While driving through Paris, Ont, what is the first thing you notice? The little shops lining the downtown streets? The people walking, smiling, stopping to chat with a neighbour walking their dog? Do you notice the history? The restaurants with the name painted over a sign that has probably held eight names before? Have you taken the time to look at the train bridge going over the river? The dam? The people fishing? Their “meaningless” conversations that last for hours on end?
Now ask the same question about Brantford, Ont. What do you notice? The garbage lining the streets? The people experiencing homelessness rummaging through trash cans and shouting at pedestrians? Do you pay attention to all the little shops that are desperately trying to stay in business while dealing with the limited, minimal foot traffic that lines downtown Brantford? Do you notice the tents and encampments lined along the river’s edge? Would you walk down the trails with no fear? The answer, subsequently, is probably not.
The Paris waterfront has been turned into a community almost separate from Paris itself. Restaurant patios overlook the Grand River; people walk down the trails, go fishing and swim without anxiety. The city of Paris has monopolized their waterfront and curated its downtown area around the river that flows between it. Brantford, on the other hand, has done the complete opposite; they have built their downtown away from the river’s edge. They have torn down the footbridges and walking paths while forcing the unhoused down to the riverbank to keep them out of eyesight. Instead of using this natural wonder to their advantage, they have completely dismissed it and treated the Grand River as some kind of massive inconvenience.
Minimal housing backs onto the river; any paths down are often found full of garbage or homeless encampments, and then the city officials are seemingly baffled that Brantford has been used as a “lead example of a failing downtown” and cited as a case study for urban decline. In 2010, Brantford demolished over 40 buildings in an attempt to reconstruct downtown and spark new development. Now, we see the city plans to “revamp Brantford’s downtown,” but these plans never actually address the core issues seen in Brantford’s infrastructure.
This is not a new issue either; this issue has been persistent since the 1980s, when the Eaton Market Square opened in 1986 and seemingly failed to compete with local urban small shops and foot traffic, and ceased operation in 1997. It takes a significant amount of financial loss to close an entire mall in central downtown only 12 years later, and yet we see the same problems persist today. The city is putting Band-Aids on a completely shattered system and expecting the visual changes to spark change in the failing systems. The Downtown Brantford Revitalization Project will fail the same as all the other projects have historically if the city does not fix and address the core issues which keep Brantford in a state of decay.
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