(07-13-2015, 02:14 PM)BuildingScout Wrote: The irony is that because of those NIMBYs blocking the natural growth of downtown the whole thing collapsed into the current urban blight that Kitchener has spent so much of the last decade trying to revert.
It goes back a lot further than the last decade or so, but you're correct with them finally trying to revive it.
Where Kitchener really went wrong was around when it developed Market Square. This was one of many malls that were developed in the 1970s to 1980s in Waterloo Region and what they did was build one in every ward of the city. They were just a common thing in urban planning within North America during this time in the 20th century. Suddenly, growing out of nothing, was Fairview Park Mall, Stanely Park Mall, Highland Hills Mall, Frederick Mall. Downtown got Market Square and if that wasn't bad enough, they also built the one that now houses the Manulife offices a few blocks away (I can't for the life of me remember its original name, it was so long ago).
While Market Square did indeed host a farmers market, all of these were in all practical sense, simply dreadful malls. They killed all proper retail that was ever downtown. Around the 1990s these malls were themselves slowly dying and became ghost towns. Downtown became somewhere nobody had a reason to go unless it was to buy crack, you were a regular at some of the sketchy bars, were a member of a gang (it was mostly white pride ones operating down there in the 90s, although eventually the punk scene and anti-fascist groups drove them out) or you were unlucky enough to live there. After a string of fires over the years in the core - that were often rumoured to have been started by the building owners themselves to collect insurance money - gutted a lot of historical buildings, there was finally a desire to try rebuilding. From about, 1999 to 2005 (or so?) things were kind of stuck in limbo with bickering council members trying to decide what to do, but eventually the city started to reinvent things. Luckily The Record moved into Market Square, they rebuilt the farmers market, Laurier built their satellite campus there and then some residential developers took a gamble with turning empty factories into beautiful condos.
Once this transit station opens up and the LRT gets going, there won't be any stopping future development downtown and uptown (and we're finally at the point where there isn't much room for the suburbs to grow). I think the best strategy now would be to continue developing residential projects; commercial and office will soon follow. RIM may be in slump, but with Google and other tech start ups growing downtown, you'll see a lot more people coming to this region to both work and live. We're in a unique position because, for example, neighbouring cities like London don't have the schools and companies we have, and places like Mississauga and Burlington are themselves so big now they're becoming congested in their own ways.