Downtown Brampton is undergoing major economic growth transformation for innovation, start-ups, and talent attraction, investing millions across sectors. The message is clear: Brampton is open for business.
The Big Question: Where do small businesses fit?
Small businesses make up the backbone of Brampton’s economy accounting for nearly 90% of the nearly 110,000 businesses in Brampton. But lost in the revitalization conversation are the existing small businesses still recovering from the aftermath of COVID-19, now faced with another challenge.
The Double Whammy of Downtown Revitalization: Revitalization construction cuts small businesses off from customers, while raising property values beyond what small businesses can afford. Revitalization without support grows Brampton at the expense of small businesses.
Protecting Small Businesses Protects Brampton’s Communities
- Protecting local jobs: In 2023, Brampton had an estimated 226,000 jobs with a population of 687,462, underscoring Brampton’s reliance on bigger urban centers for employment elsewhere. Small businesses keep Brampton residents working close to home, reducing reliance on long commutes to jobs elsewhere in the GTA.
- Preserving Brampton’s identity: Small, independently owned businesses reflect the city’s cultural diversity in a way that large national chains can’t replicate. A city as diverse as Brampton thrives on cultural businesses, attuned to people.
- Making growth pay off locally: Dollars spent at Brampton-owned businesses get reinvested in Brampton, rather than flowing out to head offices elsewhere. This supports employment and future growth in Brampton-built enterprises.
Construction Concerns
When the Region of Peel undertook watermain replacement on Main Street South in 2023, the Downtown Brampton BIA estimated that many businesses lost as much as 80% of revenue and being forced into layoffs just to break even, and as many as 19 left the area or shut down entirely.
As the downtown core braces for increased construction from Innovation District developments, GO Expansion, and other major infrastructure projects, that disruption is only going to intensify. Reduced foot traffic and detoured drivers are an inconvenience for consumers, but for small businesses, it can mean their entire customer base disappearing for months over even years with no clear plan for recovery. However, development remains critical for Brampton’s ability to attract new workers, become affordable and make Brampton an innovation center. Responsible development ensures small businesses benefit from new clientele from development, while surviving the transition period.
- The data backs this up: CFIB research found that 67% of Ontario small businesses experienced disruption from local construction over a five-year period, driven largely by traffic congestion and reduced foot traffic.
- The margin for disruption is thin: As of 2024, only about 70% of businesses with fewer than 20 staff reported having enough cash on hand to survive three months of disruption — meaning changes in business flow could be existential for as many as 30% of Brampton’s small businesses.
- The risk isn’t shared equally: large businesses can draw on reserve funds and other capital to absorb disruption. Small businesses are often personally financed by their owners, who end up drawing on their own savings or taking on loans just to keep the doors open.
With limited foot traffic, staffing costs and prolonged disruption leaves many small businesses unable to cover overhead costs leading to leadoffs and shutdowns.
Higher Rents and Pricing Out
Construction isn’t the only risk. A 2018 Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) study found that redevelopment along Toronto’s Yonge Street between 2007 and 2018 drove up property values and commercial rents so significantly that many successful small businesses were priced out and eventually shut down.
Revitalization brings new foot traffic and economic opportunity, which is good for growth, but rents tend to rise alongside it. Larger businesses can absorb that cost with lower operating margins, established branding, and greater capital. Small businesses, without the same economies of scale, often can’t compete for the very foot traffic the revitalization was meant to bring them — even as their rent and labour costs climb. Revitalization without support risks businesses not being able to capitalize on the increased foot traffic and the benefits of a revitalized core.
The result, as seen on Yonge Street, is a downtown core that becomes more homogenized with recognizable brands, at the expense of the small businesses that carry cultural significance and offer more nuanced service. Given Brampton’s cultural diversity, that’s a piece of the revitalization conversation that can’t be an afterthought.
Recommendations:
Small businesses took the brunt of COVID-19, while larger businesses had the reserves to weather the uncertainty. A deliberate policy direction is needed to support small business recovery through this next chapter of growth.
1. Require a Downtown Business Impact Assessment before major construction
Construction affects a business’s ability to maintain its storefront and remain accessible to customers, whether through blocked pedestrian walkways, transit detours, or parking closures. An impact assessment gives businesses a clear sightline into what to expect, how they’ll be affected, and for how long, and lets the City work with affected stakeholders to protect accessibility, especially for the most vulnerable residents in need of pedestrian walkways and transit connections, throughout the construction period.
2. Create a permanent Downtown Business Continuity Fund
Unlike COVID-19, construction disruption is time-limited and predictable, which makes continuity funding measurable and achievable. Building on the work already underway through the Downtown Brampton BIA, a continuity fund would extend support beyond repairs and rebranding to cover the operational costs and partially compensate for lost profits that keep cash flowing within the business and workers employed through short-term disruption.
3. Municipal Rent Stabilization on Existing Commercial Properties
As property values and rents rise, the squeeze on small businesses will bite into their profit margins and price them out of the core, effectively gentrifying the downtown landscape. Rent stabilization for existing tenants of commercial properties through municipal policy or municipal land can protect small businesses, allowing them to benefit from revitalization and economic development alongside other businesses.
Conclusion
COVID-19 decimated Brampton’s small business community, and it has spent years rebuilding. Another series of unexpected blows, could leave small businesses further behind.
Brampton is growing. If small businesses are left as an afterthought, they may never return. Without deliberate planning to support the businesses already here, the winners of that growth may not be the Brampton-grown businesses that built it.