Mean streets makeover: The city's blueprint to reinvent Edmonton's gritty east-central core
Even top city planner Walter Trocenko sounds a bit nervous when he talks about The Quarters.
“We’re so close and yet so far,” says the man charged with sparking new life in Edmonton’s forgotten east downtown. “Until we actually see that soil being turned, that’s when we’ll take that deep sigh of relief and say, ‘Mission accomplished. We got one off the ground. Only a couple dozen more to go.’ “If we’re successful in getting these projects off the ground, there will be sufficient momentum to carry on after.”
Talking with urban planners, the cynics find it easy to list reasons why The Quarters plan won’t work – a stigma attached to the neighbourhood since the 1950s, fractured land ownership, competition from other civic redevelopment projects, and a conservative spirit in city hall.
On the other side of the scale is a planned 27-storey condo tower and a high-end hotel. With a promise to start construction by the fall, they would be the first major private developments in decades.
The city is trying to fast-track development permits for The Quarters, and is pioneering an idea to compel creative urban design. Almost the entire 18 blocks have been rezoned to allow a maximum building height of just three storeys. To earn the right to build a tower, developers must hide parking lots, use more than stucco on exterior walls, give preference to pedestrians over cars, and let sunshine reach the street.
“(The design plan) encourages all kinds of aspirational things,” says Trocenko. But, “it’s that street character that’s important.”
The existing level of development within the boundaries of The Quarters is dismal. Many of the buildings are boarded up, and roughly half of the building lots are empty, used as gravel parking lots where downtown office workers willing to walk pay $3 a day.
When city staff surveyed the area, they found more than 80 per cent of the people who live here rent their homes, compared with 40 per cent citywide. Average income levels were half that of the rest of the city. Property crime was five times the city average, and violent crime 15 times higher.
But it wasn’t always this way.
