For Victoria’s downtown businesses, there are some days when the homelessness, toxic-drug and mental-health crisis is an abstract thought, and others when it wanders into a bakery wearing a bathrobe and hospital gown.
This week, Michele Byrne, one of the owners of the 68-year-old Dutch Bakery on Fort Street, stared down the issue in the form of a young man, dressed for a walk on a hospital ward, standing in her store, unsure what the money in his pocket could be used for.
“He’s in a housecoat, a hospital gown, just walking the street — it’s so sad,” said Byrne, noting whatever the city and province are doing to tackle the issues is clearly not working. “The province needs to rethink what they’re doing. The money needs to be spent in a much more effective way.”
Byrne said tackling street issues is key to a successful Victoria downtown — which could mean looking at best practices in countries around the world for potential answers.
“We need to help these people properly. Not just handouts like what the government is doing because it’s not working,” she said. “That’s going to be the first step in trying to revitalize this downtown and all of the cities. I mean we’re not alone — it’s everywhere.”
Victoria city council this week voted unanimously to push the province for greater support for small businesses and commercial tenants dealing with high rents and inflation.
The city plans to write to whatever government is elected on Saturday asking it to consider the impact on the downtown when making decisions on remote-working rules for the civil service. It also wants a renewed focus on addressing street disorder with supportive housing, affordable housing and health and social services.
The motion, put forward by Coun. Jeremy Caradonna, was prompted by the closure of a number of local businesses. As for the timing, he hoped to catch the attention of all prospective MLAs in the midst of an election.
He said it was a signal to the new government that the city wants to work with it from Day One to address some of the issues in the downtown core.
“We can’t do much to address some of these issues,” he said. “As a local government, we do not have the capacity to solve the deeper underlying issues that drive homelessness, street disorder, mental health, addictions. All of that stuff falls to the province.”
Byrne said addressing the issues downtown faces will be challenging and require all levels of government to pitch in.
She said while the province must focus on the larger problems of mental health and homelessness, the city has work to do as well.
Loss of parking and congested traffic flow due to bike lanes, construction, changing traffic patterns and increased volume has scared off a number of people, she said. “I hear it a lot from people, that they don’t want to come into town because of all the construction, the parking issues, the homelessness. There’s just so many things against us right now.”
Rob Bennett, chief operating officer at VIATEC, the voice of Victoria’s $6-billion tech sector, said the homeless and mental-health issues of downtown have not forced the organization, which operates Fort Tectoria in the 700-block of Fort Street, to change how it works.
But he said the problem is getting worse, with people yelling at the top of their lungs on the street first thing in the morning. “It scares people away. These are people in some sort of crisis, whether drug-induced or mental illness or whatever, and I wonder what resources are available to them,” he said.
“My heart goes out to them, but on the other hand, it does deter people from coming downtown.”
He said there are tech executives and staff that prefer to no longer attend events downtown in the evening.
While street issues are top of mind these days, Bennett said the biggest issue the tech sector faces right now is housing.
Companies trying to expand struggle to recruit people because of the scarcity of affordable housing — though he said the city is clearly trying to catch up, given the amount of construction underway.
Jeff Bray, chief executive of the Downtown Victoria Business Association, said having the city lean on the provincial government for more support will add some weight to the pleas of business organizations over the last few years.
“A lot of the issues relate to provincial responsibility and what we would argue to some extent are failed provincial policies,” he said, with the city left to manage the fallout.
Bray also said the city’s letter shows it has been listening.
“It shows that the city has also heard from the businesses and the residents and the visitors about the state of some areas of downtown, and that we can’t just keep doing the same things hoping for a different result.”
Bray said downtown Victoria has both a lot of economic strength and plenty of challenges.
“We have a lot of things going well, but there is a lot of exhaustion among the business community around some of the street-disorder issues that have been going on and getting worse for years.”
A recent report from Colliers showed the downtown Victoria office market has not recovered fully from the pandemic, with a vacancy rate of 8.6 per cent, up from 6.1 per cent in the second quarter of 2023. The pre-pandemic vacancy rate for the region was about 5.1 per cent,
The most recent retail report from Colliers showed Victoria’s downtown had a 9.2 per cent street-front vacancy rate, well above the pre-pandemic level of about three per cent.
Both measures are lower than for most other major cities in Canada.
Coun. Dave Thompson said while there are challenges, the city is safe and has a “great downtown.”
“I see this motion as building on those efforts and encouraging the provincial government to play its role, and I’m happy to support it.”
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