Revitalization of Moncton’s downtown desperately needed

MONCTON – Business leaders and city officials are trying to come up with ways to revitalize Moncton’s downtown core, which is currently filled with empty storefronts.

It’s a problem that’s costing the city money in lost taxes.

During the Annual General Meeting of Downtown Moncton Centreville Inc., keynote speaker Adam Conter, a sales associate with CBRE Limited for New Brunswick, told the crowd that the city needed to do more to attract retailers downtown.

He said the best way to encourage people to shop downtown is to actually have people living downtown.

“When we talk about retail in any market, stores need customers and customers come from households,” Conter said. “From 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., that’s where your strongest base of active population is and if they don’t have much to do, you’re seeing an even more aggressive drive to the suburbs.”

One of the more well-recognized residential projects proposed for Moncton’s downtown core is the Five-Five condo building slated to be built at the corner of Queen Street and Lester Avenue.

The design for the building includes two floors of commercial space, two floors of higher-end apartments and four floors of condo units.

“This is the first true condominium purpose-built property that’s going to be introduced into South-East New Brunswick,”developer Bill Hennessey said.

The project has been in the works for 24 months, but is now stalled. Hennessey said 70 per cent of the commercial space on the first floor has been allocated, but the uncertainty around the future of the downtown events centre is leading some potential tenants to hesitate.

“There was a sense of go, and unfortunately now there’s a sense of idling, and that indecision absolutely causes us to take pause. It causes some of our tenants to take a pause and say is this really going to happen?” he said.

He said the project cannot move forward without those commercial tenants, and he also doesn’t know if it will move forward if the events centre isn’t built.

“We haven’t had the conversation. Hopefully we never will have to have the conversation,” he said, explaining that they haven’t asked their commercial tenants whether they would move in without it, because they believe the provincial government will agree to fund it.

Having residents nearby is one of the key requirements for retailers, but it’s not the only according to Conter. He said having a single point of contact to deal with, like the system that exists at Champlain Place or in the Mapleton Centre, also drives development.

Moncton City Councillor Dawn Arnold said the city is currently in the process of hiring someone to fill this role for the downtown core.

“Through economic development, we will have one person that when you want to develop in the downtown, they will be the person that you go to, that will have all your answers for your development,” she said.

The city has another issue downtown: 42 per cent of the core area is covered with surface parking lots. That doesn’t bring much tax revenue to the city.

“It’s a terrible, terrible situation for the city,” Arnold said.

Arnold said that a parking lot valued at about $200,000 only brings in about $5,000 in assessment, but if the city could encourage the development of a $12.5 million building with underground parking on that same piece of land, it would get $300,000 a year.

So the city will be launching a pilot project that goes from the riverfront to Queen Street and from Foundry to Lewis Streets, to encourage development that includes property tax incentives.

The plan is that developers would pay their property taxes on a sliding scale in the first years after the development. They would pay 10 per cent in the first year, then 20 per cent in the second year, and so on, until they reach ten years.

“After which time the city is $1.6 million richer and the developer has been incentivized to building something,” Arnold said.