Sidney
This community of about 11,000 calls itself Sidney-By-the-Sea, and with good reason.
The town of Sidney is bounded to the north and east by water – from Tsehum Harbour to Roberts Bay to Sidney Strait for which the town was named. Down its centre is Beacon Avenue, running west to east from the Pat Bay Highway to the waterfront, with the new ‘Pier’ luxury resort and spa to the left, a lengthy pier straight ahead, and community space to the right. Beacon Avenue is the focal point of downtown, and offers a small, seaside town ambiance, with plenty of coffee shops, restaurants, boutique stores, art shops, and book stores – lots and lots of bookstores.
Sidney is renown for its bookstores. It is a quaint little town.
But apart from quaintness, Sidney in many ways is ahead of its time – and could be a model of smart development. It’s compact size and layout puts almost all residents within an 400 metre hike from public transit – Sidney is eminently walkable. It is well contained, lacking urban sprawl and so minimizes the impact of the gas guzzling, carbon dioxide producing automobile. Its recreational and community and cultural amenities are within easy reach of everyone.
Sidney is ‘user friendly’, and maybe that explains why its age demography differs so markedly from the British Columbia average. The ‘over 50′ population represents just over one half of the population, whereas a more typical average would be around one third. At the other end of the spectrum, the 20 to 29 age group is under-represented in Sidney, comprising only 7 percent of the local citizenry, just over half of the ‘norm’ in nearby communities.
Sidney has a strong economy, with a well established commercial base which serves as the service area for all of Central Saanich and North Saanich. But it has an industrial base too: a well established marine industrial area along Harbour Road adds interest and tax dollars to the local economy; and an industrial park on Sidney’s westernmost border, adjacent the the Victoria airport across the Pay Bay Highway, adds to Sidney’s economic diversity.
How will the face of Sidney change over the next decade or two? Its most recent (2007) Official Community Plan (OCP) lays out its major challenges, and how it plans to deal with them.
Most land available for housing is already built up, and has been for some time. In recent years, almost all additions to the housing inventory has been in the some form of multi-family buildings, and most of those have been redevelopments in close proximity to the downtown area.
This trend can be expected to continue in view of policies encouraging multi-family growth in the core area. Mixed use within the downtown core will also be encouraged, adding residential units above commercial space along Beacon Avenue and the avenues that cross it.
Sidney’s OCP also addresses its unusual demographic, encouraging a diversity of housing forms and types (including secondary suites), as well as types of ‘tenure’ to provide suitable housing for the elderly who wish to ‘age in place’, as well as for all income groups. And those developers who undertake to provide defined public amenities for Sidney’s residents may in turn benefit from approval of a density bonus for their residential developments.
But the quaint, people-friendly scale of Sidney will not be compromised, and new developments and redevelopments alike will need to be appropriately massed and scaled to fit within existing streetscapes, whether they may be. You see, Sidney’s OCP envisages a
‘…balanced, vibrant waterfront community with a revitalized town center, which caters to residents, visitors and businesses through the provision of a broad range of services including:efficient transportation, tourist amenities and cultural and social activities for all segments of the community, while affording optimal opportunities for industrial and commercial development.’
Sidney is an interesting place. It promises to become more interesting, and vibrant, over the next few years.
