There’s been a lot of talk lately about working with non-profits and co-ops to get affordable housing built on City owned properties. Sites like this one, especially in our most walkable neighbourhoods, should be seeing this kind of development and with real urgency.
The private sector has, not surprisingly, expressed confidence in our city last few years. From Wallace St to the Millstone and along Chapel St in the core there are proposed multi-family and commercial projects that could result in almost 2000 new households downtown. There’s little in evidence, especially downtown, of our City Hall's corresponding investment in the public realm. A false economy, self-defeating.
The private sector faces rising costs for materials + labour, steadily increasing financing costs, strong possibility of a recession. It may be less able over the next few years to build large ambitious projects. The public sector—our City Hall—needs to make bold generational investment in our downtown now. Time for public investment to lead not follow.
Downtown improvement ideas floated over the last few years seem to have had their origins in “stakeholders” exclaiming in meetings, “You know what I think would be neat…” Nanaimo seems protective of its parochial amateurism. What’s required now is an RFP, an open competition, to attract teams of some of the best, most proven architects, urban designers, technical specialists, and landscape architects to create a visionary, comprehensive downtown plan, a plan to maximize public and private investment.
A public development corporation is likely the key to making something like this happen. Granville Island in Vancouver, Pike Street Market in Seattle and The Forks in Winnipeg are examples of city-building projects created by publicly owned development corporations. See (index) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B--aoLeZtOaudHpqTFA2QnJRX0U/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-0bIW9z10SIwfgS0YOCi4YQ
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