company and that Nater has supported us on. And so okay, Puneeta, over to you.

Puneeta McBryan We are so grateful that Edmonton was one of the case studies chosen because we have a really big data problem. And I don’t think that’s just an Edmonton problem, but it’s certainly something I’ve been struggling with. You know, we as a BIA for Edmonton’s downtown are a tiny organization. We sort of have, you know, economic development as part of our mandate, but like, what we can actually take on within that, the data that we can afford to buy and let alone being able to compile it and display it in this kind of way, is just like so far outside of the scope of anything we could do. And it hasn’t really been something that our municipality has really taking on in this kind of way either. So, this already, I can tell, is a game changer for us, even, you know, having grant funding conversations with Prairies Canada about what kinds of projects will be transformational from a community economic development lens here. We can use this tool to point out where there are gaps, where there are opportunities, where there’s a, you know, a big population not having their needs met, where there are economic shifts that we don’t want to see happening. The currency of it is really exciting. Like, you know, so much of the data we’re working with is already, you know, 3 or 4 or 5 years old when we do get our hands on something. And so the fact that this goes all the way up to 2022 is great. It’s interesting, though, because there’s already things happening since 2022 that are concerning to me, and so I’ll be really excited to see how that gets shown. You know, as this thing continues living and gets updated data. Housing starts is a perfect example. So obviously from a from a city’s perspective, especially a sprawling city like Edmonton, where we continue to have the vast majority of our housing starts way around the edges of the city. There’s a section on housing starts in our case study for our downtown main streets. And it looks really good in this platform because we had, you know, just a phenomenal amount of housing starts in our main street neighborhoods for the years leading up to the pandemic. And it looks in the platform like we kind of held on to that. But what’s happened in the past two years is we’ve fallen off a cliff. So 20,000 housing starts across Edmonton in the past two years – zero are in our downtown. Zero housing starts in the last two years.

Michael Powe Wow

Mary W Rowe Even Michael said, wow, look at that. You made Seattle say wow.

Puneeta McBryan Yeah. And so it’s like … and that’s just in the last two years. And that to me, like, that’s where we’re seeing the results of the economics of housing right now, building towers is obscenely expensive. And we’re a city with, you know, no shortage of land, as all Canadians know up here in the prairies we can just keep building out. And that’s why our housing is so affordable. So that’s great. But what does that mean for our main streets? What does that mean for how efficiently we’re building our city? You know, what does that mean for how we’re building around our transit hubs and all of our civic infrastructure? And for the efficiency and viability of our tax base, like, that’s a conversation that our City Council is having right now too is … our commercial tax base is not growing at pace with our residential base. So being able to see all this stuff mapped out in this tool allows us to better tell the story. A) Why this matters? B) What are what are the trends that are actually happening? C) What are the opportunities and the challenges that we need all of government to react to?

Mary W Rowe Yeah, yeah. Again, I want to encourage people to put questions and queries into the chat. But also, I see that Emily has put an email address you can send it to directly. Listen, you know, whenever you launch something like this, there are going to be glitches – there are going to be things that are wrong that have to be corrected, obviously. We would love to do more of those deeper dives like we were able to do in Edmonton. So, if you work for municipal government and we know a lot of people who do tune in to CityTalk work for a municipal or provincial government – and you’ve got resources, let us know and let’s see if we can build out more case studies. Nader a quick question for you. And then I’m going to come to Cheryll. And there’s a question about data privacy that, Charles Finley is asking. And I know this is a big, big priority at IDA. So how have you made sure that that’s being accounted for?

Nader Shureih The short answer to that, the short answer to that question is we’re the second company in the world to get ISO certified for privacy by design designation with respect to all of our data. And that includes the mobile data that Greg was referring to. Okay? And that means that we apply principles, the seven principles of privacy by design from, you know, inception, from conception of the data product that we want to build through to launch of that data product. The principles of privacy by design are applied at all points. That means that we manage the quality of the data, we manage the integrity of the data. We manage the issues with respect to privacy-related or personal information. All of that gets scrubbed, effectively. That’s what ends up happening. What that means in the case of mobile data is you get suppression. So you need much larger samples to make the mobile data more effective. And that’s what we’re working with. We’re working with a couple of different data sources on what really is defined as big data. Because this core data that you see there, the demographics, all the demo stats, data that you see in the platform right now, the demographics … that’s not big data, it’s small data. All right. Big data. We’re talking about billions of lines on a daily basis, that kind of thing. Right? That’s the big data stuff that we’re talking about.

Mary W Rowe Ok, you’re starting to lose me, my eyes are starting to glaze over. Just saying. I’m going to go to Cheryll and then to Mike to make sure that we get our other guests in. But just so … I hope that there’s some reassurance here that there is due diligence, which is one of the great benefits of working with a company like Environics, who’s ahead on this stuff and trying to think about the implications. Cheryll, we asked you to move your camera because there was too much backlight from you, but people if you can recognize where Cheryll’s coming in to us. She is downtown at Yonge. And you can see there she is in a very evocative place in Canada. Cheryll, what’s your perspective about this kind of framing and you are stewarding one of the most important main streets in the country. Not that anyone is any more important than other, but you have one of the most challenging ones. So talk to us about your sense of how this kind of data analysis can help.

Cheryll Diego Thanks, Mary. First off, I want to just say how I really love and I think I will start doing the same thing as you did wherein you ask for your first impression or first interaction with an indigenous person. I think that’s kind of great … just for me, it will be Dave. He was a common fixture in the downtown Yonge area. But anyways, so we are really excited to see this platform. Mary, you may already know this – at downtown Yonge, we love data. Pauline, our executive director Pauline here, has an economic development background, and we rely a lot on data in our planning and making decisions. I think on our end, it’s kind of like a reverse in terms of the concern that Puneeta has. So the density and intensification of the downtown, here in our neighborhood, is huge. To just give you a sense, in the next five years, we’re to see about 70,000 households adding into our current population. That’s about, 30,000 people. With that said, having this data, seeing what are available … the infrastructure in the community, will help us advocate as to what else do we need to make sure that we build a complete community? So a few years ago there was a development here, close to our area … what we always say, Mary, our business improvement area, we have an invisible line. Anything that is about a ten-minute walking distance from our core has a direct impact to our neighborhood or main street. Going back to what I was saying earlier there was a condo development here, they actually have on their board that says there is no school catchment available in that area.

Because, we are … the intensification of our, neighborhood – We need to build more of those infrastructures. What’s great though is, I want to see that there is some light towards the end of the tunnel. The building of, for example, the Ontario line will be a great help for us. We just did our strategic planning and ease of access is one of the biggest concern for our neighborhood. So knowing where the nodes are can kind of let us know as to what are the alternatives. We are a recipient … we’re very lucky to be part of that additional funding wherein additional data is being gathered. So we’re actually seeing, with the closure of some of the main streets, we’re seeing now which roads or which streets are taking on those excess vehicles, and how is it impacting travel time within our area? I think the biggest challenge also for us is … and I guess like many other downtowns, everybody owns the downtown. Not just the people who are actually living in the downtown core. So everybody, we need to take into consideration people who are also coming downtown. With intensification we also see a lot of changes in the types of businesses that we have in our area. But being the center of the city, we have to keep in mind that we also still have regional businesses that are here so we have to take into consideration those people who are coming into the city.

Mary W Rowe Yeah. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of fiddles around what’s on a main street, how long is the visitor on the main street? Is the business on the main street? Is the service on the main street … all of that stuff. It’s not uncomplicated. So I appreciate that there has to be layers of sophistication here. And I also am conscious that there would be a way for some of this data to be used negatively. So we are conscious of that too. If we start to put on incident reports, for instance, you know, that could be used negatively but also on the other extreme, you know, what about extreme weather events? What about climate? So there’s a whole bunch of stuff. Mike, you’re very patient. We appreciate patient Americans. Thank you for joining us. I’ve got to tell you that every Canadian has Main Street America envy. We love the work of Main Street America. You are a great, great beacon of leadership on how main streets matter in American cities. And we spend all our time just saying we want to be like Main Street America. So thanks for joining us and we’re interested for you to just give us a little snapshot. I know you told me you’re in Seattle today, so just talk to us a little bit about what this kind of discussion for you is like in terms of how do we use data in a way that strengthens main streets. So thanks for joining us on CityTalk.

Michael Powe Thank you Mary. I mean, I would say it’s very nice and it’s kind of surprising to me to hear that, that you all are envious of Main Street America and the work that we do. That’s wonderful. I was going to say the exact same thing. I think the platform that Greg and team have built is incredible. I mean, I’m envious of that platform and just really blown away by it. I would love to build something like that for our main streets.

Mary W Rowe You can come on up. You know … Americans always envy aspects of Canada. So this is another thing to add.

Michael Powe Yeah. There you go. I would love to try and build something like this. And, you know, I hope to talk to Greg more about that in the future.

Mary W Rowe Nater, you see the smoke coming out of his head … He’s already got Environics on it, I’m sure. You know, measuringmainstreets.us. Okay. Keep going. But, Michael, what are you seeing? I mean, Seattle’s a perfect example where I’ve been many times. There’s many main streets that are challenged there, too. So go ahead. Give us your perspective.

Michael Powe Well, I mean, I’ll say one thing about Mainstreet America, you know, is this national association of actual main street organizations. So I think the approach that y’all have taken with this platform, just to map out density and look across the entire country is also sort of mind blowing to me. We have a network of 1200, designated main street districts across the US. Many of them, most of them are in rural areas and small towns, not just in big cities like Seattle, as it turns out the city of Seattle’s doesn’t have any actual designated main streets. There are, of course, many, many more than we recognize in that 1200. We work with probably more like 2000 places across the US. I think when I look at the platform that we have a lot of the same sorts of data. We have our own mobile analytic data we started to use and, you know, understand now that 400 plus million Americans visited, Main Street in 2023, which that is also mind blowing, given we’re a country of …

Mary W Rowe How many, Mike? How many?

Michael Powe 400 million. So that means it’s …

Mary W Rowe Ten times the population of Canada.

Michael Powe And more than the population of the United States.

Mary W Rowe Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re ten times the size of us. I get that, okay.

Keep going. Yeah.

Michael Powe I mean, that number is not really that meaningful, but I think our main streets are doing quite well. You know, we have … a lot of them are thriving economically … We have about the same number of jobs on main streets as we have with Amazon and Walmart combined. We’ve got more than 2 million Americans living in main streets. We’re doing great in a lot of ways, and I think it’s important that these are the historic and civic hearts of our communities, you know? Something like 60% of them are in a city or have a town hall, two thirds have a place of worship close to half has a child care center. So, but what I’m kind of struck by, looking at the platform again with Greg and with you all is sort of … what are the use cases for people like Puneeta or people like Cheryll? Like, if I think about a numeric audience, our, you know, nonprofits and city government offices that run main streets would be curious to say, “okay, so what do I do with this?” Like, what are the how do I how can I, inform infrastructural investment in a smarter way with this platform? Or how can I sort of, attract a broader swath of the community using this platform? So to me, that’s the big question coming out of this. But yeah.

Mary W Rowe Yeah. How do we make it real? How do we drive more traffic? I’m interested … One of the questions in the chat and maybe Greg or Nader, you want to reply on this … All of us have had the experience of going to a website and we realize the data is stale. So how do we make sure that the data here is as up to date as it possibly can be, either to Greg or to Nader … Which … either of you?

Nader Shureih Greg, please start …

Greg Spencer Yeah. I mean, ultimately it’s, you know, technically it’s not really the challenge – It’s it’s more just, you know, the financial aspect behind it and maintaining sort of funding for it.

Mary W Rowe You mean buying … I don’t know whether people realize you got to buy this data, right?

Greg Spencer Yeah, a lot of it, there’s a cost involved. And so that’s the bigger challenge. I think we’ve set it up in a way that’s technically pretty easy to do, not just to add data and keep it up to date, but even to add additional data sets as we’ve been talking about, as Mike was just suggesting, new use cases come in, and to Cheryll’s point and Puneeta’s point around housing, there’s definitely going to be more housing data coming along. One of the big things we’ve found actually in the first project from ad research perspective was that the most resilient streets, the ones that got hit the least hardest by the pandemic and bounced back the fastest, were actually the ones that had the most people coming from close by. Coming from within a kilometer … the higher your share of visitors coming from close by, the better off you were from a resiliency standpoint. And as we sort of think about how we grow our cities, our communities, through infill housing, through making use of existing infrastructure, which a big part of this is understanding where maybe there’s even already , you know, an infrastructure surplus to some extent. And where we can add housing without having to build brand new infrastructure. This is the kind of application that I think we’re going to be looking for, adding in additional and more information going forward.

Mary W Rowe So what’s interesting about that then, is the businesses. I mean, we did block studies ages ago. CUI started on this path called Bring Back Main Street. Puneeta, I think you were in those early meetings. This is just before the pandemic. And we talked about the ones that had survived, and they were the ones that were providing hyper local products and services. So the dilemma there is … what happens is on a main street there are specialty shops and people come from long distances. So I’m interested in terms of Edmonton and Toronto, both Cheryll and Puneeta, when you’re curating the business mix how do you balance that? Puneeta first.

Puneeta McBryan Yeah, the really cool thing that popped up in the pandemic here and I’m sure across the US and Canada is sort of like digital main street supports. So of course, we had a similar program here where so many of our specialty types of retailers were able to move online and still meet most of their client’s needs. And we actually lost very, very few businesses in Edmonton’s downtown, which is quite a miracle because I know it’s not the same story on a lot of other main streets and downtowns. But yeah, our bigger challenge is still just like we don’t have the residential density that we need. So the businesses that we have lost are the ones that were relying entirely on the office workers. So if you’re relying on that, you know, CBD, Central Business District base, and then they’re all at home and their home doesn’t happen to be a block away, then you’re toast. And that’s really the story of our Edmonton City Center mall. You know, tons of businesses in there that were really built just on that foot traffic of, you know, tens of thousands of people every day, Monday to Friday. So it’s really forced us to think a lot more about resiliency and what that looks like. And how do we A) build the residential base we need to support more of the retail mix that we want to attract back. But also what are the residents that we do have looking for? And so we finally have our first grocery store opened in Edmonton’s downtown. Right coming out of the pandemic, actually, we’ve got a Loblaws City market now in the heart of the core. And that’s a huge anchor for that residential base that we need to grow.

Mary W Rowe I mean, part of what you’re flagging, as you suggest, is part of so much of CUI’s other work around – how do you revitalize downtowns, how are we ensuring and housing on main streets? So you want complete communities. What’s your perspective, Cheryll, on this in terms of what you’re seeing on Young Street?

Cheryll Diego Yeah. So yes, we have a lot of residents in our neighborhood, but we are also heavily reliant on the office workers. So before the pandemic, on a daily basis, the population actually grows about half a million. Because of all these office workers coming in … a quarter of them coming into the area. So our nighttime population, where the residents are, it’s not actually enough to sustain those businesses. But as I said, we also still see … we have done a number of retail studies or retail counts. And to date, we’re almost evening out. Yes, there were a number of businesses that closed down, but we also have new businesses that’s coming up. The number one thing that I want to promote is Shake Shack just opened a couple of weeks ago!

Mary W Rowe Yes! You got a Shake Shack. Mike … There you go. American brought Canada Shake Shack. Thank you Mike.

Cheryll Diego There is still a line up outside Shake Shack yesterday when I walked past it, but anyways … so the malls are doing better in terms of vacancy rate. They are doing better compared to our main street currently. Again, what I wanted to also note is what I said earlier, we’re seeing this shift into the types of businesses that are coming in because of the ongoing rise of the residents in our neighborhood.

Mary W Rowe: It’s interesting, you know, we just finished releasing a report about the future of downtown Ottawa, similar challenge to what Washington DC has, Mike. And when you’ve got a predominance of office workers, particularly in a Capital City. And part of the strategy that we said was you need your good old import replacement unit. You need to replace those commuters that were coming in. You replace them with residents. So that is a good strategy just to get more people. Looking forward in terms of the kind of how do we use data? John Kerr is asking an interesting question on the chat, which is data is fine, but do we have the stories? Do we have the anecdotes? So thoughts, Greg, on how we can maybe add more storytelling to the platform. Any thoughts from anybody else? I’ll start with Greg, but anybody else can chime in.

Greg Spencer Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s key. I think it’s important to point out that data isn’t everything – that you can’t, you know, it’s just one way of knowing. And it’s best when it’s combined with stories. You know, we’re talking about winning over hearts and minds to make change in certain places. This is the minds. But we also need the hearts, right. And so we need to humanize the data in a lot of ways. I would say one of the other RKI projects, this was one of 12 projects that the federal government funded. I really liked, what the people at the Climate Atlas had done, where they actually did go around and collect people’s very local stories about places that they had data on. And then they had little videos, little vignettes, that you could click on, like if you went to the street, the case study, and you could see somebody talk about it. That’s something I wish I had thought of two years ago when we were doing this, something I would love to … the kind of thing I would love to do going forward.

Mary W Rowe – yeah, is there a way to create those little layers, and could we use audio for video or whatever. Somebody else is asking a question about – could we start putting user data up more easily? Nader, have you thought much of the about storytelling and how we can sort of bridge the divide between what the data says and what people actually, viscerally feel?

Nader Shureih So storytelling at EA is a bit different from the storytelling we’re trying to do here and in the in the context of the platform, I think … I won’t necessarily speak for the plug but I think, I think there is sort of a crowdsourcing opportunity for the platform to explore. But from an EA perspective, storytelling is about taking data, turning it into insights and enabling action on those insights. What that means is … What does this number mean for policy development? What does this number mean from a governance perspective? You know? And what does this … you know what … If we have a number of housing units that are planned in a city or in a space over the next ten years, what are the implications on the population, what are the implications on infrastructure and so on?

Mary W Rowe Let’s take those questions. Let’s take those questions to PUnetta and Cheryll who have to deal with decision makers all the time. Can you … do you think you can strengthen your case? Does the data help you? They’re talking to these people and they’re lurking in the chat. They may not be in the chat, but they’re listening. Puneeta?

Puneeta McBryan I think so. Yeah. Because so often we ask the question or it’s not even spoken. Is first of all, why does this matter? And I think actually in cities like ours where especially in Edmonton, like we’ve built a city plan that we should be really, really proud of, to build, you know, a series of 15-minute cities and to let people live and work and play and meet all their needs within 15 minutes of their home. Why does the downtown matter in that context?

Mary W Rowe Right, right

Puneeta McBryan What is it even for anymore – if all these, you know, main streets across the city can be created. And so that’s great. And I think this tool will be helpful in that regard. But for me, and proving the case of our downtown, this is a fantastic snapshot of how much we’ve already invested in civic infrastructure.

Mary W Rowe Yeah, exactly. What’s already there.

Puneeta McBryan Yeah. Why are we focusing all of our time and effort and, you know, policy tools and incentives on building, in my case housing. That is the number one priority I’m sure on all of our minds, where we already have all of this infrastructure, like, when you look at it, it’s remarkable. Our downtown truly has the all the infrastructure that one needs.

Mary W Rowe Let’s just be clear that 15 million … apparently we in the pre-chat, we just, for those of you not listening to the pre chat, 15 million people on Monday night saw why your downtown matters because your downtown was full of fans who had to cope with their disappointment collectively [speaking of Stanley Cup finals loss against Florida].. Mike, do you have anything further in terms of your particular perspective on this around the policy aspects of this and the advocacy that you and all your association members have to do all the time I’m assuming.

Cheryll Diego We have a little bit of a twist on this. So a thing we just launched is called the Booms Tracker. The Building Opportunities On Main Street tracker.

Mary W Rowe The booze tracker …

Cheryll Diego It’s a crowdsourcing tool in a way. So it’s a property inventory tool. Folks can use a smartphone, a local director of a main street can walk out of their office, tap on a property in their district and say, is there a vacant space in this building or not? We can see from this data so far that something like 40% of our properties have a vacant space. So it seems like these are really vibrant and active places, but there’s still so much room to grow, and I think the need that Puneeta says, for housing, I think we’re seeing potential for something like a quarter of a million more housing units in existing spaces.

Mary W Rowe Great.

Michael Powe Existing infrastructure. So I feel like that’s the huge opportunity that’s in front of us.

Mary W Rowe Yeah. Let’s get that into the … is that site publicly accessible Mike? Can we get that into the chat? And people will be leaving mainstreets.ca and they’ll be going over to the BOOST tracker. Cheryll, thoughts from you in terms of your particular sets of challenges in downtown Toronto?

Greg Spencer Yeah. So the tool is really great. We use a lot of data in a lot of our advocacy works. And I think just knowing what we currently have now and knowing what’s coming into the pipeline in terms of the additional residential buildings that are coming and then we can better plan not just the civic infrastructure, but the social infrastructure that contributes to that community well-being. Like for us here, safety really is a huge concern. We should not lose track or lose sight of those things as well.

Puneeta McBryan I‘d just like to react quickly to a comment in the chat from Melanie about aging infrastructure. Like, downtown Winnipeg as an example. I mean, we’re all having that issue and that’s part of this, right? I know I was just talking to Mark Garner, Cheryll, about what’s happening in Toronto right now. And yeah, we’re having to dig underground and replace 150 or 200 year old pipes in order to build these neighborhoods to the capacity that they should be built at. So to Melanie, I would say to you, like that’s advocacy to the federal government, we need this infrastructure upgraded because we need our our main streets and our downtowns to be …

Mary W Rowe Just remember when we talk about upgrading infrastructure we need to say Calgary, Calgary Calgary. Go ahead Cheryll. And Mike, you may not realize that Calgary’s water system has completely collapsed. Okay. Go ahead. Cheryll.

Cheryll Diego Yes. In terms of aging infrastructure, we’re hoping to redo our water main pipe here to avoid what happened in Calgary. But what I’m saying is, I think, yes, we are great in building new stuff, but we don’t seem to plan. There’s no operations in the capital build. And, it seems like every ten years, say you build a new park as part of a development, and then ten years from now, you have to redo the park because it was not properly maintained. Right? So we have to build it in the planning.

Mary W Rowe … at the outset. And I was just noticing Mike has put in his tool and it’s BOOMS. I thought it was booze …. Just shows you …

Michael Powe A booze tracker … Maybe it’s a different version …

Cheryll Diego Well, that’s what got my attention. Just saying, but the BOOMS tracker. We’re going to we’re going to start using it here. Okay. With the time remaining. Any last thoughts from any of you around this idea of how we can actually make this tool raise all the issues you’re raising around investment in infrastructure, aging, mixed use, complete neighborhoods, 15 minute cities, all that stuff. Any final thoughts, Greg, to you just quickly, because we’re going to run out of time. I’m just going to give you each 30 seconds. Greg first.

Greg Spencer Okay, sure. Yeah. I mean, we released, a report with the Canadian Infrastructure Bank a couple weeks ago that said every new unit of housing on average requires a $100,000 infrastructure investment. But that’s not, you know, everyone, like, there’s a range … some are less, some are more. Like, can we use this information to be better about … or more sophisticated about development charges? Because ultimately that infrastructure is paid for by developer charges. Can we figure out a more efficient way of doing development charges that takes into account existing infrastructure and has the double benefit of increasing and improving densities?

Mary W Rowe I mean, we’ve got to figure out how to get this investment done. Mike, to you, 30 seconds.

Michael Powe I would say, yeah, I agree with that exact point, and I’m glad the infrastructure point came up at the end. I think there’s been some good analysis in the US of this greenfield development, building out constantly to build new infrastructure. That infrastructure then has to be maintained just like anything else. So why not invest in the heart of these communities and try to get the bang for the buck out of what you already have? So I’m wholly on board with that.

Mary W Rowe Bang for the buck. Absolutely. Nader.

Nader Shureih I think prediction. I think using the data to help predict what communities will be like, can help with a lot of policy-based decisions, infrastructure decisions and the like. So use the data, leverage the data for prediction.

Mary W Rowe You know, we’ve got a lot of smart people in Canada and also in the United States, who know how to take data and learn. So this is the important thing that CUI tries to create data sets and shared platforms for all smart people to figure out what could we do with it? What else could it tell us? Cheryll. And then last word to you, Puneeta. Go ahead Cherylll.

Cheryll Diego Yeah, I want to kind of expand on what Nader said about using it for policymaking. I think with the information that we have currently and being able to predict the future, we have to do those policy reviews now, that can be implemented when we get to that next tipping point that we have.

Cheryll Diego Which we know is around the corner, of course. Punetta. Last word to you because we want Edmonton to know that we love you.

Puneeta McBryan Always appreciate you, Mary. I’m also going to jump on something that Nader just said, which is about long-term planning. Like I think especially the pandemic had us just looking, you know, you can see my Oilers nails still, two feet in front of our face because we’re just in reaction mode and recovery mode. And now we really need to be thinking about what do our communities look like 15, 20 years down the road, and not as urban planners, but as people who are living in the community as it exists today. And I think a tool like this will hopefully help us to do that better.

Mary W Rowe Thank you. Thank you everybody. If you have a topic that you’d like us to tackle on CityTalk, just let us know. Send us a note. We’re trying to do these things in real time. It’s all about place. It’s all about place-informed decision making and policies. And we’re appreciative of these folks joining us. So Greg and Nader, again, congratulations on getting this two up. It’s going to get better and better and better because of everybody tuning in to give you all their feedback about how you can improve it. Thanks for joining us, Cheryll and Punita. Always great to have your cities here and have your voices here. And Michael, we are glad to hear from Main Street America and to have your input and to have the BOOMS tool. So thanks always for joining us. We’re appreciative of the chance to have this kind of conversation. Thanks everybody for joining CityTalk. Have a great rest of the week.