Canada

I've watched Toronto decline over the last 20 years, and I'll tell you what the problem is, and it is pretty obvious. Too many big businesses, big government offices, and big health care organizations are located downtown. Hundreds of thousands of people need to get to these places every day for work. No one likes a long commute, so people try to live as close to where they work downtown as possible, which leads to extremely high housing costs, which leads to more suburbs, more car use, and then demands to build more road infrastructure. Also, with so many giant office buildings downtown, it's vibrant during the day, but then almost everyone leaves at night, and people don't want to invest in community infrastructure because they actually live in the suburbs.

So, why are all the big institutions of business and government located downtown? It would be far better to spread big workplaces out across Ontario. In the olden days, sure, it made sense to centralize business, government, academia, and tertiary care hospitals for convenience, influence, cross-fertilization, and all that. It was also a centralization of the elites for prestige, and the decision-makers were always people who could afford to live downtown. But, nowadays, that is totally unnecessary. People chat online now and try to avoid having to go to in-person meetings if they can avoid it.

There should be a total ban on locating any more government or quasi-government offices downtown, and they should slowly be spread out to other cities. It would make everyone happier and shorten commutes. Over time, those big buildings should be converted back to residential use, so people can actually afford to raise a family downtown.