Walkable neighbourhoods need places to shop
It's not a 15-minute city if you can't find a litre of milk or other useful stuff.
It was Jane’s Walk Day in Toronto on Sunday, with Lorenzo Mele of the Global Walkability Correspondents Network (GWCN) conducting a walkability audit of Oakwood Village. I grew up a few blocks east of the area and now live a few blocks south, but I never spent much time here; it has long been an enclave of new immigrants and the Caribbean community. Oakwood Avenue is also a car sewer leading up to the bottom end of an expressway that was cancelled in 1971- our family home was expropriated for a highway that was never built.
One of the problems on many of the streets of Toronto can be seen in two of the shops in this block, where the retail use is gone, and there are sheets over the windows- it is now being used for residential purposes. There are many reasons that this is happening, but perhaps the biggest one in Toronto is the fact that commercial uses are taxed at about three times the rate of residential and the assessments are out of date. Kyle Fletcher of the Altus Group notes that reassessments haven’t happened in a timely fashion:
“In Ontario, 2023 property taxes are based on assessments as of January 1, 2016, and the province has not yet specified a timeline for an update. Unfortunately, this continued delay in updating assessments has resulted in some properties paying up to 50% more property tax than they should.”
The real estate industry also notes that it is all about votes.
“It has been contended that municipalities must also change their mindset that commercial properties should bear a more significant portion of the tax burden. It is widely believed that the lower rates on residential property owners are mainly because local governments want to minimize taxation on homeowners as they are most likely to vote in local elections.”
This stretch near our home used to include an office, a plumber and a variety store. The dry cleaner and tailor where I took my clothes for the last 30 years is now a wall with three doors to residential units. Some try to fight this trend; Workshop Architecture noted on Instagram: “Went to CoA [Committee of Adjustment] to argue for keeping the commercial at grade, and adding more units … but alas no.”
It’s not just Toronto. Erin Caldwell wrote about this in Next City: For Walkable Neighborhoods, We Need More Useful Businesses. Her interesting twist is on the word “useful,” developing a three-part typology where the zoning and tax codes would be used to promote different sorts of businesses.
Non-useful businesses that the average person almost never visits include facilities where no in-person goods or services are provided, like factories or corporate offices. Employees or contractors are likely the only ones on the premises.
Somewhat-useful businesses are establishments that do offer in-person goods or services, but ones that most customers need less than once a month. Examples include doctors’ offices, dentists’ offices, law firms, furniture stores, mattress stores, hair salons, banks and government service centers (like the DMV).
Highly-useful businesses offer in-person goods and services that the customers use at least once a month. These are restaurants, grocery stores, drug stores, nail salons and gyms, and we can also include public amenities in this category: schools, parks, recreation centers.
I have also written that every 15-minute city needs a good bar, which one wag called “New Bourbonism.” After the walk, I had lunch in what 80 years ago was a hardware store and is now a restaurant; it’s closing next week and being upgraded to a fancier tapas joint as the neighbourhood continues to gentrify. It is currently highly useful; I hope it remains so.
Caldwell, a Seattle lawyer, also wants to promote “Accessory Commercial Units”
“ACUs are a means of introducing retail in existing residential areas by allowing small businesses to operate out of homefronts or the construction of structures on or adjacent to residential properties to house small businesses. ACUs enable residents to address unmet retail needs and explore economic opportunities without significant investment or overhead and without dramatically changing the landscape of a neighbourhood.”
Variety stores were needed in residential areas before everyone had cars and refrigerators; after that, they survived on cigarettes. I thought they would make a comeback after the pandemic with so many people working from home, but this doesn’t appear to have happened. This shop that I used to patronize now sells expensive tchotchkes, but at least it is still commercial. I don’t know how Caldwell would categorize it, but I think it has gone from highly-useful to somewhat-useful.
Caldwell suggests that we should use taxes and zoning to promote highly useful retail. I suspect that it is difficult to categorize; some might find expensive tchotchkes more useful than a litre of milk or a deck of smokes. But I do agree with her conclusion:
“Useful retail is often missing from conversations about urbanism. In reality, it should be a focus. After all, it’s not a 15-minute city if you can only walk to the mattress store.”
There is no question that we need more housing in Toronto. But I do think we need less of this.
In my recollection those local convenience/variety stores (we had one at the corner of our block) offered grocery staples, sweets, tobacco products, newspapers and maybe some paperbacks, but what seemed to make them work was that they were family owned and operated with the family living above the shop. This appears not to be a lifestyle of choice these days. Here in Arlington, Virginia we see a good many of these mixed use projects with the street level aimed at commercial/retail tenants. However, post pandemic they are having trouble filling these spaces and I think their expectations may not have reflected a realistic assessment of what goods and services would really be needed for the new residents.
>> "but perhaps the biggest one in Toronto is the fact that commercial uses are taxed at about three times the rate of residential and the assessments are out of date..."are mainly because local governments want to minimize taxation on homeowners as they are most likely to vote in local elections."
Silly idea in thinking that Govt, which caused this problem in the first place via its policies, is going to have the wherewithal, the brains, and the political will to actually fix the problem correctly.
It's clear that not many here truly understand how politics work - or the length of time it will take due to the entrenched bureaucracy that depends on status quo. They also don't understand that the highly touted Socialist idea of having "unbiased" technocrats make decisions for the betterment of all. After all, the only difference between them and us is that their paycheck is signed by a govt agent.