CITIES OF ALL SIZES around the world struggle with how to get people into their downtowns.
No one wants a ghost town in the heart of their city, but avoiding that is easier said than done.
The problem is, the people cities want downtown – the ones who spend money and clean up after themselves and then go back to their homes to sleep – don’t want to be around certain *other* people.
Those in this second group require services and don’t necessarily have homes.
They reach their hands out for help, forcing the rest of us to confront the realities of how helpful we really want to be.
“Confronting realities” is not a desirable slogan for a city’s downtown.
These others make the first group feel unsafe, even though there is a big divide between someone asking for help and someone threatening harm.
Here in Kamloops, the city is launching a pilot project that will close two tiny portions of Fourth Avenue to vehicle traffic for two weeks.
It’s a bit of tinkering in an effort to create a more welcoming, plaza-like experience, and likely will be noticed by very few people.
And while it may be a pleasant little aberration, it doesn’t address the fact that, rightly or wrongly, the balance of Group A and Group B seems to be keeping more and more people away.
Kamloops is not the only city struggling to address that balance.
In Nanaimo, a tent city has been set up in the downtown, certainly not the first of its kind in BC or Western Canada.
The City of Red Deer just budgeted an additional $1.53 million to hire 10 RCMP officers specifically to reduce crime in the downtown core.
Up in Prince George, efforts to revive the downtown have been well-documented, with the latest being a city-run pilot project adding bylaw staff to deal with illegal camping and other nuisance-type violations.
Just this week, Global Okanagan reported on businesses pulling out of downtown Kelowna because of the growing issue of homelessness.
It’s not a local phenomenon.
And while we ask our elected officials to deal with the downtown, we also need to deal with our own reluctance to simply relate to other people who are having a hard time.
That may go a lot further toward creating a comfortable downtown environment than closing down streets or hiring bylaw officers.
