We had our first two Community Cafés on Sunday, June 8 and 15, and the event has been a great success. Arnold’s coffee trike is working quite well, and I look forward to seeing how it will evolve to serve more people as this event grows. The event provided me with an opportunity to speak with victims who graciously allowed me to discuss urbanism. The presence of coffee in the neighbourhood led a few of our neighbours to lament the closure of the Art of the Bean. I also got he opportunity to talk to the owners of Almanac Grain and Dominion City Brewing, sponsors of our community association and residents of Convent Glen. As a business school graduate, I am always interested in learning about organizations and how they work. Lately, I have been thinking about how our city is failing small businesses and, most importantly, their customers.
The city controls the availability of commercial space by regulating what can be done on a piece of land through zoning. A major policy that has had an important impact on commercial space is the separation of residential and commercial land use. Historically, commercial space was located where people lived. I picked a random street in Paris, rue Martel, as an example. You can see that this street has commercial space available on the ground floor, with housing above. This pattern is evident in many successful cities, including London, Istanbul, and Tokyo. Ottawa does have small pockets with similar developments in the most prized areas of the city, such as the Glebe and Hintonburg. These regulations cause two major issues.
The first is that it constrains the availability of commercial space. The lower supply means that lease prices for businesses increase, and this cost is passed on to customers. It also means that customers have to travel further to reach these businesses, which often requires driving (mainly because we have only built transportation infrastructure for cars). To support customers who drive, businesses need to offer parking. Parking occupies a significant portion of the available land dedicated to commercial space, and the construction and maintenance of a parking lot are important business costs that need to be passed on to customers. Zoning imposes significant costs on businesses through higher lease rates.
The second is that it imposes additional costs on small businesses, as it makes it more difficult for customers to access them. Having commercial space away from where people live means that they need to travel to access businesses. Because of the way we built our city, travelling to a business often means driving. This means that businesses must provide parking, and since customers often need to visit multiple stores to obtain everything they require, they are more likely to favour stores that offer everything in one trip, such as big-box stores. For example, you can buy a week’s worth of groceries at Walmart while also getting furniture, automotive supplies, electronics, etc. Big-box stores are better able to absorb the cost of parking due to the greater volume of sales. Buying the same amount of goods at smaller retailers would require several stops. Through trip efficiency, big-box stores are also able to justify longer trips to reach their locations. It’s worth driving an extra ten minutes to avoid the additional twenty minutes of driving you may need to do if you decide to chain trips to shop at smaller stores. This is how our zoning laws favour big box stores, which further pushes small businesses away from main streets towards cheaper space in industrial parks, where land and parking are more affordable.
The city is currently rewriting its zoning bylaw. While the new bylaw has several much-needed changes, such as a broad reduction in minimum parking requirements, it still maintains the separation between residential and commercial areas, except in particular situations. The zoning proposed in the bylaw for Convent Glen Orléans Wood still limits commercial space to St-Joseph, Place D’Orléans, existing strip malls, and around Youville. It would have been great if the zoning bylaw had allowed small businesses that serve the local community, such as bakeries and cafés, to be permitted in neighbourhood zones. If someone wants to open a small café in their single-family home garage or a corner store on the ground floor, it would bring more benefits to the community than the potential problems. This is especially true if we expand the culture of active transportation that currently exists in our community, since the issues often cited with businesses in neighbourhood zones are car traffic and parking. Some board members of the community association are lobbying to get those changes included in the zoning bylaw.
Another change we can make beyond zoning to support small businesses is to develop our active transportation infrastructure further. Using active transportation makes it more challenging to make a single trip to a big box store, as cargo capacity is often less than that of a car (cargo bikes can compete with small cars). Additionally, the distance and environment where big box stores thrive are often hostile to people outside of cars (including parking lots). However, chaining trips to smaller stores is much easier to do on a bike when good infrastructure is present, since congestion is not an issue, and it is easy and cheap for small businesses to install a bike rack in front of the store compared to building and maintaining a car parking spot. Studies such as this one, done in Toronto, show that people who walk or bike to shops tend to visit more often and spend more per month than drivers.
As a community association, we believe the city should encourage our small businesses. Small businesses are key to building a vibrant, healthy, and sustainable community. Small business owners are more likely to be from the community, to utilize community services, and to contribute to creating an environment where community members can socialize. The city should help small businesses by not forcing them out to industrial parks, where land is cheap, through zoning bylaws, and by improving active transportation options.
