YORKTON – It’s sort of like a case of déjà vu all over again as the Yorkton Business Improvement District and the City of Yorkton have embarked on a process to determine how to revitalize the downtown core.
It’s not exactly a new undertaking in a sense, with the idea of city core revitalization kicked around in the past locally, and in communities all across Canada and probably beyond as well.
The reason the discussion keeps surfacing is that answers as to how best to improve the downtown are not easily determined, and even what seems like reasonable ideas tend to sputter and die for various reasons – often because it’s hard to find someone to pay the costs.
That isn’t to say that the Reimagine Downtown Yorkton event in the city last Wednesday was not worthwhile. It was at least a process which showed interest in terms of the number of people turning out.
The interest was there in-part because there was a common concept that something is needed because when the question asked was for a single word to describe the downtown area, the answers weren’t particularly flattering with answers including tired, old, empty, sad and gray.
It is also unfortunately true that the collective didn’t exactly offer up bold new visions of what might be done.
There was the idea of a downtown farmers’ market, but that has been talked of for years without ever finding enough momentum to go beyond an idea.
Other ideas returned to the fore – such as allowing sidewalk seating at cafes – even to the point of expanding into areas of the street – although that would impact the already perceived issue of a lack of parking – a situation which shows how challenging finding an acceptable balance will be.
That is the challenge.
It was not so long ago the idea of community art was championed as a way to attract tourists to Yorkton, and make the community more aesthetically appealing to residents.
The idea actually got off the ground with some urban art created, and then stalled – even going backward as one of the key art creations was lost to a coat of black paint when the building it was on changed hands.
Downtown concerns are of course heightened as vacant storefronts grow in numbers.
Certainly filling those spots with a variety of businesses would help attract people, but on the flip-side you need to see traffic to entice entrepreneurs to open a business. It’s a Catch-22 situation that has confounded the effort of downtown revitalization in the past.
So what are the answers?
Well the process started last week will try to find them, and certainly the more people in the community the better the chance of finding those answers.
The onus really is on the broader community to rally behind the effort to make the downtown the place to be.
