You can’t rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Three years ago I wrote a series of articles (One, Two and Three) on re-starting businesses in downtown Victoria during the pandemic. Of course, at the time I didn’t know that we still had almost two years to go for things to really start opening up. Still, what I was seeing was a downtown barely holding on as the world went through a massive upheaval. Cities are resilient though, and Victoria plodded on for the next couple of years always with the expectation that a return to the vitality was just around the corner. We are now seeing that some of the challenges either brought on by the pandemic or greatly accelerated by the pandemic, are here to stay. This is not a Victoria-only problem, it is happening around the world, but that also doesn’t mean we can’t try to solve it locally. I am again going to write a three part series on a few of the ideas that I have on trying to manage this problem, because despite the complacency I am continually hearing, there is a problem here and it seems as though there are not a lot of people rushing to solve it. (Acknowledgement to Gene Miller who has also recently written an excellent article on the topic)

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The Problem

I think I have heard that the first thing you have to do is acknowledge that you have a problem and while there are a lot of people acknowledging “problems”, I am not sure that there has been enough stepping back to see the larger problem and the real threat it presents. We are all living through the largest change in how cities work in at least 100 years, maybe longer. The bedrock of cities, whether it is corporate head offices or provincial governments, of the commuter office worker being the dominant aspect of a city economy is about to go away. I have many thoughts on what this might mean for society, but for that you will need to take me out for a beer. The reality is that this is going to happen and it is happening in Victoria, in particular with the recent decisions to allow government workers to choose to work almost completely remotely. I have heard a lot of people celebrating the change, and to be clear, I completely agree with the idea of giving the employee a choice, but the hardship this will cause is going to be tremendous and will amount to more than just the closing of a few coffee shops.

To get a sense of what is happening, I asked Shane Devereaux, owner of Habit Coffee and The Sherwood, a few questions on the impact on his businesses, here is what he said:

It’s hard to truly quantify, but it is obvious there are far fewer people working downtown on any given day. One of the biggest impacts is navigating what days people are most likely to come to work. What used to be fairly consistent in terms of business flow is now erratic which makes managing labour much more difficult.

We have had to change our hours and staffing levels but you can only change them so much. Most hospitality, but certainly coffee, is about volume. We can only bring our staffing levels down to a point and when traffic falls, the business can go from being profitable ( with volume ) to breaking even. There’s a critical point / threshold that was easy to meet in the past that is harder to reach now. And thats before we even talk about costs of everything for everyone.

I also asked Shane if either the City of Victoria or the DVBA had reached out with any suggestions or ideas on how to mitigate the changes and he said that they had not.

The key thing that makes any city exist, is the coming together of people for mutual benefit. Whether that benefit is economic, security, political or creative pursuits. If you remove the purpose of why people have congregated together, those people will go elsewhere. Victoria (and many cities around the world) is about to potentially lose a large portion of the people that come downtown everyday to work in offices. Those people all go out and support stores, restaurants and services. Without them or some form of replacement of them, we will lose the diversity that currently exists. That diversity that we have, which for a city of Victoria’s size is quite impressive, is one of the main attractions for people to want to live downtown. Take away a quarter of the stores, or a quarter of the restaurants and not only do you lose the diversity that you had, but you also lose the need for those that remain to attempt to compete at the same level. Over time quality will decline. Beyond the loss of the places to go, with less people downtown, services will also decline. If you have a significantly smaller population coming into the city then you can reduce transit service. If you have less people visiting the library during the day, then you can reduce library services. I will leave it to your imagination to think about what other things we have downtown that will no longer need investment if we don’t have people coming downtown to work.

I know that many of you will say that we now have a much larger downtown population, and this is true, the downtown population has increased significantly over the last fifteen to twenty years, but it is not enough to make up for it. According to Go Victoria, we had about 40000 commuter trips into the city before the pandemic. A large portion of those are office workers downtown. The population of the downtown core is somewhere between seven and nine thousand. This is why I said in my article on the Harris Green Village, that if we want to supplant office workers with housing, we would need to build many, many projects of that size. Not only does the City not seem to be working to encourage that kind of project, there is a general lack of understanding of the scale of people needed. As I also said in that article, I fully support us increasing the downtown population exponentially, but we need support for downtown businesses now, before it’s too late.

The Stopgap

I will be writing two further articles on the ideas that I have in the coming weeks on what we could begin to do to reimagine downtown Victoria, however, we do need to do something in the short term to try and stem the flow of office workers. As I said earlier, I fully support the idea of employee choice for this. So if we are not going to compel the provincial government to change their policy, what other options do we have? For many of the office workers that were coming in to work, they now have a choice to work at home, at the office, or in a hybrid model. The City needs to encourage more people to want to choose either working full-time in the office or in a hybrid model where they work at least a couple of days a week at the office. And when I say City, I mean the City of Victoria perhaps aided by the Downtown Victoria Business Association. It is the City’s responsibility, not only to manage the city infrastructure and governance, but also to guide the city to a more prosperous future. I know that it is hard for the City to understand that because for so long the City has relied on what it believed were immovable industries in tourism and the provincial government. (office workers are barely mentioned in last year’s economic plan) While Victoria will remain the capital of the province, without the jobs in the city, it will no longer be a dominant industry. We will need the City to find a replacement industry if we want Victoria to remain as vibrant as it is now. I am not aware of any cities that rely only on a resident downtown population to support the city. If you know of one, please let me know in the comments. I know of a lot of cities who have tourism as their only industry and while they may be fun to visit for a few days, they are generally not amazing places to live. The city should always be for the resident population first, thereby creating a place that others want to visit. I will leave this train of thought with a quote from Joe Berridge:

The best city is one that can most effectively support the creation of the collective employment and wealth necessary to support its residents’ lives and aspirations, that can readily move people and goods around, that can connect broadly to the wider world, that can continuously build and rebuild its ever-changing physical structure and best capture global forces of economic change and investment.

Joe Berridge, Perfect City

So what should we do in the short-term? I think that there are numerous things that we could be doing to entice officer workers downtown, especially with the hybrid work model becoming dominant, people are losing in person contact with other people in their field. Here are four ideas for the City and the DVBA to take and implement pretty much free of charge:

1. Downtown Lunch and Learns - In person learning is still a great way to educate yourself on something and it usually comes with the bonus of there being like-minded people attracted to similar topics. It is a great way to meet people in the field of work you are in or want to be in. This would be such an easy thing to do. The City has space at the library and the conference centre that could used at no cost to them and getting speakers on a topic is relatively easy and many great ones will do it at a low cost or for free. The City can then advertise it for downtown office workers and you get in free with a selfie of you at your office desk or cubicle. Everyone else pays a $20.00 entry fee. From cybersecurity and social media to team building and real estate, there are endless topics that would draw people in.

2. Job Fairs - It is a job seekers market right now which is one of the reasons that remote work is growing. If you can’t offer the same benefits as another employer then the employee will choose someone else. Still there are benefits to office work. Some employers have on-site gyms, in-office technology not available at home and of course all that downtown has to offer. Having downtown work based job fairs allows employers to share what they have to offer while people can also spend time downtown. Right now everyone needs staff so motivating employers to hold job fairs would be an easy sell and again the City has lots of venues on hand that they can use to host events.

3. Cultural Events - One of my favourite things about working downtown, especially in the summer is being able to walk to Centennial Square or Government Street and be able to listen to live music for free. There are also great galleries and museums most of which have no cost or just a small one to enter. The City could easily promote what it is already here to office workers to encourage them to spend more time in the office. It is surprising how little promotion is actually done on the events and establishments that already exist. Building on this, it would be great if there were more music options in the rainy season. The City has multiple indoor venues where they could offer dry and warm space for performers and the audience and it would be a further reason for people to want to spend time downtown during the day.

4. Networking Events at Local Eateries - Just like with courses, meeting people in your industry, or the industry you want to work in is one of the best ways to get that job you have always wanted. People are more than willing to spend a little bit of money to get into networking events, especially if there is food. The City and DVBA could easily organise networking events at some of our downtown eateries or cafes during the day with a cover charge. The business would have the income from the event and also get the exposure to those that come to it and attendees get to mingle with people that share their interests. Again this would be as easy thing to organise. The DVBA has the business connections and lots of people are looking for these types of real-life connections. Holding the meetings during the day would encourage those that work downtown to attend and would provide an event for those that get to choose whether they are coming into the office, to come in that day and maybe decide that there are tangible benefits in being downtown.

This is just a short list of some very doable initiatives. There is so much more that can be done and I will be exploring some more of those ideas in upcoming articles. If you have an idea to encourage people to keep coming into the office or to start coming into the office, please let us know in the comments, I would love to hear them! Also again, I would encourage you to read the recent article by Gene Miller in Focus on Victoria. He has a different tact and potential solutions in there as well.