» Victoria Community Planning Forum: Economics
This session was a hard-nosed look at the economic future of the municipality, less utopian than the rest of the forum. The discussion centered around discussing the current employment breakdown:
| Sector | Employment % |
|---|---|
| community-oriented* | 48% |
| government | 15% |
| tourism | 11% |
| construction | 5% |
| banking | 5% |
| post-secondary education and healthcare | 4% |
| high tech | 4% |
| ⋮ | |
Government, tourism and construction won’t grow much in the next few years (although I didn’t get the impression that this was looking 30 years out like the plan is supposed to). Healthcare will grow on demand. High tech presents the best opportunity for growth but it has a variety of land use needs from office space to light manufacturing.
The session expert, Jay Wollenberg, thinks that Victoria’s waterfront represents our most underutilized resource for:
- tourism
- residential (which creates community-oriented and construction employment)
- industry
- public space (which could make the city more attractive for the Creative Class)
The City’s downtown plan is commited to maintaining existing industry on the harbour, but doesn’t say much about development. I like the idea of an intensified working harbour, but Ryley says it’s not necessarily great in practice.
Wollenberg’s other suggestion is that the City could try to get government offices to consolidate in the municipality (right now 7500 government jobs are outside the municipality in the region). Amalgamation would do that for local government. I’m not sure exactly how to get the province to do it, but I really like the idea.
Wollenberg also mentioned that there’s a trend toward raising children in condos and apartments – apparently Yaletown has a shortage of daycare spaces. This is a huge cultural shift that I’d like to know more about.
In the question period, a woman attempted to share her view that Victoria should pursue a no-growth strategy. I’m sympathetic to this concept and will be writing on it in the future, but she came off as a crank because she didn’t know how to articulate this complex idea (I took me a while to figure out what she was talking about and I’ve read papers on it!).
* Community-oriented: services and goods consumed by people living within the municipality
[...] real crank I’ve run into at these planning forums. In a long-winded statement, he expressed a degrowth agenda. He said he didn’t want Victoria to grow not only because it was bad for the environment, but [...]
MentalPolyphonics » Victoria Community Planning Forum: Downtown
30 Jun 10 at 9:51 am