Does Windsor have the savvy to bring its downtown back to life?

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Dorian Moore has a vision for Pitt Street. As the distinguished architect and urban designer walks this thoroughfare in downtown Windsor, Ont., he imagines crowds of pedestrians; stores and restaurants that spill onto the sidewalk; a public library at the corner of Ouellette Avenue welcoming locals to read and linger.

The reality of Pitt Street is far different. The public library is here, but in a temporary location at the back of a building, its entrance through a parking lot. There are covered-over storefronts, some empty buildings, a pickup heading for the casino-hotel a few blocks east.

“There’s just no critical mass here,” says Mr. Moore, a Windsorite who co-leads the design firm Archive DS in Detroit. “There’s not enough bodies down here, and there’s not a lot for people to see along the street.”

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This is the state of Windsor’s downtown in 2023. The southwestern Ontario city of about 230,000 is experiencing an economic boom, spurred by private and public funds and by the rebound of Detroit, its neighbour just across the U.S. border.

Windsor’s population is also growing rapidly, in large part thanks to thousands of international students at St. Clair College and the University of Windsor. And the city is preparing for more as it looks toward billions of dollars in committed investment – most notably the NextStar Energy electric-vehicle battery plant – that is expected to fuel growth in both economic activity and the number of people moving here.

Yet the city’s core – its historic social and economic heart – is languishing. Like many other Canadian downtowns, it has a glut of empty office space, a struggling retail sector and not enough residents. Fixing that, experts say, will require a combination of smart design decisions, further public and private investment and more people living, working and spending money in the area.

Does Windsor have the economic heft and design savvy to bring its downtown back to life? And will it make the right choices in order to do so?

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If you stand in Windsor’s Legacy Park on the shore of the Detroit River, the towers of Detroit feel close enough to touch. The two cities are closely interlinked. All sorts of trade has flowed across the border; so have people, often looking for a party.

When Tom Lucier first came to work at Windsor’s Phog Lounge in the early 2000s, the nightlife was thriving. Locals – and Americans who hadn’t yet reached drinking age at home – flowed into dance clubs and live-music venues such as Phog. The scene on a Friday night “was bananas,” Mr. Lucier recalls. “It was wild.”

Now, after dark, Phog is an island. The bar, located on University Avenue near the centre of downtown, is open seven nights a week, moody lighting glimmering from behind its fire-engine-red façade. Around it, usually, is darkness. “A lot of nights, it’s just us,” says Mr. Lucier, who now owns the club. “Even pre-COVID, there was no critical mass of small businesses. Now you can go 10 blocks before you find another place that’s open. It’s absolutely dead at street level.”

“We had an incredible scene here,” recalls Renaldo Agostino, the city councillor for downtown’s Ward 3 and a concert and event promoter. “Then it died.”

Tighter U.S. border security enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks deterred visitors. Then club culture as a whole declined and downtown Detroit – which in the past 10 years has added thousands of residents and seen billions of dollars in private investment – experienced a resurgence. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic, and resulting extended closures of the border, hastened the decline of cross-border traffic and trade.

Windsor experienced problems at home, as well. Its manufacturing-dependent economy was also hit particularly hard by the Great Recession in the late-2000s and took longer than other Canadian cities to recover. And as is the case in other places, downtown Windsor is also missing office workers who are now telecommuting.

In short, the downtown needs a new reason for being, says Anneke Smit, director of the University of Windsor’s Centre for Cities. “Downtown has to be a place that people live as well as visit. Improving the quality of life here is good for everyone.”

Sitting at the school, located in a renovated federal armoury a few blocks from Phog Lounge, Prof. Smit says that downtown Windsor “has very good bones.” Its grid of streets is easily navigable and it has a significant stock of historic buildings, such as the armoury itself. “It is the connective tissue of urbanism that is often missing.”

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The city must care for the growing homeless population in the downtown core, “and also deal with aspects of economic development, bringing life on the street and revitalizing downtown from a quality-of-life perspective,” she explains.

In theory, Windsor’s government agrees with this point of view. Mayor Drew Dilkens argues that such efforts are under way. Revitalizing downtown “is like turning a big ship,” says the mayor, now in his third term.

To improve the city’s physical condition, “we’ve spent millions of dollars streetscaping our main streets. We’ve spent millions streetscaping our main drag” – Ouellette Avenue – “and streetscaping Pelissier Street.”

However, downtown streets remain in rough condition. The city recently installed benches and trees along Pelissier, a side street that hosts a weekly farmer’s market and is lined with half a dozen independent businesses. Yet the new elements are already in disrepair. Along one block, more than half of the plants have died or been cut down completely. Numerous trees along Pitt Street, likewise, have been removed, the emptied pits filled with asphalt.

On that same block of Pelissier is a parking garage. Until 2017, it had three retail spaces fronting the street; then city council, led by Mr. Dilkens, approved an $888,000 project to replace them with parking. That long stretch now lacks what designers call “activation” – there is nothing to do or see, only a monotonous low wall of precast concrete.

Such decisions worry Mr. Moore, the architect and urban designer. “In North America, as Jane Jacobs said, our streets are our quintessential public spaces. Every time we make an investment, we need to look at how it accommodates the pedestrian, vehicles and cyclists, to make it become recognized as a very good public space.”

While such small improvements and repairs remain elusive, Windsor’s government is spending considerable sums on its riverfront parks. These draw people from across the region for events, but are a few blocks removed from most of downtown’s shops and restaurants.

Mr. Dilkens and his administration “look at downtown as a place to take visitors, not as a neighbourhood,” says former councillor Chris Holt, who ran against the mayor in last year’s election. “You have to build a strong foundation that will lure people to live downtown.”

The mayor speaks with pride of the new investments in the waterfront. These include the “Legacy Beacon,” a $10-million café and pavilion housing a historic streetcar, which is under construction.

The city also plans to revamp Festival Plaza, a waterfront park and concert venue, with a $32-million redesign by the Toronto architecture firm Partisans. This proposal (as yet unfunded) involves a broad, curvaceous canopy that would host large events of up to 5,000 people. Its nearest neighbour, across the four-lane Riverside Drive, is Caesars Windsor, which greets the park with a large driveway and opaque, mirrored windows.

Mr. Moore points out that the eight-figure budgets of these projects would fund large streetscape improvements. The key to both successful urban design and economic growth, he says, is to focus public space improvements, business and amenities so that they feed one another. “You have to create nodes of concentration” to bring people together, he explains, articulating a view widely shared by experts in urban design. “Right now, it’s a bit more loose about where things can happen. That doesn’t work.”

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Mr. Moore also criticizes a lack of consideration and coherence in the city’s approach to public spaces. In particular, he cites a plan to create a “civic esplanade” running three blocks south from the river to City Hall. In conceptual drawings, this row of parks extends in a straight line, past the back end of Caesars (loading docks) and two courthouses (mirrored glass and high security) before reaching the municipal building. But, as Mr. Moore notes, City Hall’s front door is off to one side, “so you’re crashing right into a blank glass wall. The design is lacking. It just feels off.”

For Prof. Smit, Windsor under Mr. Dilkens’ leadership is too focused on major projects. “The city is trying to achieve big wins, which are always risky. We also need a lot of small wins, and those can be more effective.”

And many of the big moves now under way – as well as the city’s overall planning approach – will do little to benefit downtown.

This week, Mr. Agostino and Mr. Dilkens celebrated the announcement of a boutique hotel going in the Paul Martin Building, the former federal offices where Mr. Moore would like to see the public library. But the mayor and council also refused a request from Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Minister Sean Fraser to permit four-storey apartment buildings across the city, including downtown and the nearby neighbourhoods. This decision could cost the city $40-million from Ottawa.

Several major construction projects with negative implications for the core are already under way. The $5-billion Gordie Howe International Bridge, which will add a third crossing to Detroit, will steer traffic far from downtown. The new EV battery plant for NextStar Energy will be constructed (with financial support from the city) on Windsor’s rural fringe, 15 kilometres away.

Then there is the hospital. The biggest issue in Windsor politics in recent years has been where to put a new, consolidated Windsor Regional Hospital, which is projected to cost $2-billion to build. Currently, the hospital occupies two sites near downtown; its board, with the strong support of Mr. Dilkens, chose a new site on farmland 12 kilometres from the core.

For years, a vocal group of citizens, and a few politicians including Mr. Holt, have fought that decision. The move will eliminate all hospital services at one current location and seriously reduce those at the other – even though the downtown has the highest population density and the largest concentration of high-needs patients.

According to figures from Citizens for An Accountable Mega-Hospital Planning Process, a local opposition group, roughly 5,000 jobs will move to the suburbs, along with other businesses that currently serve the two existing sites.

Mr. Dilkens downplays the economic impact. “I would argue that the economic spinoff of the hospitals is less than you would think. Most of those people who work in hospitals, because of the way their shifts are organized, they go to work and they go home.”

Besides, he adds, the project “will lead to huge growth in the Sandwich South lands.” That is the now-rural zone where the hospital is slated to go, and where a builder wants to construct more than 4,000 homes alongside it. Earlier this year, Mr. Dilkens stated that the city will have to spend at least $400-million on infrastructure to support these homes and industrial development.

For Mr. Holt – who took issue with the growth strategy “numerous times” while on council – this is clearly the wrong path for the city. “That sort of suburban growth is a drain on the municipal finances,” he says firmly.

Indeed, suburban “greenfield” development is generally costly to service. In 2021, the City of Ottawa commissioned a study that showed low-density suburban housing did not pay enough taxes to cover the costs of infrastructure, and generated a yearly loss for the city of $465 a person; high-density housing in the core, however, generated a fiscal benefit of $606 a person. Windsor has not done any such analysis, said Mr. Dilkens and Neil Robertson, the city’s acting chief planner.

For Mr. Holt, this conceptual gap needs to be fixed. “We need to have an honest conversation with all our residents,” he says, “and let them know what the benefits are of a thriving downtown.”

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Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly named Sean Fraser as Canada's federal finance minister. His correct title is Canada's federal housing, infrastructure and communities minister.