Data drives community economic development for Main Street

Main streets are meeting places within our communities. Whether it is a commercial plaza, a collection of two- and three-storey commercial properties in the heart of a town, or a big-city downtown core with offices and retail, these are places that bring together people, commerce, and public activities into shared spaces, creating experiences and connections between residents.

The challenges facing these main streets pre-dated the pandemic, but COVID-19 provided an opportunity to rethink and try new ways to revitalize these important meeting places.

Historic Challenges and Responses

The challenges facing main streets fall into three buckets:

1. Healthy retail mix — Attracting sustained traffic along main streets requires the right mix of retail and services. A street needs the amenities that service residents, such as a grocery store, a dry cleaner, a hardware store, etc., as well as amenities that draw both locals and visitors, such as restaurants, bars, and unique retail experiences.
2. Attracting people — Bringing people to the main street requires a sense of safety and activity. If people do not see other people enjoying the area, they are unlikely to visit themselves. People attract people.
3. Retaining community wealth — Retaining wealth within a community requires local ownership of businesses and property. As property ownership models have shifted from owner-operated retail to lease-operated retail and corporate retail chains, main streets have become more homogenized and seen the wealth generated in the community removed.

The traditional approach to these challenges has focused mainly on attracting people, while leaving the two other issues on the table for someone else to solve.

Investing in beautification projects, such as store facade improvements and streetscapes, has been one response to draw people to main streets. So has promoting events, such as sales, parades, and concerts. Likewise, collaborative marketing efforts that get a community to promote the whole instead of individual businesses have also been drawn upon.

The challenge with these approaches is that they often miss data to inform these decisions and measure their impact. And, of course, dealing with the bigger challenges of a healthy retail mix and retaining community wealth are often considered too challenging to tackle.

Enter My Main Street

As a response to the pandemic, the Economic Developers Council of Ontario (EDCO) and the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) launched My Main Street — a data-driven community economic development program funded by the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev). Its aim is to use data to address the three main historical challenges facing main streets.

Communities applied to participate in its two program streams. The Community Activator, the first stream, focused on funding placemaking initiatives — such as events, streetscape improvements, and community activations — that used data to draw residents and visitors to their main streets.

The second stream, the Local Business Accelerator, focused on leveraging data to identify business opportunities that existing and new independent entrepreneurs could realize and would assist in building a healthy retail mix in the main street community. The stream also provided a grant of up to $10,000 to assist in implementing these opportunities.

The Markham Experience

The City of Markham joined 65 other communities across Southern Ontario to participate in the Local Business Accelerator Program. Focusing on two main street communities — Unionville, a traditional European main street, and First Markham Place, an Asian community-focused commercial mall — the city’s interest was in better understanding who shopped in these communities, what their needs were, and working with local entrepreneurs to realize these business opportunities.

To identify these opportunities, a deep data analysis of each main street community and its surrounding trade area was completed. The resulting data provided detailed demographic insights, shopping behaviours and expenditures, and an understanding of local and regional travel patterns to the community.

With this data in hand, the city was able to work with each main street community to realize several opportunities, including:

• Healthy retail mix — Expenditure data from the local trade area helped the city identify businesses missing from the main street. For instance, residents in the Unionville community spent significant amounts at bakeries, but there was no local bakery. This allowed the local business improvement area (BIA) to work with local entrepreneurs to set up a new bakery to take advantage of this local market.
• Targeted marketing — Leveraging anonymized cellphone mobility data, the city was able to identify the socio-economic profiles of locals and visitors who visited and shopped in Unionville. By understanding where they came from and their behaviours, the BIA was able to target their marketing to similar residents to draw them to Unionville for shopping and entertainment.
• Impact of events — To understand the impact of community festivals, such as the TD Jazz Markham Festival, the city was able to leverage anonymized cellphone mobility data to quantify the origin of attendees, as well as their demographic characteristics, such as household income, age, social media channels, and whether they were a visible minority. This allowed festival organizers to understand the event’s draw (30 percent of attendees came from outside of Markham), as well as how to target marketing in future years to draw more of those attendees.

Overall, the My Main Street Business Accelerator has supported 190 small independent businesses with data insights and delivered 20 of them with $10,000 grants to help them build their operations using detailed market research data.

The Stratford Experience

The City of Stratford and Destination Stratford joined 80 other communities across Southern Ontario to participate in the Community Activator Program.

The Stratford Festival draws theatre lovers world-wide and generates $140 million a year in local economic activity. Its cancellation due to the pandemic was therefore a big loss for the community. However, it did provide the opportunity to pilot new tourism initiatives with a clean slate of data to understand their impact.

To challenge traditional assumptions that drawing people during the winter was a non-starter, Lights On Stratford — a six-week free-to-the-public winter festival of lights — was launched, transforming the downtown and park system with interactive luminous art installations.

The festival featured the North American premiere of Sky Castle — an interactive exhibit that previously appeared in Melbourne, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. It featured a cluster of five-metre-tall inflatable arches that changed colour and played sounds when people passed through the Market Square site. Stratford’s own talented arts professionals also created several stunning sites, including:

• The illumination of Shakespearean Gardens with over 4,300 tiny lights that reacted to the movement of visitors;
• An interstellar installation on Tom Patterson Island with giant, glowing models of the planets; and,
• An imaginative display at the Avon Theatre that chronicled a fantastical around-the-world journey.

Attendance exceeded expectations, drawing more people to the city in the winter of 2021 than for the same six-week period prior to the pandemic in 2019. Over 80,000 visitors attended, 68 percent of which travelled more than 40 kilometres to get there, resulting in a 34 percent increase in sales activity for downtown businesses compared to the similar period prior to the pandemic.

Leveraging Data to Support Main Street

Advertising and events are great ways to promote communities, but without detailed data, there is no ability to ensure the message gets to the right audience, target the right investments, or measure the impact of investments.

The pandemic provided a unique opportunity to test new approaches to community economic development. By embracing data, cities like Markham and Stratford can change the way they approach main street revitalization.