12-13-2020, 10:47 AM
There was never any real pull major there at any point in time. I grew up in the area for a while when I was a kid and came back a lot over the years. There were a few unimportant shops, Vincenzo's and I think a Beer Store. Vincenzo's did indeed bring a lot of people there for lunch (from Sun Life, as you said, as well as the old factories and Grand River Hospital). It wasn't until about 2010 that they tried to really force it into being an urban village but that has not really been a success...it's still basically just a few strip malls with restaurants and dentists. Urban villages generally fail most of the time. There's quite a lot of good planning/architecture theory into why this happens.