Your City’s Innovation Play Starts on Main Street

Pick up an economic development strategy for any city — large or small — and it will aim to attract and nurture a tech and innovation ecosystem. It’s no wonder: tech jobs are well-paying, have great economic spinoffs and have the potential to transform a community’s reputation to attract further talent and investment.

But a tech and innovation-focused economic development strategy that doesn’t prioritize quality of life at its core is doomed to fail. Investment follows talent; tech talent is found where there are educational and interesting job opportunities in welcoming communities that provide a strong quality of life.

A community’s downtown and main streets are both a quality-of-life indicator and contributor. As an indicator, a healthy main street highlights economic opportunity, livability and an engaged community. As a contributor, it provides a place to connect, generate economic opportunities and shape cultural identity. They provide a gathering space where people can fulfill their physical and social needs.

Plus, tech workers have families — they aren’t just bodies that work at computers. And amenities and opportunities are critical to a family’s quality of life, so walkable and amenity-filled communities that feature quality public spaces, and a range of arts, culture and recreation opportunities, become fundamental to building a community attractive to talent.

As an example of the value that main streets hold for those in the tech community, when the COVID-19 pandemic began and stores were ordered closed, the City of Toronto, in partnership with Digital Main Street, launched a program called ShopHERE, which focused on rapidly building e-commerce stores for main street businesses at no cost.

The program relied on volunteer web developers who were connected to struggling main street businesses that needed to get online quickly. When the call went out to Toronto’s tech community, more than 700 web developers came forward within days to give their time to support local main streets. The program eventually expanded across Canada and built over 50,000 e-commerce stores for small businesses.

In Markham, Ontario, which is home to Canada’s largest cluster of semiconductor companies and the country’s second-largest tech hub, the City recognizes this important connection between tech talent and quality of life. It recently completed an integrated economic development and culture strategy that leads with the importance of quality of life in its bid to continue to attract and nurture the tech talent it needs to secure investments from local and global technology companies.

The strategy highlights investments in arts, culture, public art and quality public spaces as critical to maintaining and enhancing the community’s quality of life. It also prioritizes investments and programming to build strong main street communities.

For instance, in Markham Centre, the city’s new urban downtown that will grow from 21,000 to 106,000 residents at full build-out, is identified as ground zero for bringing arts, culture and business together. The strategy identifies investments not only in tech and innovation, but also in community events, interesting public spaces and art, and new amenities, such as a performing arts centre.

Just as importantly, Markham’s strategy identifies the need to ensure diverse, unique and locally-owned small businesses populate the new downtown. To ensure this, the City is working with YSpace, York University’s business incubator, to develop a retail accelerator program to support and curate the local retail mix. Of course, this could just be left to the market, but Markham recognizes unique retail and restaurant experiences attract visitors and, as witnessed through the pandemic, locally owned businesses build community connections and are more resilient, both of which add to the quality of life of a neighbourhood.

Hands-on curation to facilitate the right mix of retail and services in its commercial core extends to Markham’s main street, and its other main streets, such as Unionville. The process starts with an inventory of each main street’s businesses and detailed marketing research for its local trade area. With this data in hand, staff identify business opportunities that are missing and have market potential. Then this market research is shared with existing businesses and new entrepreneurs, helping them expand and start new businesses that can meet these market opportunities, all with the goal of creating a healthy retail mix that draws residents and visitors to the area.

So before jumping straight into an economic development strategy focused on building out the next Silicon Valley, start by focusing on the fundamentals of a healthy community–and that starts by focusing on main street.