London’s Downtown Office Vacancy Rate Is Still the Highest in Canada — Here’s What Locals Say Could Actually Fix It

London’s downtown office vacancy rate is still the highest in Canada, and the conversation about what to do about it keeps circling back to the same cluster of ideas. Not all of them are about offices. Many Londoners think the fix starts with making downtown a place people actually want to be in, every day, not just for work.

Here are the solutions coming up most in local conversations right now.

1. Get More People Actually Living Downtown

New condos are already going up, and the logic is straightforward: more residents means more daily foot traffic, which creates real demand for local businesses. Some locals think this residential momentum is the most promising thing happening in the core right now.

2. Bring in a Downtown Grocery Store

If people are going to live downtown, they need to be able to run basic errands there. A grocery store keeps coming up as a missing piece of infrastructure. Get that right and you make downtown a genuine neighbourhood, not just a place you pass through.

3. Invest in Victoria Park

Victoria Park sits right at the heart of the core and locals see real potential in the space. More investment in making it welcoming and well-maintained could give residents and visitors an actual reason to spend time downtown.

4. Prioritize Walkability Over Parking

The argument being made is that applying more current urban design thinking, making streets genuinely pleasant to walk around in, matters more than chasing occasional drive-in visitors. A downtown that works for daily residents doesn’t need to be built around the car.

5. Double Down on Unique Destinations

Concerts, theatre, and one-of-a-kind restaurants and shops are already pulling people in from the suburbs who wouldn’t otherwise come downtown. Leaning harder into the things you simply can’t get at a mall is where some locals see the clearest opportunity.

6. A Vacancy Tax on Empty Buildings

A vacancy tax has come up as a potential policy lever worth exploring. The idea is that if empty buildings carried a real financial cost for sitting idle, there’d be more incentive to fill them and more pressure to bring asking rents in line with what tenants will actually pay. Locals on Reddit are treating it as one piece of a larger puzzle, not a silver bullet.

Watch for whether city council picks up any of these threads as the downtown vacancy conversation keeps building pressure.