Saving and Rebuilding Main Street: COVID-19 Has Reminded us of the Value of Main Street
Having grown up in Stratford, Ontario, I always was attracted to vibrant downtowns and main streets. The stores, the architecture, the action on the street and, most importantly, the people. Wandering around, bumping into people you know, catching up — it’s the action and interactions that make life enjoyable. And, Stratford, is one of those unique places with a downtown that offers that life.
I liked downtown so much that when I was 18-years old, I opened a live music café in downtown Stratford. It was not much — some couches bought from the Salvation Army, a small stage in a corner for live bands, I served up lousy coffee and the Generation X Combo (a can of Jolt Cola with a serving of Mr. Noodles). But it felt great to be adding to the vibrancy of the life of my hometown’s main street.
Years after closing my café and serving as a City Councillor who focused many of his efforts on protecting and building Stratford’s downtown, I moved to Toronto for work. When friends back home asked what living in Toronto was like, I told them that Toronto was just a bunch of small towns smashed together. It was not this massive city, but a community of neighbourhoods, each with their own main streets, filled with their own unique life and opportunities. Toronto’s main streets made Toronto a small town and were critical to defining its qualify of life.
It is that quality of life and the hundreds of neighbourhoods that make Toronto a great place to live. That quality of life is what the City uses to sell itself to talent and businesses who call Toronto home, as well as to tourists who choose it as their destination. And it's that quality of life that has driven residential property values through the roof.
With the onset of COVID-19, though, this quality of life is threatened — stores are shuttered, the streets lack traffic, and those few people walking keep their distance. Boarded up main streets do not attract talent and tourists, they smother the street life we enjoy, all while dragging down their neighbouring property values. The downtown that shaped my youth in Stratford and the one I enjoy every day — Toronto’s Corso Italia — are at risk of being lost. My neighbourhood is in a coma, and we need to ensure all our main streets are resuscitated as we emerge from COVID-19.
If there is one thing we have realized through this crisis is just how tenuous business was on main street. I think we all kind of took main street for granted — we figured it would always be there. As we see now, though, it was hanging by a thread. After just a few weeks of being shut down, according to a recent survey by the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas (TABIA), 50% of Toronto’s main street businesses could not pay their entire April rent.
There have been a range of programs rolled out to support main street businesses — the Federal government has made available the 75% wage subsidy and the Emergency Bank Account program. However, paying 25% of a wage is impossible if you have got no cashflow. And paying back a loan is daunting, if not unlikely if your margins are barely enough to carry you a month without income during the best of times.
To support main streets, the City of Toronto has rolled out several support programs, including deferring property taxes and utility payments. It has also expanded its Digital Main Street program to help businesses embrace technology and sell online. It also launched a virtual Support Centre to help companies to apply for Federal funding programs.
The most significant piece to help main street businesses, though, in the short-term is the Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance Program. The program will provide rent relief for businesses for three months (April through June), with tenants being on the hook for 25% of their rent, the landlord eating another 25%, with the government picking up the other 50% as a forgivable loan. Given TABIA found that 72% of Toronto’s main street businesses do not expect to be able to pay rent May 1st, this rent program is going to be critical in saving main street.
All that said, we are going to need whole new thinking on how to support main street and support it post-COVID-19. What this crisis has illustrated is that the commercial backbones of our communities were already on life support before COVID-19 arrived. We were not valuing main street’s contributions to our communities — we figured they would always be there — whether we patronized their establishments or not.
Now more than ever, we need to support these main street businesses. First, we need to ensure they survive this crisis — and for the most part, there are now programs in place to help do that (albeit too late for many), but it also means shopping locally with those that are still operating. We need to ensure as many as possible survive so that there is a foundation to rebuild upon.
Post-crisis though it is going to mean reinvesting in our main streets. The public realm we all enjoy needs to be rebuilt to attract and manage people in a potentially socially distancing future. Infrastructure investments in transportation and community facilities should be directed towards main streets to help drive people towards those local businesses. And, just as necessary, every main street business is going to need an online way to sell and interact with their local customers, given browsing in-person may be replaced by queuing for local online orders.
Most of all, though, we need to rethink our shopping habits. We need to value our main streets and keep our dollars in our neighbourhoods. We need to direct them towards those independent main street businesses and ensure we give back to those businesses from which we derive so much benefit but neglected to recognize until COVID-19 brought them back into focus.
