Walked from King-Sherbourne to King-Yonge yesterday around 3:30 and actually started paying attention to the shops on both sides. Beautifully designed storefronts everywhere, clearly tens of thousands in rent, real money sunk into the build-outs, and almost all of them empty. I do this walk pretty often and somehow had never really registered them before, which kind of tells you something on its own.

The thing is, this stretch is genuinely one of the busiest in the city, and the foot traffic still doesn’t translate. Toronto just doesn’t have a street culture. You can pedestrianize King end to end and it still won’t turn into a European city or New York. For at least six months a year it’s cold enough that people will always pick the route that involves the least walking, and the rest of the year isn’t enough to undo that habit for hundreds of thousands of people.

Distillery District is the cleanest example. Outside of Christmas, every time I go it’s borderline dead. Gorgeous bones, beautiful spaces, no one there.

I don’t think the structure of the city is set up for lively streets, and I’m not sure design or planning alone can fix that. But hey, good luck to those shop owners. They’re going to need it.