Community activism

Today the three of us attended a meeting hosted by our community association about future development in our neighbourhood "village" (their term). We heard some people speak about the vision and looked at architectual renderings of what could be, and generally came away feeling that it sounded good, but that it's a long, long way from fruition. The primary issue is what's going to happen with Main Street, the major artery that runs through the neighbourhood. Right now the street's kind of a mixed bag: a few convenience stores, a health food market, a vegetarian buffet restaurant, a few offices, one new age book store, and a lot of vacant storefronts and underutilized space. The area seems like it could be on the cusp of becoming a really great urban neighbourhood, since the location is prime in relation to the city's major amenities, and the other cool areas are now very expensive. All the signs look promising to us. But we learned that there are also some significant barriers that could drive things the other way.

The major problem is that traffic is fairly heavy and fast moving on Main Street, which is four lanes, and apparently City Hall sees the area primarily as a traffic corridor. That perception is changing, but there's still a lot of work to do in terms of making the strip more hospitable to foot traffic by slowing down and thinning out vehicle traffic. A related issue is that for more businesses to be viable, they'd probably have to pull in customers from outside the immediate area, and street parking is limited. So the plan seems to be, fight to keep Main Street's commercial zoning whenever possible, increase population density in an intelligent way, improve green space, draw in businesses, and do something about the speeding cars. Not the kind of stuff that happens overnight. But that's the Big Idea.

On the other hand, I think there's a broad consensus in the 'hood that our quality of life would improve exponentially if someone would just open up a damn coffee shop. I tell you, if I wasn't a survivor of many years working in such establishments (and therefore all too aware of what it takes to run one, not the least of which is the 6 a.m. start time every day), I'd be tempted to open one myself. I think the neighbours would throw flowers at my feet every time I left the house if I did that, so strong is the expressed desire for a local java hut.

What I would really like to do to make the neighbourhood more vibrant is open a wine and beer store like the one we had down the street from our house in Richmond. But that kind of business is illegal here in Soviet Canuckistan, so, never mind. I'll just keep going to community association meetings instead and throwing in my 2 cents here and there. At the very least, it's good to know that there are so many people around who care enough to actually hold meetings like this one and try to make the area better.