At Wednesday’s city council meeting, council approved demolishing two houses to make way for a new parking stall.
Regina council approved the removal of the two buildings after a business requested that a lack of parking hurt their ability to hire and fill positions.
With the approved removal, some residents are worried that Regina’s downtown is turning more into a place for people to park rather than to live.
Councillor Lori Bresciani, who is the acting deputy mayor and voted in favour of the demolition, said that every City deals with the balance of making their downtown residential and business-friendly.
“You are seeing in Calgary, they approved five different types of buildings to actually move from commercial to residential,” she said. “Parking is always going to be needed, especially if people are living downtown as well. I think that it’s case by case. We do want our downtown to thrive, but the other piece is we also want people to remain downtown, to live downtown. Not having people just come to-and-fro.”
Currently, 40 per cent of Regina’s downtown is considered parking. Bresciani said that the council needs to balance the needs of the downtown.
“It’s seeking the balance between how do we ensure that parking is an asset downtown, but it’s also not a deterrent for people to not go downtown,” she said. “I think we as a council understand that we still have to protect our downtown from it being just a great big parking lot, so we seek a balance. I think at the end of the day, if we really want to have a vibrant downtown, we have to ensure we meet the needs of people being able to go downtown, but also people being able to live downtown, and I think council is doing that.”
Councillor Dan LeBlanc voted against the motion and said that adding more parking isn’t attracting people to the downtown.
“I just think the central proposition that we make our downtown more dynamic by having more surface parking doesn’t make a lick of sense,” he said. “I think the way we enhance our downtown is by having more people, more buildings; we don’t achieve that by surface parking lots.”
He said that having more people downtown also makes it safer.
“I think this business of getting more people downtown also supports the safety issue. People who are nervous to walk two or three blocks, I think we enhance that by having more people downtown, and you get more people downtown by not having surface parking.”
LeBlanc said that the public has many concerns about the direction of the City’s downtown.
“We heard from people (and their concerns) including poor use of land in our downtown core neighbourhood, parking is an efficient use of land that undermines transit options, failure to develop destiny, we already have too many parking lots. I think the public is right on this. People want us to not continue to propagate these downtown parking lots.”
Overall, Bresciani said that council would work on a case-by-case basis to decide what parking they feel is necessary and what isn’t.
