CBBarnett
Senior Member
It's been a slow-burn on Kensington but the needle is always pointed in the right direction.
It's been an interesting journey for the area. From the early and mid-2000s perspective, Kensington was talked about in the lens of being top 1 or 2 urban communities - hip area, cool places, a bit of nightlife, urban lifestyle families and young people always talked about it. But at the time it was more of a "destination" than a self-sustaining place than people admitted - it really relied on commuter traffic and visitors from the burbs having a night out to keep the lights on to a nice walkable retail district.
The issue was always structural - despite it's urban vibes and attention to curating the retail experience, the area really never had a ton of population. The neighbourhoods around are geographically small, anti-growth and weren't able to capitalize as much as others on the incremental infill boom that created a doubling or tripling of local population at a scale that matters for self-sustaining walkable retail (see obviously the Beltline, but more recently also Marda Loop, Bridgeland, others as examples of a more growth-oriented areas that caught up to Kensington in activity over this period).
While Kensington incrementally improved it's local population density it's slowly reducing it's reliance on those commuters retail visitors, it's evolved into a more sustainable urban community. But others have been even busier - Beltline added like 10,000+ units over the same time. Marda Loop communities added several thousand units, so did Bridgeland and any other "competitor" communities. Many inner city neighbourhoods added more units than Kensington area did over that time period. Many more places remain far better priced to access for urban lifestyle families too as a result of more growth in the past few decades.
Meanwhile, other areas also began to excel at the "curation" and design approaches only Kensington was top-tier at previously - Marda Loop's weird little 34th Avenue micro-wine bar cluster, University District's whole thing, the Beltline's upgrades all over such as the high-density urban big city vibes on 1st Street SW and surrounding Tompkins Park on 17th Ave SW, for examples. More areas offer cool, interesting urban amenities that were previously only in Kensington and a handful of other clusters.
Take this all together - in my opinion, the story of Kensington the past decades is one of continued success in retail curation and urban design, as they have continued to improve the urban vibes with incremental growth, but equally important is a story where it's the "rise of the rest" as other areas were far more successful in using growth to transform their areas (for better or worse). Despite always having a construction crane, Kensington is a very slow-growth community.
The result is Kensington doesn't stand out anymore - other areas have caught up and even surpassed it in several dimensions of offering urban amenities. Kensington isn't talked about the same way: it's not a top 3, it's a top 10 urban neighbourhood. This isn't a bad thing - it's a reality of a bigger city with more neighbourhoods offering things people want in urban spaces and having better capacity to provide them. The urban tide raised a lot of boats, Kensington isn't the only one out there anymore!
It's a bit like a modest version of the "Kitsilano effect" from Vancouver - 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s the Kitsilano neighbourhood was all the rage. But slower relative growth and higher relative prices slowly transformed what the area's vibe actually into something where it's not talked about as much as the up-and-coming areas with far greater capacity to accept growth.
