Parking in Waterloo Region

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Kitchener looking at better uses for city-owned parking lots

https://www.therecord.com/news-story/960...king-lots/

I like the idea of the city selling off surface parking lots, but this line concerns me

Those aspirations Bluhm refers to still haven't been worked out, but they could include things like what he calls "a globally relevant office park,"

An office park suggests a very suburban single-use way of thinking about redeveloping the Bramm St yards. I think the surface lots that are in the central core make a lot of sense to redevelop now. Like at Water/Charles, and at Charles/Gaukel. That creates an opportunity for a proper mixed use development, with ground floor retail and office above, and slowly expanding the retail/restaurant space beyond King St. A 20, or even 30, storey office building could easily be supported on either of those sites, and would build more than enough office space for current demand. The Bramm St yards are just too far from the King St corridor to support a good mixed-used development for probably another 10 years, and that's fine. The current downtown core is plenty big enough to support intensification within it. A policy of expanding the King St retail/restaurant corridor, property by property, until it reaches the Bramm St yards is exactly the kind of long term thinking the city should be doing.