What does DTK need?

[dtkvictim]

Thank you for sharing your intimate experience.  I would love it if you shared this with mayor and city counsel.   I am going to share it with my cousin who sits on the police service board and regional counsel as well.  We need more real personal stories like this that remove the bias and say it like it is.

I have shared a number of my experiences with a Downtown BIA member, who I believe raised some discussion with the mayor and police. But you are right, I should be more active about sharing my experiences in my own words with the people that matter, since I don't know if my experiences were portrayed in the manner I would have wanted.

Has anyone writing Mike Morris gotten personal responses? I've been meaning to write him for a while, as I have more faith in him than anyone else I can write, and I believe most of the issues brought up here can't be solved exclusively (maybe not even significantly) by municipalities. Though he may have the lowest amount of real political influence of anyone I can write.

Thanks for the concrete examples. I can't explain all of it, but some of it (break-in attempts, smashed car windows) that are not happening to us may well correlate with modern condo building security (security fob entry, secured garage) vs older buildings. Absolutely not good experiences for you -- and yet not happening to me or our neighbours (I think our building's 200-car garage has seen only a handful of cars broken into in the seven years that we have been here). I don't know that there is any easy fix here, apart from moving to a newer building.

The "DIE" and sign-throwing incidents ... wow. I have not witnessed similar. I walk a lot on King St, Water St, Francis St, but probably not as much as you do, and probably much less after dark. These do feel like mental health issues, but not as harmless as many such issues are. As a society, we do need to address these. I think it's quite difficult to completely eliminate such problems, but certainly we need to work on them.

All that said ... I suspect these kinds of issues can occur in any larger city, they are not unique to Kitchener. But, as I wrote above, new downtown residents may be less likely to encounter them if they are living in new condo or apartment buildings with reasonable security, and maybe spending less time outside in the dark? It's a hypothesis, though, I really have no hard evidence to back that up.

I'm glad for you and all the others who haven't had significant issues. There is so much here to love, between the high quality independent shop owners and staff, best cycling infrastructure in the region, transit access, the park and trails, etc. And so I hope living here can continue to be a net positive for all of you.

But my initial point in all of this was that my personal experiences align with how large swaths of Canadians perceive urban Canada, and so it frustrates me to see their views dismissed as ignorant, hateful suburbanites (while acknowledging that many of them do exist). My urbanist ideals are primarily motivated by climate change, so the inability to get suburban Canada on board with radical changes to our built environment because we dismiss their concerns is a frightening prospect to me.

You are 100% right that this isn't a Kitchener specific issue though. As I've mentioned before, I've now seen probably thousands of comments from Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Calgary forums telling similar tales to mine, and so while I don't found others on this forums sharing my experience, I know it's not just me. I must have read 100+ comments from people claiming to have abandoned the TTC in favour of buying a car, even before the recent high profile events, which given my motivations, is a highly disappointing development. Even transit enthusiast (sometimes even transit apologist) RMTransit has noted safety concerns stemming from the same mental health and drug addiction roots.

And another point I want to address, not directly to you Tom, but I've seen people here use the development and population increase of places like DTK as evidence of the area's improvement and desirability. But for those of you looking for evidence that revitalization is working, I wouldn't recommend this metric during a housing crisis. I think I'm quite a bit below the average age of this forum, and frankly most of the people I know of my age aren't choosing where to live. They are taking the first housing that is both available and affordable, which usually means living in one of the few areas that actually has active development and small (cheap) units.