Three drawbacks
The city planners and the developers figure that if they build
ground-floor commercial units,
tenants
will buy or lease the units and the shoppers will come. In my opinion,
for this to happen, three issues need to be addressed.
1. Unit sizes
The ground-floor commercial units are usually small and best suited for services and small
shops. A convenience store, small professional offices or hair salons can work but a
supermarket, an LCBO, a Best Buy or a department store will need to be close to huge residential towers.
2. Pedestrians
Rush hour and not a
pedestrian in sight.
For this model to work, the retail stores need to front busy sidewalks.
The key is pedestrians. If there is no steady flow of people
walking by during business, hours, it may prove to be very tough to
make any money. Many major four-lane streets in the GTA are very busy
roads used daily
by thousands of motorists yet the sidewalks are empty.
A neighbourhood that consists of single-family homes and two rows of
mid-size condos does not have the required density to fill the
sidewalks with shoppers. The only groups of people you see on the
streets are standing in front of the bus stops.
3. Parking
So if there are few pedestrians, the commercial units need the
motorists to stop. Yet, that will not happen as there is very little
parking and what does exist, is hidden out back or is underground.
This will discourage banks, the Beer Store, Shopper Drug Mart, sit-down
restaurants, coffee shops and and any other business that depends on a
steady flow of customers.
No
drive-thru's
No drive-thru's means no fast-food burger joints and no Tim Horton's.
Sheppard Avenue
West
Sheppard Avenue West, from Allan Road to Bathurst Street, was lined
with
rows of small single detached houses and a few strip malls. Most of the
strip malls are still standing but most of the houses have been torn
down and have been replaced with mid-rise condo towers.
Most of the condos are five to nine stories high with retail shops on
the bottom floor. There is limited parking for the retail customers
with small parking lots in in the back of most of the condos and
limited parking underground at the few condos that have limited outside
space.
Not a single unit on the south side of this large condo tower at the
corner of Sheppard and Allen Road is leased or has been sold.
Only a few retail units on Allen Road are occupied.
See the sidewalk? This photo was taken during a weekday rush hour.
There no pedestrians. None what-so-ever. So how can small independent
retail shops make a go of it?
This building has been open for over a year. Not one retail unit is
occupied.
This building has been open for a few months. No retail units have
opened. There is some work being done inside so there may be some
opening soon.
Yet, there are more mid-size condos being planned for this strip.
Rows of single-family houses have been flattened to make room for more
residential units and retail shops.
Will all of these planned developments get built? Sure, maybe some now
and some more in the years to come.
Wilson
Avenue
A new condo development on Wilson Avenue that has 500 residential units
has been open for months. In the second year after opening, (summer of
2015) only one ground floor retail unit is occupied, a pharmacy.
This development has no other stores or services within easy walking
distance.
Bathurst
Street
This new mid-size condo is on Bathurst just south of Bloor Street. The
retail units may be sold or leased as it is right across the street
from Honest Ed's so it may have sufficient pedestrian traffic to
make it successful.
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