Charles St GRT terminal redevelopment

[KingandWeber]

What similar-sized Canadian cities would be considered "first-class"?

DTK needs a lot of help. Sadly, I think our mayor has zero visions for DTK. Years ago it was heading in the right direction, but that doesn't seem to be the case right now, and sadly, Kitchener citizens rarely fire their mayor (Waterloo, OTOH...)

Anyway, I would say any city close to our size has a better DT. Nothing special in Kitchener anymore. Even city hall is locked down now (that was due to the safe injection site, btw). Sunlife and Manulife have left DTK, Google is basically in mid-town so that doesn't count.

Really, the city should be ashamed of the state of DTK. No excuse for its decline.

I definitely agree that our mayor lacks vision, but there is obviously a big excuse for the decline - being Covid, of course, and then its knock-on effects. Every Canadian downtown has deteriorated since Covid. Toronto is still nowhere near rebounded to the activity levels it saw pre-pandemic. Meanwhile, Kitchener was hit especially hard since a lot of the office activity up until Covid was from tech companies and they've moved to remote working more than other businesses. That said, I think that means you need an even clearer vision and focus on revitalizing downtown whereas, as you say, we really have none. I feel like the approach right now is to tread water under the completely naive hope that things will go back to "normal" at some point, and that's simply never going to happen. We should really be in crisis mode thinking to try to turn things around, but there doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency at all.