Advice that i gave as a private stakeholder to the Downtown planning team at the City is that they should strongly consider policy that doesn't renew food service or retail (clothing shops, corner stores, etc.) within the Plus-15 in the new LUB update. Retail and restaurant uses belong on the ground level, so people can access them after 4:30-5:00pm when the offices close. Restaurants can't get any after hours business or complete orders for Skip or DoorDash and they could do more productive/flexible if they were on the ground floor.
With plans to entice more residential to the downtown core, i think it is time to revisit why things were located on Plus-15s in the first place. Plus-15s were created to turn all of the Avenues (sans 8th) and many of the streets into one-way (oversized, with many lights) freeways with very limited pedestrian mobility at the street-level to move pedestrian traffic above-grade to reduce conflicts. A 1970-80s transportation engineers dream to move suburban car commuters back to the suburbs as quick as possible surely, but a very different set ideals than what downtown needs today.
If active streets and more importantly residential investment is priority, then the streetscape of downtown needs shops-at-grade and services that are accessible in the times that residents are at home, in walking distance. Street calming, tree-line assignments, eliminating rush hour on-street parking restrictions (which outside the Core would include 10 St NW, Centre Street, 11 Ave, 12 Ave, 9 Ave Main Streets, 17 Ave, maybe others) would be essential to creating an urban fabric anyone would want to live or do business in. Downtown sees limited investment because cars are flying by and can't park in front of businesses at peak hours, and the built form reflects an ideal of getting everyone back to Tuscany or Cranston 2 min faster by speeding through downtown and surrounding main streets.
We have so heavily prioritized efficient vehicular movement from the suburbs to the core at the expense of creating active and human-scaled streets with building frontages and the public realm being valued that no business, let alone residential development will look at downtown as an attractive place to build. Focusing retail on the Plus-15 gave us the excuse to prioritize cars at-grade and the truly lackluster experience on the street for too long, if businesses fronted the streets they would give a fuck what the interface of the building to that street felt like. That is why businesses like Ceili's relocated from the main-floor to a fucking rooftop.
My advice was to eliminate the chicken and the egg problem of does residential investment happen before or after services are there. If the at-grade relationships of the new and existing buildings fronting streets downtown had an inviting business environment at-grade (adequate sidewalk and patio space, tree line assignments and planting, no oversized vehicle lanes and many of them, less-restricted on-street parking), we would naturally see more investment into the downtown from residential builders, and retail tenants would see more ability to capture revenue in the evening.
If you stopped renewing leases outside of the TD Mall or whatever for retail and restaurant uses, and used some of the Downtown incentive thing to improve the public realm and make renovations to desolate, useless office lobbies, all the while improving the public realm, it would show the vision to developers that they are taking for downtown revitilization seriously. As it sits, they keep investing in converting office space to residential in a public realm that is deeply inhospitable to future residents. Calm the streets, provide incentive for good at-grade interactions of currently desolate lobbies and see investment work the way it is supposed to.
Also fuck cars and getting people back to there homes in the suburbs 5-10 min quicker, make downtown streets look like places people actually want to live on, and the street level will thrive and the Plus-15 level retail will die (with the exception of office, office supply, medical office, etc.) a pretty natural death for businesses that operate outside of 8-5.
