More Than Monuments: What’s on the agenda for capital downtowns?

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. I always appreciate there’s always one or two who are going to say, “Hey, beautiful music, but are we supposed to be seeing anybody”? Yes, you are, but it takes a while for Zoom to kick in and for us to get the room as full as we can, particularly having a session as popular as this one. We’ve got a couple of hundred people from across the country. Lots of people sipping coffee on the West Coast, it’s midday here in eastern central Canada, eastern the United States. People are a little further along in their day, but what a great moment for us to have a chance to have this conversation about the future of downtowns, and particularly on the day following the release in Canada’s capital of Ottawa, a strategy around the recovery or future or reimagining of Ottawa’s downtown, which we’ve now … To paraphrase the late Peter Herrndorf, we are now calling it Canada’s Living Room. He coined that phrase when he did an extension to the National Arts Center. He wanted it to be Ottawa’s living room. And so, I copied him and said, let’s understand, and let’s be clear that, in fact, Ottawa is Canada’s living room. So, I’m delighted you would join us. I’m back in Toronto today. I was in Ottawa yesterday for the launch of that report, and to have a chance to celebrate with all the partners that were engaged in creatin g that, a couple of whom are on the call today, on this session today. But I’m now back in Toronto, which is the traditional territory of many First Nations and Métis nations, and particularly home to … covered by Treaty 13 and William’s Treaty, and particularly home to the Mississauga’s of the Credit, the nation of the Wendat, the Huron Wendat, the Chippewa, the Anishinaabeg peoples and the Haudenosaunee. And we continue, in Canada, and I will be interested to hear from our American colleagues, to the extent to which you’re also coming to terms with this, we are continuing to look at what reconciliation needs to look like in urban environments and how we acknowledge, celebrate, and affirm the ancestral territories upon which we all occupy. You’ll see that lots of people in the chat are checking in, indicating whose ancestral territories they live in. And also, the exclusions of urbanism that have excluded other folks, in various kinds of systemic ways. So … And downtowns are an interesting part of that conversation, I think, because part of what we’re suggesting, I think, in all of our work here, is that downtowns need to be inclusive of everyone. And one of the challenges we have is that they have become less inclusive through the pandemic, and now we have a moment where we can think about how to reinvest in them to become more inclusive. So thanks for joining us. Everybody knows that, we tape these CityTalks, we publish the video version and we publish the chat. So please feel free to engage in the chat. Put your questions in there. Remember that whatever you put there, though, will be publicly shared. And we always … I always joke about it, it’s kind of a parallel universe on the chats, on City Talk, because you often put ideas over there and questions and challenges, and then you all start to respond to each other. And so you have to be a good multitasker to be an effective CityTalker with CUI. So thanks for doing that. It’s always a really rich conversation for a clean, sharp, hour. So, specific to this topic, as I suggested, is the future of capitals. How do capital cities vary, in terms of their composition and their assets, and their challenges? And as I say, we’re fresh off launching that Ottawa piece, which, of course, is a part of a region, and we have someone here is going to participate with us who actually is part of a federal agency around a region, the National Capital Region. For our American viewers, just so you know, Ottawa is actually located adjacent to another city, the city of Gatineau, Ville de Gatineau, en français, two provinces, Ontario and Quebec, sharing a water course and sharing all sorts of assets. And so, again, part of the theming that we see in all of our work at the CUI is increasingly, we are operating as regions, even if we don’t have a regional government, it may not actually be necessary, but we have a kind of watershed eco-shed, shared set of landscapes that create the region. And the question now is, how do you prioritize investments in those regions to strengthen that capacity to be resilient and economically vibrant and all the things that we know are important to cities, so … And important to countries, and important to how we function. So really pleased to have a couple of colleagues with us. And I’m going to ask them to all put their cameras on. A couple of colleagues from the US is what I was going to mention. And if I could ask them all to put the cameras on so that everybody can see everybody and you can see we’ve got a really terrific group of folks here. For those of you that haven’t been, up all night, like Sueling Ching has been, responding to media inquiries and, continuing to look at the implications of the report that she just underwrote and created with us. If you haven’t … go to livingcapitalottawa.ca About my colleagues at CUI will put it in the link, and you can have a good read and see about where Ottawa is going … or where we hope Ottawa will go, because it has to be … As we always say, city building isn’t for the faint of heart … And it’s not a single job for one person. It’s a lot of partners. And so, who better for us to have join us here, to talk specifically if we could, each of you, about, you know … the questions we’re always framing with CityTalk is what’s working, what’s not and what’s next? And we’re interested particularly in the challenges that we’re seeing in downtowns. And then I guess on top of that, is there a particular kind of challenge that we can anticipate in a capital city? So we’re really pleased to have a deputy mayor with us, from Washington DC, which is, as I said to Nina, you know, we invoke Washington often in Canada and certainly in Ottawa. Yesterday, your city was mentioned several times, your district. And I was lucky enough to be in Washington DC for the Canadian Urban Institute’s counterpart, the Urban Institute in the U.S. had a big annual dinner, and you spoke at it. And I came right up to you and said, “wow, we need to have your perspective if you can come up to Canada and be part of something that we’re talking about for Ottawa”. So, Deputy Mayor, we’re really, really happy to have you with us and, I ask you to open your mic and just give us a little snapshot and also just remind people you have a, you bring a lot of different experience to your role. So we’d be interested a little bit of that. And then a little bit about what you see is the challenge that you’re facing in terms of Washington in particular downtown. So welcome to City Talk. Really glad to have you, Nina.

Nina Albert Well, thanks so much. I don’t know if I can talk as quickly as you do, Mary. So, everybody can take a breath a little bit about listening to me. But I do have a lot of different perspectives, when I came into this role … I see Sujata here, who has a metro map behind her from San Francisco. I used to work, doing what we call joint development or transit-oriented development for the Washington Metro Region Transit Authority. So I have that as background. I, I have also worked as a real estate developer. But most recently I worked for the federal government, and so I have met the Canadian counterparts who run the federal real estate portfolio, or the, you know, Canadian real estate portfolio. And so that’s what I did in the District of Columbia. Or sorry, for the country, I was located here in Washington, D.C. And so coming into this role now, I have the transit perspective and how to recover and the concerns about transit as well as the importance of transit. There’s some new trends emerging, in how people are using transit. So that’s something that I bring to the table. But I think most importantly is the background that I have in terms of the federal impact, and their return to work, sorry, return to office policies. And now sitting in the role that I’m in, the question … Those impacts … How it impacts the private sector’s own telework policies quite frankly, because the private sector has a huge, you know, inner interface – the two cultures of the federal workplace and the private workplace, you know, kind of feed off of each other here. And so as a result, downtown DC is 87% commercial office, which is a huge concentration of office. We see that in other parts of the city that are much more mixed use, where there’s a mix of residential, office, retail, and entertainment that those submarkets have rebounded. They’re much more resilient. And it’s the huge concentration of office in our downtown that, you know, is just really deadening the downtown. And, we are … like in Washington, D.C., already, our tourism and hospitality business is back. The entertainment industry is back. Restaurants actually are … We have net new restaurants opening in Washington. You know, the hotels are back. So we see where the strength of the economy is. We actually just from most economic indicators, things like GDP, new business starts, employment growth, population growth … DC is doing well. But where there is significant challenge is in occupancy downtown and the commercial tax base that that produces. And what we’re anticipating over the next five years is, you know, a significant decline in office assessed values and how that will hit our, frankly, the city’s bottom line, more so than the overall economy. And so we are putting together our plans to reposition, just like you would think, a portfolio, you know, reposition these office assets, to accommodate much more mix of uses. And so we already have an office to housing conversion incentive program that we’ve published and are taking applications on, but we’re getting more aggressive than that. And we are now trying to incentivize office to what I call anything, anything that is productive. If you want to go office to trophy office, where we see demand, continued demand, for trophy office space. If you want to do office to hotel, or office to something else that you might come up with, we will entertain all of that and incentivize that conversion because we don’t see any near- or long-term demand for particularly, class B and C space downtown DC. We need to take it off-market, and start bringing back vibrancy so we can have a mixed-use neighborhood in downtown DC, just like our mixed-use neighborhoods across the city. So that’s, kind of my two second, maybe that was longer … three-minute coverage.

Mary W. Rowe That’s good! And so, listen, I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know, I’m familiar with “trophy wife”. I am not familiar with “trophy office”. So that’s … Is that just code for class A? Like, if you want to have a really spectacular …

Nina Albert It’s class AA ++. So like, views become really important. You know, just amenitizing, you know, that there’s, like, a really great restaurant on the ground floor. You know, it’s really the whole building, you know, so, yeah, it’s … Class A is one thing, then there’s class A+, if you want to get really … or then there’s trophy.

Mary W. Rowe Wonderful. You know, I often invoke – because I’m a person of certain age – I invoke the Petula Clark effect, which is that “when you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown. Things are all brighter there. You can forget all your troubles. Forget all your cares.” There was something spectacular about going downtown. When I was a kid, I’d come in from London, Ontario, which, for your benefit Nina is a couple of hours south of Toronto. And I would come to visit my aunt. And where so we want to go … Can we go downtown? So it’s not a new conversation in that way, I suppose, to look at different ways. And I love your idea of converting to anything. We’re with you on that. There was an initial conversation a couple of years ago, and in Canada’s particular case, Calgary had the jump start on this. It had a shift in the oil and gas industry, which meant it had several empty office floors before Covid hit. So it’s been at this for ten years, and it has the most ambitious, aggressive, as you’re suggesting, incentive program to get conversions happening. But we are, like you, starting to realize it’s not only housing. Could be post-secondary use, could be cultural use, could be light manufacturing. Right? Could be a makerspace. Who knows? You’re muted there. Just keep yourself off mute …

Nina Albert So just a couple quick things. I mean, you know, we’ve been talking to a lot of, you know, sort of thought leaders in, you know, kind of the urban planning space and almost unilaterally everybody sort of reinforces that downtowns are where people go naturally. Like, if you’re coming to discover a city, if you want to, you know, go to a restaurant, the natural inclination of all of us that have, you know, kind of grown up in the built environment will go downtown because that’s where you anticipate the hub of activity to be. And so I think on average downtown, of any of any town, small or large, 70% are visitors. They’re not people who are occupants there. So when you think about that, the importance of the vibrancy of downtown becomes even more important, because that’s the first touch, the first impression and the reason that people might come back. So vibrancy continues to be important. We are looking at short term and long-term activations to make sure that when people come downtown again, they’re getting what they expect. But the other point, there are two other points that I just wanted to share, which is that downtowns are resilient because there is that continued foot traffic that wants downtown to be vibrant. So if something isn’t working now, you know, you can insert and try new things and see what catches. So the resiliency is a function of the fact that people continue to come and visit because that’s their expectation. But the real thing now, that we have an opportunity to do this is a pretty cataclysmic shift in land use and how people are using, you know, you know, buildings and, and cities, you know, probably akin to when the time that, you know, the automobile, started to shift, you know, land use patterns. And we had to recover from that. And we’re having to recover from it again. But to me, the real question that we have an opportunity to tackle is how do we, you know, reinvigorate downtown equitably. And for our downtown, I mentioned it’s 87% commercial office. We’re not going to be displacing anybody by introducing more residential and other uses. And so what I’m really looking at is, you know, we have plans, you know, the real estate process and investment cycle is long, so it’s going to take some time to actually execute. But that also gives us time to be really thoughtful about how to make sure that what is brought to the table and what is being, you know, what downtown is being repositioned into is repositioned for, you know, a broad spectrum of people and users and residents.

Mary W. Rowe It’s interesting, you mentioned this when I was in DC two weeks ago, that in many ways you have a kind of … not a blank slate, but you have a kind of opportunity because of these assets and you’re not displacing. I mean, you might be displacing … there’s a certain concern of displacement, obviously, and I’m actually going to go next to Sujata because I’m interested to hear what the perspective would be from the West Coast. But … so we’re just … we’re being polite Canadians. I’m making sure the Americans get in first. And then I’ll come to the rest of you. But I am interested … This notion that if you have an opportunity to innovate and try some things, because you’ve got these assets that aren’t … and you’re not having to push aside a whole lot of other uses. So let me just next go to SPUR, if we could, we are, great friends of SPUR and your colleague Sujata. We’ve talked with you many times through the pandemic. Certainly. And when I lived in the United States, I had lots and lots of dealings, with Gabe, and with the previous leadership there and continue to just watch with great interest as you’re developing, so … and as you’re animating. And the other thing, it’s so interesting, to echo what Nina just said, you’ve got your transit rides right behind you. And mobility is one of the critical ingredients, I think, right? To the future of these downtowns. So, let’s hear from you, and then we’ll come to the folks that are in Ottawa. Go ahead Sujata.

Sujata Srivastava Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the major challenge we’ve had with downtown San Francisco specifically is that less … Around half of the office workers are back in the office. Our vacancy rate is about 30,000,000ft². So 36% of the office space. That’s a lot of inventory to try to fill up. Having fewer workers means less foot traffic to support small businesses. So we’ve had a lot of closures and, you know, a lot of budget implications, too, for the local municipalities. And, because of all of those dynamics our transit ridership is very low. We had a really successful, BART transit system that was actually able to recapture a lot of its operating costs through fares. Unfortunately, now those revenues are gone. And so there’s this existential crisis for a lot of our transit agencies of how do they survive. They’ve really been able to make it so far through pandemic relief. And so we’re really dealing with how do we make sure that those agencies can continue to provide high quality, high frequency transit service? A lot of our challenges, though, were even before the pandemic, with the lack of housing that is affordable to the workforce, particularly near the downtowns and near the employment centers and the commute to work. And so if we’re able to address both of the housing shortages and the transit access, I think we can go a long way towards recovering some of our economic prosperity and addressing some of our equity and sustainability goals. Downtown had also become so mono-centric and dependent, not on federal workers, of course, but on the tech sector. And so really trying to think about how do we diversify the economic engines for downtown and create more affordable spaces for smaller businesses and other types of uses downtown. Those are some of the questions that we’ve been grappling with. I mean, fortunately, in the Bay area, we have a few things that are working well. We have, like I said before, a strong transit network that we can leverage, we have a still strong economy. I mean, we don’t have people in the office, but we have a lot of job growth. And AI has really been booming and creating a lot of momentum. In San Francisco we have some of the tourism starting to come back. And then on the public policy side, there have been a lot of changes that have helped to create some momentum, making it easier to convert some of those obsolete class B and C spaces into residential units. But on the financial incentive side, we still don’t really have a conversation here in the Bay area about what can we be doing to help the market recover. We can talk a little bit about like, the cultural … kind of cultural context of San Francisco and the kind of resistance to doing those kinds of partnerships. We also have a lot of opportunities, I think, to think about how do we experiment with the fact that there is some lower cost commercial space? Can we do something creative with artist housing, more small business spaces. We’re thinking a lot about sea level rise, particularly for the waterfront. How can we leverage some of the infrastructure investments that are coming, in the downtown area and the eastern waterfront to create some possible, like, you know, new investments, new public spaces, new exciting things that can make downtown more attractive to more different kinds of people.

Mary W. Rowe It’s interesting both you and Nina have touched on this, this idea that we be open to trying things, you know, that we might have a moment to try some things. And I think that the dilemma is always, I suppose, maybe more complicated in cities that have more of a formal function. I’m going to come to you next, Tobi, because you are very familiar with the dynamics of formality versus informality. But I think this is where you … I wouldn’t say a Canadian wakes up and thinks, “oh, they are risk takers over there in Ottawa. They’re going to try some different stuff”. You know, it’s, it’s an interesting challenge, I think, to a city like a capital about how much risk taking you can tolerate. But, Nina, you were just suggesting you’ve got all these assets and Sujata was saying the same thing, you’ve got these really strong assets. And I want to come back to talk about transit, Sujata, because I think one of the challenges we really see in Canada is, people, because of the affordability issue, starting to live further and further and further away from downtown. And boy oh boy, oh boy, they don’t want to get back onto a transit system that’s not, you know, pleasant and it’s a sort of doom loop on transit. So I’m going to come back to that. But, Tobi, can I come to you, please? Can you just for our American colleagues too, and maybe for people listening, just remind people what the NCC is and a little bit about the fact that you’ve had a couple of different roles and then tell us what your sort of picture is as you look at Ottawa’s downtown, you happen to be there, I’m looking out your window at it. It’s nice to see you. Thanks for joining CityTalk.

Tobi Nussbaum Yeah. Thank you. And good afternoon, everybody. And thank you, Mary, for convening this panel. And thank you to the Ottawa Board of Trade, who are really the instigators of having us get together to talk about how to revitalize the downtown core in Ottawa. So, great to see everybody here this afternoon. The NCC is a federal Crown corporation that’s charged with building and inspiring capital. That’s really what our mandate is in a nutshell. And we have some similarities with DC in the sense that we’re sort of artificial capitals. We’re not Paris, we’re not London, we’re not Rome. We’re cities that were established really as a capital. And then that feature being a capital has been central to our growth. And just to say that, you know, Washington has been a great partner. We’ve worked very closely with our equivalents down there, which are a little bit of the National Capital Planning Commission, a little bit of the architect of the capital, a little bit of the National Park Service, and we’re sort of all three in one, if you’re trying to understand our role south of the border. And so, yeah, this notion of how do you create vibrant downtowns while at the same time, reflecting the majesty of a capital and its important democratic role, and also managing that tension between the fact that, capitals, if they’re doing well are attracting a lot of visitors and that’s important, and you want to be welcoming to those visitors. But at the same time, I can tell you that in the middle of March or the middle of November, we need to rely on residents of the capital to be helping with the stimulation of our downtown spaces. So, there’s certainly, I think, a commonality between Ottawa and DC in terms of, managing those two population centers. On risk taking, Mary, I would say that the pandemic did offer us an opportunity to do things differently, both here at the NCC. And I know the city of Ottawa, too, tried, like many cities across the world, to do things differently in terms of patios and open space and public space. We did the same thing in terms of trying to create more attractive spaces for people through turning many of our parkways over for active use. And so we saw that, on many of our parkways, that that funnel into downtown core. And that was a huge success. And we’ve seen, as a consequence of those pilots, continuation of some of that programing. And I think that’s really, really important. And, and maybe a word and I don’t want to steal Zach’s thunder because I know the Byward market was an important recommendation for the work that you announced yesterday, Mary. But just, just to say that I do think there’s an opportunity. I think the lesson we’ve learned, and you alluded to this too Mary, is we want to build our downtown cores for people, and we need to build really attractive spaces. And many of them need to be pedestrianized in order to be successful. And I want to leave you with one little anecdote. I spent the weekend, it was a long weekend here in Canada, at a ski resort called Mount Tremblant. And for those who don’t know it, it’s one of these ski resorts that’s been turned into sort of a Swiss style pedestrianized village. And we have them in different places. We have it at Whistler. It’s the same company that did it here. And it’s remarkable to see that when you do that, the place was teeming with people, and most of the reason why they were there is because they could walk around with their kids play in fountains, wander around safely without having to worry about cars, and it was remarkable to me that people were willing to travel great, great distances, to spend a few hours being in a pedestrianized space. And imagine if we could do that better as North American cities, and what the consequence of that would be for the successful rejuvenation of downtown cores after the pandemic. So I’m going to pause there Mary.

Mary W. Rowe Thanks, Tobi. You mentioned the C word. So did Sujata. I mean this is … actually so did Nina at the beginning. You know, when cars entered … I mean, I have read all that literature about we used to have horses and buggies and then we had too much methane. And then when we got cars and then we’ve had cars for what have we had cars … For a century. And now we’re into a whole different evolution and technology. And it’s going to reform itself. And as we know, cities are unbelievably resilient. But I appreciate you’re shouting out … People are putting in other InterWest sites – like there is one in Collingwood quite rightly. I am interested to now go to Sueling and then I’m going to finish with you, Zachary, and then I’m going to ask everybody to put their mics on. Sueling, the Board of Trade decided that you wanted to do this piece of work. Tell us what informed that. Why did you and the business community feel that you needed to double down in focusing on downtowns?

Sueling Ching Well, Mary, thank you. And thank you, if I could just use this opportunity to thank you and the team and Jen and the team at CUI for working with us on this. And just to say that you were a proponent of and we were successful in making sure that we had lots of partners working with us through this process, including Tobi and his team at the NCC and, and, and so, I mean, as the voice of business, we often will work on policies that are just aimed at making sure we have a competitive business environment for our business community. But also we became increasingly interested in what our role was representing the business community from a city building perspective. And when, you know, the city was first built, you know, 160 some years ago, business leaders were very involved in deciding how the city would move forward. And we and we just felt a calling, recently before the pandemic and then certainly through the pandemic, to be involved in that conversation again and to provide some leadership. Specifically, we saw a big risk with our downtown, not unlike what Nina had mentioned, where our downtown is a is a business district, but over 50% of it is public service. And when we changed the workforce strategy, it just immediately overnight flipped the switch on what was happening in our downtown and our ability to support the businesses there to maintain some vibrancy. And I think even pre-pandemic, there was some question around the, even though it’s a gift and a blessing to have had the public service here, that there was an opportunity, should I say, to even extend the vibrancy more, outside office hours. And so, we saw two things. We saw a risk, if the hybrid work strategy was maintained and it has been so far, but we also saw an opportunity to become more vibrant, more diverse, and, and, transform the downtown and to have the courage to do that where we might not otherwise have been able to do so.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah. I mean, it’s an interesting dilemma, you know, when the statistic is offered, which I know is true, and Jennifer Barrett, who authored our report with her team, is in the chat providing data points. And she could probably provide this one. But, when you have a high percentage of the foot traffic coming from visitors, which capital cities naturally do, but so does your town, Sujata, you’ve got tons of visitors coming to San Francisco. It’s sort of a … It’s a liability and an asset. Right? And we always say that if you make a neighborhood vibrant and vital for the people that live there, it will attract visitors who come to look as well. But the dilemma is always, how do you make sure that the city that you’re in is a place where people want to live 24 x 7, they want to actually be there. They don’t want to just pop in and pop out. So, Zachary, you are sitting on, one of the great assets of Ottawa. It’s older than the city itself, the Byward Market. And you have witnessed and I have in m, many years of being a visitor to Ottawa and then a resident more recently, the kind of iterations that a place like the Byward Market goes through. And it’s sort of the good, the bad and the ugly, right? And that’s the … But you have a wonderful shot of the good there.

Mary W. Rowe So talk to us about what the challenges are for you. And, and you have to service a visitor community and a tourist community and a business visitor community and entity as well. And then you’ve also got all sorts of other challenges. So just give people a picture about how you’re anticipating the future.

Zachary Dayler Sure Mary. Public space is just that. It’s for the public. And I like to go back to, you know, we had, the now King, come through, and the effort that sort of went into that experience. At the same time we have individuals who perhaps are homeless or within that, who live in the same space.

Mary W. Rowe I just want to pause for a minute, just for the benefit of our American visitors. If you actually heard what Zachary said. The now-King, just to remind you. Canada continues to have a King. So when King Charles came swanning through … sorry Zachary, just adding a little bit of cultural context for people wondering who were you talking about. Keep going …

Zachary Dayler So it’s really about balance. And it’s really, you know, I get the opportunity to have conversations, you know, on a policy level, and then come down and sort of see how they unroll on the street. And I think one of the things that’s a recurring theme, what’s working. I do think we’re coming out of the phase of Covid, where, communities, cities are prepared to try things. In Canada, we are very, very young when it comes to being politically organized in the scope of history. And I think in a lot of ways, what our biggest value is … Here you go. I’m going to give a little bit of a political science 101 here. But in the US, it’s an it’s a melting pot. And in Canada we say a cultural mosaic. And what’s important about that in public space is as people come together, that’s really going to be our strength. We’re seeing large immigration levels coming into Canada, and we’re seeing cultural communities come here who have a far better understanding of what it is to come together. And I think we’re learning that as a country and as a city. And so the future for Byward is really how can we provide spaces for these communities to come together and celebrate? Mary said, you know, “Canada’s living room”. Well, then perhaps, Byward is our backyard … come to play in our backyard, you know? And that’s what we want to do. We want to invite cultural communities, and we want to invite, you know, creators, makers, all those things to come down here, and reinvest in that market tradition. Because if you look around the world, public markets are something different than they are in Canada. It’s a place where people exchange information, where they discuss. And I think, to Tobi’s point, the next and most important challenge, of what we’re trying to do with public space in Ottawa is pedestrianize it. You know, the car and the pedestrian is not something that that is really in a lot of Canadian planning, discussion. How do we keep them separate is part of that. But I think we’re seeing some really interesting things. And I’ll end on saying, you know, if you’re interested in sort of seeing what the city of Ottawa is planning for Byward and where we’re going with that, the city has really put together a really ambitious public realm plan for the Byward Market district, which includes a lot of pedestrianization and includes, sort of creating that table for people to come and gather around. And I should say, when it comes to connecting the city, Byward’s an important piece here, but so it’s Lansdowne, so is LeBreton … So are the pathways that are connected, you know, through the MTC. And I think our biggest strength here, and I’ll give a big shout out to Sueling and Mary, is what this agenda has done has, in some respects forced the conversation and forced people to say, “hey, I’m here. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves. Let’s make this happen”. We have a lot of opportunity coming out of Covid, but I think we also have a lot of work.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. Part of the … If I could just have everybody on the screen now because we’re going to … this is what I always affectionately call the bun fight section. So Wendy, if you can just put everybody up on the screen … So it’s Hollywood Squares time and I’ll ask our panelists to open their mics. You know, this is kind of the dilemma that I think we’re facing around shared uses, right? So how do we make sure that … and I’m interested … I’ll just come back to you, Nina, for a second. I lived in the US 25 years ago when Washington, DC was not what it is today. And it feels to me like a lot of what happened there, tell me if I’m wrong, is that local business folks and local neighborhoods started to get very engaged in not just letting things happen to them. Do you know what I mean? It was a moment of realization that they could make their neighborhoods and make Washington as a whole, a city for them. And can you talk to us a little bit about that transition? Do you remember what I’m talking about? Am I wrong in my perception that there has been a significant transition?

Nina Albert Well, you know, DC is kind of interesting because it was a federal city and controlled in many ways by the federal government. And then, you know, it’s the history is, we got home rule in the 1970s or so. Maybe it was even later than that. Anyway, that’s really when you saw DC start to kind of, you know, take control of, you know, how the city functioned, number one, but then also like how it was designed and who it was for. And so the business community specifically, as we as a city and tending the operations of the city, started to kind of, you know, start up and mature, the business community set up a variety of different, you know, structures, not least of which are the business improvement districts.

Mary W. Rowe Just so you know, Nina … Canada, we invented those. Just saying, Toronto … they started …

Nina Albert Well we copied them. [Yeah, that’s good]. And we have 13 of them, throughout the District of Columbia. You know, the two biggest ones are downtown, but there’s, you know, kind of a number of others that made sure that there’s like marketing, branding and then that curation of an experience or of a neighborhood or community, you know, at that local level. And so I think there was through the business improvement districts, like quite a bit of like local empowerment of businesses and community coming together. And so over the years, DC now has 39 very distinct neighborhoods. I don’t want to say it’s because of the Business Improvement district. It’s just these natural clustering and commitment to, you know, and empowerment at that neighborhood level. Right now, what we’re learning that we have to do is, like I said, there’s two business improvement districts that govern or that cover the downtown. We’re actually talking about how to break that up into even smaller submarkets so that you can get that dynamic, and also intimacy, between businesses and community that really leads to much more innovation. And, you know, we’ve been talking about this moment and how it’s going to require some nimbleness and ability to try and innovate. And I think getting organizational or governance structures down to a scale that you can ensure that type of nimbleness, is really important. And just culturally, that’s what I’m trying to promote within the government, you know, and within what we call my cluster, like the five agencies that are affiliated with my work. So I think that, yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the evolution of how DC has sort of, grown into be what it is and, and how the business community has historically gotten involved.

Mary W. Rowe It is interesting, this kind of ground up … You’ve got to have a … how do you actually get to the granular, even the creation of the Byward Market District. Exactly. That was partly to do that, was to actually get very focused on a particular amenity. Sujata, when you look at the markets that SPUR works in – San Francisco’s also …and the Bay area is also a region of neighborhoods, in essence. Have you seen … And I think you have the same challenge that it became too expensive for lots of people to live there or to open a business there. So how do we how do we deal with that? The place gets hot and then it’s too expensive.

Sueling Ching Yeah, it’s well, it’s interesting too, because the dynamics have changed in the neighborhoods of San Francisco, which are the more residential areas that are often mixed use, but certainly not the same sort of intensity and density as the downtown. There’s actually been a bifurcation there where the neighborhoods seem to be doing well. A lot of people are working from home. Spending a lot of time in the neighborhoods. And what we see is not a lot of people wanting to play and hang out in downtown because they have their own community. So there is that dynamic. And we also think that the downtown, the fact that the values have dropped significantly is also an opportunity for us to start to create more entrepreneurship, more artist spaces, really take advantage of those opportunities. We just have a little bit of a disconnect between what a lot of the institutional landlords are expecting in terms of rents and what they’re willing to concede on and what the actual market demand is. So we still have persistent vacancies at the ground floor level. We really have to actually, this is where I think the public sector and public private partnerships through the bids can play a really important role in starting to create some of those programs and incentives that will start to shift the attitudes, because there is a little bit of a perception issue. When you have a lot of vacancies on the ground floor, it depresses the market and you don’t see that type of activity happening. But I do think this is the perfect moment for us to take advantage of historically low values, to be able to start to make that shift and create a downtown that really is for everyone, and urban centers that are really for everyone and not just for the elite.

Mary W. Rowe The dilemma, though, and I’m interested whether or not other cities and maybe somebody in the chat will put in some awesome ideas. But as you … If those storefronts stay vacant, then you start to … It devalues the real estate value, which means that it diminishes the amount of property tax that can be collected by the municipal government that actually has to provide the services that make it appealing for a business to open or and as we’re seeing in the chat, lots of concerns about community safety, that if you don’t have businesses that are operating, and there’s a vibrancy and lots of people living there, then it starts to feel unsafe to people. And I know that American cities are dealing with this the way we are. We have a much more visceral presence of people who are homeless or dealing with mental health and addiction challenges, and aren’t necessarily getting the supports that they require. And so that also is a dynamic that’s affecting the perception, potentially, but also the reality of operating a business on a main street. So how do we deal with vacancies? Anybody got a thought? And it came up yesterday in the press event, for Sueling’s report, a concern about an iconic street in Canada, Bank Street. Every Canadian city has a version of this. You in American cities do too … of a particular street that’s particularly challenged. So what do we do?

Zachary Dayler If I can add in on on that? Because again, in Byward, I just looked at this, of our census that we did, where we go and measure sort of the vacancy. We had about a 9% vacancy in Byward last year, which, which is quite low, in terms of other areas and what we’re seeing, and there’s some reasons for that. But one of the things that we’ve noticed, and this is the benefit of the District Authority, and it’s sort of a nuanced point here. A district authority or a central authority has given sort of powers to generate revenue in a variety of ways, whether that’s commercial tenancies or whether that’s patio revenue. And one of the unique things that we have under our portfolio is some small scale commercial operations. And what we’ve been able to do is … we’re not going to impact the market by doing pop ups and, and low scale rents in these locations. We just don’t have enough. But what we are able to do is show people what’s possible at a very affordable entry point. So a lot of the pop ups we do in that vacant storefront are three months. They might be a year. But the hope is to transition them and their business model into a market commercial space.

Mary W. Rowe And this report is calling for a business incubation district. It’s, again, an opportunity to do collaborative retail. Nina, what do you call it when you’re trying to support independent businesses so that you don’t end up with just a bunch of chains, national chains, to come into these spaces? How do you actually foster local economic development?

Nina Albert Well, we’re doing so we are doing … We are incentivizing pop ups, for anything between a month up to two years. And we’re working with property owners. So, you know, so the marketing that we’re doing at the local level is really to both artists as well as to businesses. And we have, I think a market that’s kind of similar to the one you run, Zachary, which is, you know, really geared towards food. But we don’t have that same kind of pop-up marketplace for the retailer, or for the artist. And so we know that there’s pent up demand, particularly from artists, you know, for space and a place to … So we’re concentrating, we’re, you know, we’re really focused not on just, like, put retail anywhere there’s an empty space, but really concentrate certain activities, so that that sense of vibrancy is really there. It also allows the property owner, even though they might not be collecting rent, they’re also not forgoing their property. So they still control the timeline. And the access to that property. So the other thing too by the way, I’ve really been thinking a lot about our role as a capital city. And, we have world pride coming to DC next year and trying to take that international festival and invite international businesses to come in the pop ups, you know, for the month before, up to a month after, however long they want to be if they want to test the American market. I’ve also been reaching out to embassies, that have a permanent location here, and they’re cultural attachés that don’t necessarily need to make a buck. Right? It’s not sales driven. It’s more brand driven. And so that’s another way, just again, like curating sort of an experience of, “hey, when you come to the capital city in Washington DC, you get exposure to the world and it’s done, you know … Yes, it’s through the retail space that we have available. But it feels more curated and intentional than just, you know, different things popping up. So again, taking a look at what our assets are, as a capital city and saying, we have an international brand and presence. How do we leverage that and play off of that? You know, is there a community where there’s existing demand for these spaces? The artist community is that pent up demand that’s looking for space now and then, how do we also go after local businesses that couldn’t have afforded necessarily, a retail space [kind of both] for that opportunity and we are offering grants to local businesses specifically, to be able to pay for, you know, whatever limited investment needs to be made to make that space more suitable.

Mary W. Rowe And you’re doing that from the from the municipal government … It’s the DC government.

Nina Albert Correct, yes. So we’re … I think we’ve got, you know, close to a $5 million program for next year.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah. And I mean, these grants don’t always have to be big. You know, they can be quite modest. That’s often a small business doesn’t need much. Tobi, you’ve been in the culture diplomacy business a few times. You know, tell me your reflection on what Nina’s suggesting for Washington. That’s certainly one of the value propositions for Ottawa, I would think … Go ahead.

Tobi Nussbaum Yeah, absolutely. I agree, I mean, we started this thread by talking about business vacancies and the solution in part, on top of the various ideas that have been put forward are, you know, what are the other related elements that can help. And one of them is certainly arts and culture. And Washington does that in spades and does a fantastic job. We have great cultural and arts institutions within walking distance of the market that Zach is responsible for and our downtown. And so, you know, that’s already an asset. And, we’re working hard and in partnership with them to improve that. As one example, we are opening a new public park, a new public space right on … it used to be the back of the National Gallery of Canada. It should be the front yard. Which leads me to the other word that I wanted to use, which is, waterfronts. And, you know, that’s another asset that, you know, we’re seeing, again, cities across the world starting to do more. They used to be, you know, these industrial outputs that people ignored. And increasingly, and we’re certainly doing this in Ottawa, is embracing our water, finding moments to activate our shorelines and waterfronts, bringing people to them, whether it’s through passive opportunities, terraces and patios and bars and restaurants or active, as we did last year, with opening River House, which is a swimming spot. We’re doing that again on the west side of Ottawa next year. And so, you know, really trying to marry both arts and culture, shoreline, waterways – density is something that I thought you did a great job yesterday in the report highlighting the importance of we need people to live here, too. We need people to live in the downtown core. But all of those things are going to help. And I do want to acknowledge that I think Washington has done a fantastic job. I was down there last year and seeing how they’re really bringing density and residential opportunities for people on the river, both on the Anacostia and on the Potomac. It’s super impressive. And, you know, we’re certainly thinking deeply here at the NCC about how we can contribute to that, about using our extraordinary water to both, you know, attract residents in the density we need, but also give visitors an opportunity to enjoy them.

Mary W. Rowe I honestly, I could just have you guys on this all afternoon. You don’t have any other meetings, do you? Can we just, you know, hang on. Don’t worry, I’m going to release you in eight minutes. Sueling, you know, your members are concerned about investment. They’re concerned about whether or not we’re continuing to attract investment and actually build a kind of business infrastructure there. What do you, in terms of the emphasis you placed on the report, what do you see as the party’s … What are your members telling you they’re most concerned about?

Sueling Ching If I could just back up to the vacancy question, you know, how do you fill vacancies? And part of the reason why I think we did this report is because you can fill vacancies through vision. And so part of the reason why we did this report … It’s not that this is going to, you know, it’s not that every single thing in that report is going to be done perfectly the way we did, but we can use it now as a platform to marry the good work of the NCC, to marry the good work of the Byward Market, you know, and other economic partners and sew them together so that everybody can see where everyone else is going and that they can be inspired by it. And so part of the reason why we wanted to do this, I didn’t know if you asked me or someone else in the beginning, is because we just wanted to create one platform, one conversation about all the good things that are really already happening. Right? All the good things that are intended to happen. And then you can layer in the incentives and layer in the policies and layer in the funding, to make it happen. But for us, a lot of it comes down to – we believe economic growth is the key factor here, and that it has to be a marriage between the private, the public sector, economic partners, work. And so for us, by having a plan, by demonstrating the partnerships that we have, you know, as we layer in each of the pieces, what we really are trying to do is build confidence in the community, both from the capital markets, you know, from the people deciding to live here, visit here, work here. We want to build in some confidence so that when people say, you know, they’re considering Ottawa, whether they’re an artist, an entrepreneur, an investor, a developer, that they can see that we’re working together and that we have a plan.

Nina Albert Can I just double down on that Sueling, I just … I absolutely think that right now coming out of the pandemic there took, you know, a year or so, you know, everyone’s just kind of coming out of that fog. And then there’s the big question of like, what is the impact of telework on our economy, on our downtown, on the future, like, you know, is the 15-minute city going to govern it, like just all these questions and then from the business community, very significant concern because, you know, they’re, you know, sort of analyzing, their health on a constant basis. And, you know, the world just can’t shift quickly enough for them to recover. And so I have found that … I’ve been in this job for about seven months now … What people have wanted and craved and needed the most is clarity about direction, even if it’s not perfect. But that confidence and like, do they see themselves in where, you know, the city is going in the future? Incredibly important. I just want to tell you, I just double down on that.

Sueling Ching Yeah. I mean capital want certainty. And they do move fast. They do move fast. And so they will go, all other things being equal, if we’re looking at competing with other markets, they will go where there are certainty, where they see potential and opportunity and where they see a willingness to work together. I believe.

Mary W. Rowe And certainly a key point of this report that was done for Ottawa, was creating a table of champions and having that kind of mutual accountability, which is a model that’s very prevalent in American cities. And that SPUR has supported for many years around this Bay area, not just in the Bay area, but across lots of different environments that you guys have worked in. Sujata, I just want to leave us with … we’ve only got a few more minutes, but I am concerned about inclusion. How do we … you talked about mobility, you talked about how we bifurcated communities in many ways, over time, thanks to the car, thanks to the way the economy grew. What kinds of measures do you think, and I might ask each of you to, to speak to this, and then we’ll quit. But I’ll start with you, Sujata. What do we need to do to make sure that we’re actually building an inclusive downtown and inclusive urban cores where there’s room for everybody? How do we do that? Because right now a lot of people have misgivings about whether that’s possible.

Sueling Ching Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I don’t have the full answer of like, here the three things we do to make this an equitable and inclusive downtown. I think one of the number one things we always try to tell people is we’re not trying to go back to where we were before, because that was not inclusive. We had prosperity. We did not have inclusion. And so for us, when we talk about downtown, we try really hard not to use metrics like, what’s the value of the commercial real estate asset? Because that’s not … that’s an important metric for us to understand in terms of the economic health of the city. But that’s not actually going to be the indicator that will tell us if we’ve been successful in creating a more inclusive, vibrant and equitable downtown. So we really need to think about who is actually benefiting from the public policies that we are setting forward, and is it actually going to make it a city where other people can feel like they belong?

Mary W. Rowe So do we need some different kinds of measures? We all … Everybody laments … Why do we talk about GDP? It seems to be the only thing we can talk about, but we do need other measures that give us this indication that we’re on the right track. I’m going to ask each of you for a little closing comment. Just be aware we’ve only got three minutes. Do the math. That means you have to talk quick like me, Zachary, then Tobi, then Nina, and then Sueling. Go ahead Zach.

Zachary Dayler Sounds good. The only thing I’ll leave folks with is A) big thank you for showing up. And to that point, show up. Show up in your public spaces. Show up at your committee meetings. Show up in your elected officials offices. The time is now to roll up our sleeves and do this work.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah. Tobi …

Tobi Nussbaum Yeah. I mean, so much to digest from the report yesterday and from this conversation. But I think your emphasis on partnership, on mutual accountability, is hugely important. There are many organizations and levels of government that are interested in this. And I think Sueling and the Board of Trade has done a great job of starting the conversation, and there’s lots of work still to go, but I feel really encouraged from what’s happened this far. So thanks.

Mary W. Rowe And you’re a good model. I use the NCC model often as an example of a tri-level … Are you tri? You have Ontario in there too, don’t you? Are you?

Tobi Nussbaum Yeah. I mean the province matters too for sure.

Mary W. Rowe Oh yeah, the province. Yeah. Like those are our states. Yeah. But you’re a good model for governance and how do we actually move forward … I always feel the … We get defeated if we say it’s somebody else’s jurisdiction. Just for Nina and Sujata’s benefit. Canada is seized with the housing crisis. And one of the challenges that we hear, like you are … One of the challenges we hear is that none of the orders are prepared to take responsibility for it. And so that’s when we get kind of stuck. So I appreciate what you’re saying, Tobi. We’ve just got to stay on and partnerships and how critical that is. Nina, last thought from you.

Nina Albert Yeah. I mean, somebody said … Zach said, “show up”. I’d say, you know, partner, a lot of people come to me with problems. I know what the problems are. I need solutions, and I need people who can execute. And so if there’s something that you’ve got then find a partner and bring it forward and don’t hesitate, we are all innovating and we get to define ourselves at this moment.

Mary W. Rowe It’s pretty interesting, isn’t it? We can try some stuff. Yeah. Sueling …

Sueling Ching I just want to echo Zach and Tobi and thank them for their partnership in this community. And that’s why I’m so optimistic about Ottawa. So those partnerships, showing up, working together. But, you know, thinking big, like thinking big, like having some lofty goals, believing that together that we can do amazing things. And I always loved the term “if you reach for the moon, even if you fall, you’ll land in the stars”. So like thinking big, look … And the NCC and Zach have both done beautiful work in this in this regard. And so I think for the downtown we’re well set up for that.

Mary W. Rowe Last word to you, Sujata.

Sueling Ching Yeah. I mean, I think what I’m really excited about is the fact that everybody does seem to have a handle on where the vision needs to go at this point. And so it’s really time to kind of roll up sleeves and do the implementation. And I think there’s a lot of low hanging fruit, even on removing barriers, making it easy for folks to open a small business in downtowns. Thinking about how government is actually a force for good. That can really be an important part of changing the culture and the mindset.

Mary W. Rowe All right. Listen, thanks, gang. Really, always as you can see in the chat, people so appreciative. You just have an infusion of ideas and imagination and good questions and lots of open struggle about how we all move forward. So congratulations again Sueling. The work just begins in Ottawa. Sujata, nice to see you. Thanks, Nina. Always great to have DC with us. And we continue to refer to you fondly. And Tobi and Zachary, thanks for all the work you do. Thanks everybody for joining us on City Talk. Have a good day!