Financial District BIA forges itself a different PATH

Eric Morse —

If the Financial District Business Improvement Area (FDBIA) had been in place a few years ago, Toronto might have had a better chance of escaping the construction and traffic nightmare that is everything from Front St. to the waterfront these days.

At least that’s the view of Grant Hume, the BIA’s executive director.

“It’s challenging,” says Hume. “When the phone rings, it’s generally about construction.”

“There’s a couple of things happening here. There’s certainly a big push to get stuff done for the (2015) Pan Am Games. But we do have a lot of activity in close proximity, so when you have Yonge St. impassable and York St. closed down, you’re effectively taking out some pretty major arterial roads at the same time.”

“What we want to encourage is that when we do construction going forward, let’s try and do it it from a phased, completed works approach. It’s a limited space down here, there’s only so many things you can do. I would suggest that if an organization like ours had been here, we would have inserted ourselves into the planning conversations and we probably would have put up our hand and said, we think its problematic to do York St. when you’ve got Union Station and Front St. in its current condition, and maybe we should look at phasing the work differently. But nobody was active as the voice of the public realm to raise that flag.”

The FDBIA was approved by the city in 2011 and Hume reckons 2013 as its first real year of operation, with 2012 spent in a planning phase. It now operates from shared office space on the 57th floor of First Canadian Place, a familiar locale to Hume—a 31-year veteran of the Toronto Board of Trade—and his four staffers.

The BIAs catchment area takes in the “square” from Queen St. to Yonge at Victoria (north of King) to the south edge of the railroad tracks at Simcoe St. with a few jogs to include, for instance, Union Station but excluding the Royal York Hotel.

It is definitely a BIA like no other in the city.

For one thing, there are very few residences in the area. Unlike other neighbourhoods where a BIA and residents’ association work hand in hand (and occasionally at cross-purposes) with frequent evening and weekend activities, this BIA’s work usually takes place during business hours, when hundreds of thousands of people work or pass through the area.

For another, its membership is huge. Although Hume and his staff have never tried to count the number of businesses in the area, an actual membership meeting would be too big to accommodate.

Despite its large membership, the BIA’s phone rings rarely: and almost all communication takes place through Twitter with 1600 followers. The website has received 3000 unique hits a month since April.

Two of Hume’s four staff are fully occupied with electronic messaging  alone.

The critical mass of business in the area and the sheer heft of many of the individual businesses means that this BIA does not engage in programming as others do; the membership does its own programming. The BIA tries  on the one hand  to act as a funnel through which the programming activities of the members can be showcased to the public, and on the other to be a policy and overview channel for the use of public space in the area, not all of which (the PATH underground retail corridors for instance) is truly public.

The BIA participates in public space theming and beautification. In its first year, it has come up with sheathing for the eminently 19th-century-looking wooden poles that still line the streets. Likewise, it has installed a series of iconically-themed banners on poles along Bay and King streets.

It also adopts a strategic voice on behalf of the public interest in public and publicly-used spaces. In its first year it has chosen to focus on the provincial business education tax issue which impacts retailers, the transportation file and the revenue tools that have been mooted to subsidize transportation. (The BIA wants improved transportation but appears wary of some of the revenue tools, e.g. the proposed parking tax.)

Hume notes that there has never been a master plan for Downtown and now the BIA is trying to help stimulate the evolution of one over the near future.

The BIA led massive consultations with PATH merchants over what works and what doesn’t (and learned that while wayfinding is vital, after-hours lighting is not). They have taken a hand in strategic planning for creating an integrated streetscape along York (which is almost finished) and Richmond (which will undergo heavy reconstruction beginning next year).

“We want to make sure that we’re participating in making this area good for people who work here every day and in many cases pay a price in terms of travel time and effort,” Hume adds. If we can engage in a conversation that ends up shaving five minutes of somebody’s travel time, then we’ve done a good job.”

Follow @myTOFD on Twitter visit www.TorontoFinancialDistrict.com for more information.