Streetscape design specifications from City of Vancouver Downtown South. #SketchUp
— Frank Murphy 🇺🇦 🇮🇪 🇨🇦 (@thesidewalkballet.bsky.social) April 26, 2026 at 2:48 PM
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Wednesday, June 3, 2026
The closure of a downtown bank branch is not good news.
The reason TD Canada Trust is closing the branch — as we’re told, by the local press, by downtown spokespeople, even by random passersby when I visited the branch recently — is “homeless people.”
And perhaps this is the reason or is one of the main reasons the branch is being closed.
What we know for sure is that the branch underperformed and no longer justified its existence. This is concerning, especially after recent substantial public investments in our downtown’s revitalization.
But questions arise. If we apply a little critical thinking, we might ask for instance:
● Why this branch when there is within a ten minute walk a Royal Bank branch, an RBC and a Scotiabank, and a Coastal Community Credit Union branch?
● Is the TD Canada Trust branch different from these others in any way?
● If the homeless population downtown is the reason for the closure of this branch, should we expect to soon see the closure of the others?
● And if there were no homeless people downtown, would this branch have succeeded?
● Would a different use here succeed where this one has failed?
The Port Place redevelopment about 15 years ago was controversial, the challenge was to transform a suburban style shopping centre at the heart of our downtown into a more integrated and pedestrian friendly environment. The outcome, you’d have to say, was not entirely successful.
Downtown retailers know that mutually advantageous foot traffic and “cheek by jowl” proximity are essential to the success of their businesses. Access on foot to this corner site, isolated as it is from everything around it, is poor.
The Esplanade - Terminal intersection is, I can attest, at least as hostile to pedestrians now as it was before the Provincial engineers had their way with it. Access from Port Place is across an unwelcoming expanse of asphalt.
And recent improvements to connect the site with Commercial Street’s liveliness have apparently done little to improve the commercial performance of the branch.
(An inquiry might also touch on the bank’s recent money-laundering scandals. Didn’t do the brand a lot of good.)
It’s hard not to suspect that the cause of the branch’s failure isn’t homeless people or even “disorder” (all the best downtown’s have some of that) but a failure of urban design, the failure of suburban-shopping-mall-thinking brought to the needs of the diverse, dynamic urban core.
The reason TD Canada Trust is closing the branch — as we’re told, by the local press, by downtown spokespeople, even by random passersby when I visited the branch recently — is “homeless people.”
And perhaps this is the reason or is one of the main reasons the branch is being closed.
What we know for sure is that the branch underperformed and no longer justified its existence. This is concerning, especially after recent substantial public investments in our downtown’s revitalization.
But questions arise. If we apply a little critical thinking, we might ask for instance:
● Why this branch when there is within a ten minute walk a Royal Bank branch, an RBC and a Scotiabank, and a Coastal Community Credit Union branch?
● Is the TD Canada Trust branch different from these others in any way?
● If the homeless population downtown is the reason for the closure of this branch, should we expect to soon see the closure of the others?
● And if there were no homeless people downtown, would this branch have succeeded?
● Would a different use here succeed where this one has failed?
The Port Place redevelopment about 15 years ago was controversial, the challenge was to transform a suburban style shopping centre at the heart of our downtown into a more integrated and pedestrian friendly environment. The outcome, you’d have to say, was not entirely successful.
Downtown retailers know that mutually advantageous foot traffic and “cheek by jowl” proximity are essential to the success of their businesses. Access on foot to this corner site, isolated as it is from everything around it, is poor.
The Esplanade - Terminal intersection is, I can attest, at least as hostile to pedestrians now as it was before the Provincial engineers had their way with it. Access from Port Place is across an unwelcoming expanse of asphalt.
And recent improvements to connect the site with Commercial Street’s liveliness have apparently done little to improve the commercial performance of the branch.
(An inquiry might also touch on the bank’s recent money-laundering scandals. Didn’t do the brand a lot of good.)
It’s hard not to suspect that the cause of the branch’s failure isn’t homeless people or even “disorder” (all the best downtown’s have some of that) but a failure of urban design, the failure of suburban-shopping-mall-thinking brought to the needs of the diverse, dynamic urban core.
Friday, August 25, 2023
The victory of the inter-city highway over the urban boulevard. This has been an especially bad time in Nanaimo's history to have had an anti-urban City Hall.
Six decades since Jacobs and Whyte and so much learned since and yet Public Works and MOTI traffic engineers still have a free hand, and with huge budgets, to inflict this kind of injury on our urban cores. pic.twitter.com/npE8mP4D6Y
— NanaimoCommons @sidewalkballet@urbanists.social (@NanaimoCommons) August 1, 2023
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Roger Kemble passed away peacefully on
July 24th at the age of 94
"As much a visual artist as he was an architect, an urban planner, architectural activist, educator, and author, Roger’s impact on West Coast architecture, urbanism, and the allied arts is broad and wholly unique."
Roger and I had become friends, it was more than fifteen years ago. An odder couple you'd be unlikely to encounter. He had written a letter to the editor about saving the foundry building at Swy-a-lana. I got in touch and we went to a meeting hosted by the City’s chief planner. Over the next several months and more than once we invited ourselves into the Mayor’s office for coffee and a discussion about creating a new performing arts centre at the foundry.
It was a time of great promise for Nanaimo’s downtown. There was a movement at that time opposed to the elimination of the Urban Containment Boundary. A new Official Community Plan looked poised to set Nanaimo on a path very different from the old OCP's commitment to “manage urban growth,” one more committed to near uncontrolled sprawl instead. I had moved our home and business downtown and become involved in what I and many hoped would be Nanaimo’s downtown renewal. Roger and I became eccentric comrades in arms.
Roger was an architect, already retired when I knew him back then, though he was later among the lead architects on the Vivo residential building on Frankly St, a project spearheaded by his family.
He was an urbanist to his bones. He loved the city, he loved the intense messy diversity of the city. From his 1989 book The Canadian City, Saint John’s to Victoria, Ch5 Downtown Spaces : "Of course our cities are in chaos; that's the way we like them... We love the occasional bustle, the competitive pace, the cacophonous din, the opportunity, the risk, the sleaze, glamour, great things happening, new ideas breaking out… “
I learned an immense amount from Roger, especially about the egalitarian importance of public space in the dense urban core. He echoed Jan Gehl when he would say “it’s about the space between the buildings.” Where Gehl and Holly Whyte importantly focused on the life between the buildings, Roger’s focus was on the physical space itself, its design and its equal opportunity access and use.
Around 2005 Roger had been planning a trip south, the direction he said his travels always tended to take him. His ambitions included, in addition to tango dancing in Buenos Aires, meeting with the legendary Brazilian architect and urban planner Jaime Lerner. Lerner, former Curitiba mayor and governor of the state of Paraná, had famously created the first Bus Rapid Transit system, an innovative above ground “subway system,” but carrying more passengers and for a fraction of the cost.
He intended to invite Lerner to Nanaimo to lead an urban planning symposium. I helped him with the proposal; we were bounced from council to committee and back again and again; our efforts producing in total only a letter of introduction from the mayor’s office to Lerner’s. But Roger did go tango dancing in Buenos Aires.
Post by @frank_murphy349View on Threads
Roger and I had become friends, it was more than fifteen years ago. An odder couple you'd be unlikely to encounter. He had written a letter to the editor about saving the foundry building at Swy-a-lana. I got in touch and we went to a meeting hosted by the City’s chief planner. Over the next several months and more than once we invited ourselves into the Mayor’s office for coffee and a discussion about creating a new performing arts centre at the foundry.
It was a time of great promise for Nanaimo’s downtown. There was a movement at that time opposed to the elimination of the Urban Containment Boundary. A new Official Community Plan looked poised to set Nanaimo on a path very different from the old OCP's commitment to “manage urban growth,” one more committed to near uncontrolled sprawl instead. I had moved our home and business downtown and become involved in what I and many hoped would be Nanaimo’s downtown renewal. Roger and I became eccentric comrades in arms.
Roger was an architect, already retired when I knew him back then, though he was later among the lead architects on the Vivo residential building on Frankly St, a project spearheaded by his family.
He was an urbanist to his bones. He loved the city, he loved the intense messy diversity of the city. From his 1989 book The Canadian City, Saint John’s to Victoria, Ch5 Downtown Spaces : "Of course our cities are in chaos; that's the way we like them... We love the occasional bustle, the competitive pace, the cacophonous din, the opportunity, the risk, the sleaze, glamour, great things happening, new ideas breaking out… “
I learned an immense amount from Roger, especially about the egalitarian importance of public space in the dense urban core. He echoed Jan Gehl when he would say “it’s about the space between the buildings.” Where Gehl and Holly Whyte importantly focused on the life between the buildings, Roger’s focus was on the physical space itself, its design and its equal opportunity access and use.
Around 2005 Roger had been planning a trip south, the direction he said his travels always tended to take him. His ambitions included, in addition to tango dancing in Buenos Aires, meeting with the legendary Brazilian architect and urban planner Jaime Lerner. Lerner, former Curitiba mayor and governor of the state of Paraná, had famously created the first Bus Rapid Transit system, an innovative above ground “subway system,” but carrying more passengers and for a fraction of the cost.
He intended to invite Lerner to Nanaimo to lead an urban planning symposium. I helped him with the proposal; we were bounced from council to committee and back again and again; our efforts producing in total only a letter of introduction from the mayor’s office to Lerner’s. But Roger did go tango dancing in Buenos Aires.
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Saturday, June 10, 2023
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
In a world full of stroads, be a street. pic.twitter.com/gtS8qeshgk
— Strong Towns (@StrongTowns) May 9, 2023
Thursday, April 27, 2023
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