Advocates say downtown Edmonton seeing progress, but needs to address underlying issues

Edmonton business advocates say they've seen progress in downtown's post-pandemic recovery, but there's still a long haul ahead.

Public-health measures to stop the spread of COVID lifted for good in 2022, prompting calls for downtown workers to return to the office.

Edmonton Downtown Business Association CEO Puneeta McBryan said that's not the focus now that downtown offices have reached a new normal, with most companies opting for some kind of hybrid arrangement where employees work from home for at least part of the week.

On the ground downtown, that means Mondays and Fridays tend to be quieter, with more people commuting in toward the middle of the week.

This year, the city has been trying to entice people to the core with a grant program for downtown festivals and events, and a "meet me downtown" campaign fronted by a cartoon meatball mascot.

But with research showing activity in Edmonton's core this year still falls well short of pre-pandemic levels, the city's Downtown Recovery Coalition is looking to bigger underlying issues.

According to CBRE Edmonton, the downtown office market recently saw its first positive quarter since the beginning of 2021, with commercial vacancy rates dropping slightly in the third quarter of 2023. But downtown office vacancy still sits just above 24 per cent — among the highest in the country.

"We're realizing that hybrid work is here to stay, and we have a lot of space downtown that we need to do something with," coalition chair Alex Hryciw said.

"Planning out more of a vision for what downtown needs in the long term versus just addressing what we've done in the last 18 months as the critical table-stakes issues … is where we'll set our sights."

She said that means exploring more residential development downtown — including office-to-residential conversions — and pushing for increased social supports beyond downtown, to decentralize shelters and other services mostly clustered in the core.

Karen Chapple, director of the University of Toronto's School of Cities, leads a project using cell phone data to compare activity in downtowns across cities in North America before and after the arrival of COVID-19.

This year's latest update compares March to mid-June of 2023 to the same period in 2019. Those numbers put downtown Edmonton's cell phone activity at 80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

That's not a bad result among more than 60 cities included in the research. Chapple said it's above the North American median of 75 per cent. In comparison, a handful of U.S. cities, like Minneapolis and St. Louis, barely cracked half their pre-pandemic activity this year. 

"There's a number of downtowns that perhaps were declining well before the pandemic … and the pandemic was sort of a death knell for them," Chapple said.