What does DTK need?

[ac3r]

100% agree with ac3r's remarks above @ need some big draw household names in DTK and that the restos alone are not doing it.

I think that there's a real discussion to be had about whether or not we "want" to draw people downtown. Intuitively, it makes sense that we want to support our local downtown businesses by maximizing the number of patrons coming through. But there's the push-back from local residents who don't want the compromises that come with extra traffic and parking. There's also the considerable push-back against entertainment options like moving the arena downtown.

I think that we need to be focusing on two things to create a quality downtown: increasing the population of downtown residents, and building a good downtown transit hub. Bonus points if we can build our AAA active transportation networks and minimize passing-through traffic from cars.

Once these are in place, I think we'll organically see investment from private businesses like Canadian Tire or Lululemon.

Huh? Why would you not want to draw people downtown...? Of course we do! And big brands are a good way to do it. Local businsesses are great and everything, but not everybody cares, wants or needs to shop at them. Sometimes you just need to grab some clothes at a Zara or want to eat a McDonald's burger. You can do that in literally every big city in the world but you have to literally drive your car (or waste an hour on a bus) to go to the suburbs to do something so basic in Waterloo Region. And no, investing in transit hubs, bike lanes and other frivolous nonsense like that isn't going to bring many people downtown. Things people need will.

So long as we have a downtown that consists primarily of nothing but small local businesses and a few shops that close by 6PM, then the vast majority of people living in Waterloo Region aren't going to bother to come downtown (which is especially worsened with the zombie junkies that are living all over the place now). But I guarantee if you could wave a magic wand and have a bunch of popular stores open up, have some good entertainment venues, open up some mainstream food places, make the drug addicts disappear and so on, then people would likely flock down there. Your average citizen has really no reason to venture downtown and that is a problem.