Sometimes big change happens in quiet, unnoticed corners.
Put in that category the creation of a new Business Improvement Association at Wilson and Keele, approved earlier this month at the city’s Economic Development Committee meeting.
Sounds sort of insignificant, but it raises an intriguing question: can organizations of retailers and store owners save the burbs from the planning disasters of the past?
Not that there are many BIAs outside the downtown. Besides the Keele and Wilson proposal, council will also be asked to approve a BIA at Dufferin and Finch, bringing the grand total to six north of the 401. In the rest of the city, 75 BIAs represent more than 35,000 members.
Residents in the core are accustomed to BIAs nurturing street vibrancy – think of Bloor Annex, the Danforth, Little Italy, Queen West. But consider the challenges of BIAs in strip-mall-dominated car-centric neighbourhoods.
Sure, the inner burbs have pockets of walkability with good local shopping, but these are remnants of the former villages of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough. Unfortunately, most of these areas expanded in the period – the 1960s to 90s – when isolated towers and car-dependent bungalows were the fashion.
But there’s lots of pressure for change in the environs of these two new proposed BIAs. The new Humber River Hospital on Finch and the Coroner’s Complex on Keele west of Wilson will be sources of new employment, and the Spadina subway extension to Vaughan via York University, scheduled to be completed in the next few years, is fostering the growth of University City and Downsview lands.
So who will spearhead the streetscape renewal of bleak, pedestrian-hostile streets? Could it be BIAs? These aren’t, after all, just any old community groups they’re property and business owners who have joined together in a legal arrangement.
They’ve agreed to a mandatory levy by the city to be collected on property tax bills in order to support investment in their neighbourhood. Every business member is charged a proportion of the annual budget based on their share of the BIA’s total commercial realty assessment, and association budgets typically run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly.
BIAs are there to invest in commercial strips and to market them. They’re catalysts for large capital investments like decorative lights, pavement improvement, art installations, benches, as well as funding additional street cleaning, security, flower gardens and graffiti removal.
But these bodies can also be political players, as both the Emery Village BIA and the Sheppard East BIA were when they promoted LRT lines on Finch West and Sheppard East. Community groups may have their energetic volunteers, but BIAs have staff and funding, and lots of capacity for effective lobbying and advocacy.
Not surprisingly, the tasks confronting suburban BIAs today are similar to those faced by the very first business improvement association formed in 1970 in the Bloor-Jane area. This pioneering group became the template for the others, a made-in-Toronto response to pressures on main streets.
Back then, local retailers were concerned about the growing popularity of shopping malls and suburban complexes that were putting downtown stretches at risk.
This is a familiar problem for new BIAs in the burbs trying to compete with malls and the large box stores. Acting alone, stores have trouble matching the drawing power of malls. But while small stores can’t regularly beat the prices of larger chains, they can offer an attractive alternative – the allure of a visually appealing and bustling street. Joint BIA action can even solve deterioration of strip malls where owners of individual stores have difficulty upgrading.
One of the advantages of this kind of togetherness is that BIAs get special treatment when it comes to city funding. The Façade Improvement Program shares the renovation costs of a building’s outside, fronting up to $10,000, or $20,000 for a corner structure. This encourages owners to improve their buildings even if they don’t feel it will directly benefit their business.
Then there’s capital-cost-sharing for street improvements. The city matches a BIA’s investment in decorative elements: paving upgrades (with coloured bricks or patterns), custom street signs and banners, decorative lighting, parkettes and improvements to standard plazas. All these are key to creating a sense of place, both enhancing the neighbourhood and generating business.
No, these organizations can’t create change all by themselves, but they are an important way for a locale to help shape processes otherwise controlled by macro-economic and political forces. Let’s celebrate them as a true Toronto invention.
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