Charles St GRT terminal redevelopment

[the_conestoga_guy]

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.

I think the biggest issue is that there isn't a cohesive plan for DTK - at least nothing publicly available. 

The city has started making progress on a bunch of piecemeal projects: the cycling grid, the Bramm Yards plan, the transit hub, the (attempted) pedestrianization of the area around the market, coordinating with the College to take over under-used spaces like the mall, and now the bus terminal re-development. There's even the district heating study ongoing, which isn't as sexy, but is a meaningful attempt to decarbonize our new downtown buildings.

I appreciate that all of these projects are in the works, but for the average person in the 'burbs, it can make the vision appear fuzzy. I think, at the very least, the city should put something up on its Engage page and call it "The Great Downtown Revitalization", and basically just post links to all of these projects and show them on a single map. This could give everyone the opportunity to see what's happening in one place, and to provide feedback on the gaps in the plan (of which there are certainly many).