Quote:
Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark
I think what you're talking about is building the downtown as its own community. Creating a market through population will make business owners see an opportunity to open a successful business in the area. If the market is big enough, then perhaps you will see some duplicate businesses from the suburbs make roots downtown.
However, if your goal is to attract others downtown, then you have to have businesses that offer goods or an experience different or better than is offered elsewhere. It's simple economics really. Businesses can't really exists just to provide a service to potential customers, they have to make money while doing it or they won't exist (for long).
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Well it comes without saying that businesses need to be profitable. But if the goal is attracting businesses (and their patrons) downtown, I don't think holding the businesses to a higher standard and requiring them to be in some way exceptional is the best approach. That would be more of a disincentive for a business to locate there if they were required to exert a lot more effort for the same amount of profit as could be had elsewhere.
The way I see it, downtown is naturally going to be more attractive (if properly maintained) due to the architecture, history, etc. But I think downtown's real advantage is in being (or having the potential of being) "the common ground" as in the place where a huge variety of people meet for various reasons making it the most convenient. If someone wants to spend an evening going to a show, dining at a restaurant, shopping at several places, then going for a nightcap, having all of those in close proximity to one another, and a variety of options for each, could make it more appealing than say, Dartmouth Crossing which may not have every store they'd like to visit, or may only have a couple restaurants and not the exact one they wanted. If the alternative was going to Micmac mall, then DC, then perhaps another strip mall or plaza, downtown as a single destination can be more convenient. Especially since there are so many other things like employment, and the downtown centric bus routes.
Of course, the same could be said if any of those places were to gain the critical mass necessary to attract all of those things. I just happen to prefer downtown be the one to gain that momentum because I find it more interesting and it's a greener model. Ultimately what I want to see is if a business or service were to come to HRM and we're only large enough to have one location, for downtown to be the ideal choice, and having it locate in DC or Bayers Lake or HSC simply not be feasible. These places would only get the run off and the seconds once businesses expand outside downtown.
But of course in this sense downtown
would have something special that the other places wouldn't. Not that each individual store would necessarily be better than locations elsewhere, but that there would be stores you couldn't find elsewhere or store combinations that you couldn't find in a single destination elsewhere.