State of the City: Mid Town District

The vision making portion of the State of the City Presentation  had the Mayor updating residents on a range of proposed developments for the community.

While Mayor Brain made note of the larger financial limitations that the City faces for all of its infrastructure as part of the event, something we reviewed as part of our Overview of the mayor's presentation.

The night also featured the vision making of the last few years from the Mayor, wth Mr. Brain updating residents as to the progress for many of those elements for what he calls incubation projects.

Mayor Brain's notes on on the area now known as the Mid Town District, with Mr. Braid outlining how residents may see it evolve. 

"Mid town, so as I mentioned we have a new downtown, and  now we're going to move forward with Mid Town. 

Which will go from  so you see City Hall is here, down towards Five Corners. So what we don't want to do with this area anymore is we don't want to encourage commercial development down here anymore.

We want to focus more on housing development in the downtown, so this we want to make as a downtown neighbourhood over time. It doesn't mean there won't a little shops and things, there's already things there existing there.

But the idea long term is to develop this into a housing area for the community and we've created incentives in this area to make that happen"

Towards an example of what's planned the Mayor noted of some recent plans for the area, with local businesses charting the course forward.

"Right now, we have a couple of incubation projects happening.

You know the old Empress building is 100 percent coming down, Sonu who owns City Furniture is definitely doing that.  He also owns the white building next to it, that's also coming down, he's got some ideas and plans on that, I can't say what's going to happen there, but it will be good.

Across the street, we did the Eat street. Over time we're going to develop that better, make it look nicer put in some lighting, that kind of thing.

Stuck on Design just purchased the old Shoppers, you've seen them doing the restoration work right now on the  outskirts, so they're moving in there.

The Gitga'at just did a new building envelope for their area there.

So, there is movement now on Midtown.

And what we want to do with these areas, like Marina District,  Midtown, New downtown. 

Is we want to create themes, Districts.  So that when you go there, you have different lighting,  different flags that hang from the pole,  it makes you feel like you're actually in a different location in the community. 

So think about it this way.  

This is a vision that's emerging and right now you drive downtown and you go,  oh this building is this, this building's that, but the way we look at it is, is how do we emerge  on a vision like that.

So we have, the plan and the policies and the rules in place to enable this to happen.

So if you can imagine now, the Marina District and you can imagine the Gateway and you can imagine Midtown. 

Then you can start to imagine how this community is going to actually look long term.

You know, we're going to connect Seal Cove, now they have the Rushbrook Trial through the partnership with Kaien Trails and CN and the port, connecting to the Bob's on the Rock area that will go right to the Waterfront. 

You'll walk up to the new Downtown area, that will hopefully be the New Gateway. Then you'll come into the Midtown which will be neighbourhoods, parks,  right? That kind of thing, in this area, a little bit more quiet

This, is happening and we're moving forward with all these projects all at the same time"

The Mid Town development portion of the presentation can be viewed from the City's Video replay of the Sate of the City Presentation.

The review of the Midtown elements starts at the one hour, eleven minute mark

Some of our past items of note to the theme have been included as part of our Vision Tracker archive, as well as our Council Discusison archive

With the Vision themes coming out of the 2030 Vision plan, you can go back and review notes from that presentation from 2019 here.

Our Full overview of the State of the City Presentation can be reviewed here.

We also have created an archive of the elements from it, that compilation is available here.

( some of the above images come from screenshots of the video presentation)