Saskatoon's suburban office space outpaces downtown core

The City of Saskatoon is looking at ways to get more businesses downtown in an effort to make the area the hub of the city.

Currently, there is more office space in suburban Saskatoon than there is in all of downtown, and that's troubling Downtown Saskatoon's Brent Penner.

"I'm not sure that I want to see another study," Penner, the executive director of Downtown Saskatoon, said.

"We know that we're going to see continual cost increases on the property tax base if we keep doing exactly what we have been doing, because we've been seeing them for the last many, many years."

Downtown Saskatoon, formerly known as the city's downtown business improvement district, has been tracking the exodus out of the city's core over the past eight to 10 years as more and more companies find advantages away from downtown.

According to a Colliers Canada report from July, Saskatoon's downtown office vacancy is at 18.6 per cent, compared to seven per cent in the rest of the city. Overall, there is roughly 3.2 million square feet of office space downtown, compared to 3.5 million sq. ft. of office space in the rest of the city.

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While the trends worry Penner enough, those statistics include the new office towers built at River Landing, which added roughly 350,000 sq. ft. of office space at the new development.

"That's a very significant amount of office space that's been built in downtown and the gap still is there," he said.

Bob Patrick, the chair of the regional and urban planning program at the University of Saskatchewan, says downtown office vacancy matters because it points to what's missing in Saskatoon.

If downtown is supposed to be the vibrant hub of all recreational, entertainment and cultural activity, then it needs the people most of all.

"There's more vacant parking lots than there is park space. And so there's a need for more people in the downtown," Patrick said.

Patrick said the development could take many forms. He thinks Saskatoon could make use of lots of its existing space to take in 5,000 to 10,000 people.

Using River Landing as an example, Patrick sees Saskatoon going down the right path when it comes to reinventing downtown Saskatoon to make it desirable for companies and families alike.

"The demographics today are just calling for less suburban sprawl. And for more good urbanism, good urban development, and we're seeing that ... but we can see a lot more of it."

Penner said no matter what, densification and development downtown will save the city's bottom line and keep property taxes low.

"The traditional growth of the city has been to green fields and another neighbourhood, another neighbourhood and another neighbourhood," he said.

"You build more roads, you need more infrastructure."

If there are more roads, well now the police and the fire department are asking for more stations, more staff and more support.

As the city continues to boast of the benefits of a proposed downtown event and entertainment district, Patrick says the city has to look at the project from an overall perspective, given there's only one chance to get it right.

"We have to see it as an integrated development approach," Patrick said.

"So it's not one or the other. It's some multiplicity of land use activities."

Ward 6 city councillor Cynthia Block has long been a champion of infill and other efforts to densify Saskatoon. She wants the city to approach this topic earnestly now instead of waiting until it's too late.

"The current approach is incentivizing suburban office space at the expense of the downtown," she said.

"As stated in our Official Community Plan, we need to keep downtown strong as the primary centre for business and commerce in Saskatoon."

As more people and businesses choose to spend their time elsewhere, Penner, Block and Patrick are keeping an eye on what the city can do to reverse recent trends.

"Continuing to do what has been done in the city really flies in the face of some of those objectives that they state," Penner said.