ABOUT
MEASURING
MAIN STREETS

THE PROJECT

Main streets are the backbone of Canadian society, with 85% of Canadians living within one kilometer of a main street. These streets are home to 280,000 businesses, providing 1.9 million jobs and generating $300 billion in annual revenue. They also house over 98,000 community and civic infrastructure assets.

However, despite their outsized social and economic role, planning and investment decisions affecting main streets are often made without access to consistent, place-based data at a meaningful scale. Without a clear picture of the people, assets, and activities that anchor these streets, planners, developers, and municipal leaders are forced to rely on partial or fragmented information—limiting their ability to make informed decisions and assess long-term impacts on community livability.

In response, The Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) has developed a groundbreaking toolkit on the newly released Measuring Main Streets platform. These resources, backed by two years of research funded by Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, offer city builders the means to make informed investments at the main street scale to enhance community, resilience, and equity outcomes.

“Without a thorough understanding of our neighbourhoods, it’s nearly impossible to assess the broader health and vitality of our communities, but until now, there hasn’t been a way to analyze or understand these important places quantitatively—the data has been too large, inaccessible, or fragmented.”
Gregory Spencer, Director of Research at CUI

In response, the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) developed the Measuring Main Streets platform: a suite of tools and resources that brings together robust, neighbourhood-scale data at the main street level. The platform equips community decision-makers with a clearer understanding of local conditions, enabling better planning, more targeted investment, and the ability to track outcomes that advance housing, community vitality, resilience, and equity goals.

Measuring Main Streets has completed two projects, releasing tools, research, and case studies that expanded the platform's depth and national reach. Each project built on the previous, growing the data-driven evidence base for communities and decision-makers. Learn more about each round of funding here.

The Research and Knowledge Initiative (RKI) that makes Measuring Main Streets possible is a national merit-based contributions funding program from Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada. The RKI funds projects focused on key Government of Canada research and data priorities related to housing, infrastructure and communities.

Measuring Main Streets is the latest contribution to the Canadian Urban Institute’s long-term commitment to supporting the resilience and vitality of Canada’s main streets. Through research, policy leadership, and place-based tools, CUI has spent decades advancing approaches that recognize main streets as critical social, economic, and civic infrastructure. Discover CUI’s Main Street work here.

Using a data-driven approach, Measuring Main Streets examines what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next for Canada’s main streets: empowering city builders at every scale, from local neighbourhoods to national systems. By making complex data accessible and actionable, the platform supports better decisions, clearer accountability, and more effective outcomes for communities across the country. Explore the tools today.

Round One

Resilience on Main

Equipping communities to make smarter investments in main streets and downtowns.

Following the pandemic, many main streets and downtowns faced a combination of challenges, including reduced economic activity, social pressures, and uncertainty about how to recover.

One of the biggest barriers to recovery was a lack of reliable, local-level data. Most available data focused on cities or regions, making it difficult for communities to understand what was happening on individual main streets or to plan targeted solutions.

Phase One addressed this gap by creating the Measuring Main Streets platform — the first research tool that uses main streets as the primary unit of analysis. The project began in June of 2022 and formally launched in June 2024. It identified and mapped every main street in Canada and supplied data on the businesses and civic infrastructure present as well as a demographic profile of the neighbourhood each main street serves.

The result of this analysis was a better understanding of what makes main streets resilent, how they support vibrant communities, and how they can become more equitable. The findings and research tools remain publically available on Measuring Main Streets.

In round one of funding, CUI's partners included Environics Analytics and Open North.

Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada

Round Two

Transit-Oriented Development on Main

Leveraging transit-oriented development (TOD) to advance housing and community outcomes.

As communities began to recover, a new set of challenges became more urgent — especially the need for more housing and better ways to manage growth. At the same time, major investments in transit across Canada have been creeeating new opportunities for development along transit corridors.

However, these changes also raise important questions:

Where can new housing realistically be built?
How can transit-oriented development benefit communities rather than displace them?
How can decisions balance affordability, density, and quality of life to create vibrant, complete communities?

Phase Two focuses on answering these questions by building on the data and tools created in Phase One. It explores demographics, housing development potential, and community amenities in transit station areas (TSAs) to make the case, not just for transit-oriented development, but for transit-oriented complete communities.

In round two of funding, CUI's partners were Environics Analytics, the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, and Digital Public Square.