A person with a suitcases walks through the intersection at Granville and Georgia in Vancouver on April 4. Downtown Vancouver is seeing a rise in tourist visits, but not from locals in the metropolitan area.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
Come up from the subway at Vancouver’s premier downtown corner, Georgia and Granville, and the picture couldn’t look more lively.
“Ukelele Edwin” is strumming his instrument and singing O Canada next to two food carts and a flower stand nearby. People are streaming past, some towing roller suitcases to hotels, some heading for the Hudson’s Bay store where everything inside is being liquidated. Others are rushing to catch a bus or train back to the suburbs.
Diarmuid and Tracy O’Dea from North Vancouver are part of the scene, walking to a Whitecaps soccer game, but like many others passing through this intersection, they’re not planning to spend too much time downtown. They don’t like it.
“They’ve sterilized downtown,” says Mr. O’Dea, cheerfully identifying himself as a conservative who thinks that the city did itself in by getting rid of “all the parking.”
Mr. O’Dea, a suburban visitor who comes only occasionally to the region’s economic and entertainment hub, is representative of the change that Vancouver’s downtown is experiencing.
The city’s central core is seeing more tourists than ever and more signs of good economic health than many other downtowns. But even here, trips from the suburbs have not recovered fully after the big hit of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report.
State of Downtown, an annual report created by Downtown Van – a business improvement association – showed that, while the area does well at attracting people with major events, good transit and tourism offerings, visits by locals are down.
Transit boardings increased 2 per cent since last year, while hotel occupancy is at a high of 80 per cent, making them among the most successful businesses in the area.
But the 15-per-cent commercial vacancy rate is higher than the city average, with Granville the hardest hit, at almost 30 per cent vacant.
That was before the announcement last month about the closing of the iconic Hudson’s Bay store at the corner of Georgia and Granville, which will leave a second large building at that intersection empty after the closure of the Nordstrom department store two years ago.
Jane Talbot, president of Downtown Van, which represents 8,000 businesses, said the loss of local visitors is concerning.
“I think it’s the high cost of living. People are cutting back on eating and going out,” said Ms. Talbot. “It speaks to the importance of offering unique experiences downtown.”
Those unique experiences included the Taylor Swift concerts last November, which boosted local businesses by 26 per cent from normal sales levels, resulting in $157-million spent over three days. And also last summer’s Granville Block Party, organized by the downtown business improvement association, which saw 40,000 people show up for the two-day event, with an estimated economic impact of $859,000.
Not measured in the annual report are the number of people who come downtown to work but don’t stick around afterwards, like Kubhir Garcha and Pratik Amin, two young financial-industry employees who were heading straight for SkyTrain and their homes in Surrey after work.
“We come in and just leave. It’s an hour and 20 minutes to get home,” said Mr. Amin.
Moneris Data Services, an instant-payment tech company, provided data to help Downtown Van assess what was happening with its businesses. That showed a 2-per-cent drop in retail sales and an average 6.5-per-cent drop year-over-year among restaurants.
”The consumers who frequent downtown have changed a bit. It’s becoming a challenge to get the same people to come downtown,” said Sean McCormick, the vice-president of business development at Moneris.
Mr. McCormick noted, however, that Vancouver and Western Canada in general are still doing better than many eastern provinces and cities.
Many attribute that to the high number of people, about 100,000, living close to the central business district, which makes Vancouver an outlier from many other cities that for decades didn’t allow residential uses near their business districts.
“The number of workers coming into the area is almost the same as the number living there. That’s a big ingredient for Vancouver,” said Mary Rowe, president of the Canadian Urban Institute.
But she also noted that Vancouver’s downtown has an obvious big challenge – the “manifestation of mental health and opioid and substance-use issues.” That’s something that has hit many North American cities, large and small, causing some businesses to close up shop in downtowns where operators no longer feel like their staff – or their windows – are safe.
Mayor Ken Sim announced this week the creation of a retail security task force to address the problem of shoplifting and crime related to city businesses, an effort that will be particularly meaningful for the downtown area.
Downtown Van’s Ms. Talbot also said there needs to be more hotels, as the last year saw a 14.5-per-cent increase in tourist visits but only a half-per-cent increase in hotel space. She’d also like one more addition that isn’t usually associated with downtowns – childcare space.
Currently, only 861 licenced childcare spots are available in the downtown peninsula, while 3,474 children under five live there – likely with parents working at businesses nearby.
“That’s obviously an area that could use further investment,” she said.
Bottom line, says Canadian Urban Instutitue’s Ms. Rowe, is that having a big, bustling downtown is a key factor to a city’s success, and bringing people together in intense clusters is a mechanism for spurring innovation and productivity.
“Economic life is dependent on interaction and proximity,” said Ms. Rowe. “Downtowns provide opportunities for bumping into people serendipitously.”
Like the late, great singer Petula Clark, she believes that downtowns are still magical places and starts singing Ms. Clark’s best-known song to make her point.
“When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go … downtown,” she croons into the phone. “The lights are much brighter there. You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares.”