Ultimately it's all "chicken and egg".
The local government needs to be the egg.
If I were benevolent dictator for Hamilton, I'd take a big bulldozer to the downtown city centre shopping thing and replace it with something far more open and attractive, rather than dark and enclosed, offering a multiplex cinema and more than just one floor of drab retail. I'd probably come up with some way to integrate an LRT/BRT transit node within or beneath this space to make sure people get there.
Of course all that would cost a fortune, so perhaps my spell as dictator wouldn't be seen as that benevolent when you got your tax bill
