Downtown Grocery Stores

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by Drybrain

Saint John also suffers from the fact that there's only so much money to go around in New Brunswick,

There's plenty of money in New Brunswick - it just sits with two families. Two of the richest families in Canada are based in NB. Income inequality, especially in Saint John, is very high. You either have money or you don't, as you pointed out later in your post. Imagine if Irving actually paid their fair share of property taxes in Saint John on their industrial properties.

Originally Posted by Drybrain

and it's much more concentrated in Moncton and Fredericton. if Saint John were the urban centre in the province, it would probably be on the upswing, but it's not.

Saint John is the urban centre of New Brunswick, though, if we're looking strictly at built form in urban cores. Saint John's Uptown is certainly on the upswing these days, arguably more-so than the urban downtown cores in either Fredericton or Moncton. Saint John just lacks the current suburban growth that those two cities are currently seeing (partly because Saint John's suburban growth really occurred in the 80s-00s).

Originally Posted by Drybrain

It's also very American in that what money does exist there concentrates in tony suburbs outside of the city's tax base (Rothesay and Quispamsis). Without Saint John, those suburbs wouldn't exist, but they contribute little financially to the city itself. I can't think of any other city in Canada, large or small, that has quite that stark a divide between urban poverty and suburban wealth.

I can only really think of American comparators for what Saint John's income inequality is like. Detroit is something that is often thrown around as a comparison, mostly by naysayers who think SJ is going to declare bankruptcy any day now. Hamilton is a comparison I hear most often.