Seems like Vancouver accidentally did something very right when starting in the 1970s it decided that it should actually be putting a great deal of housing right into downtown, only letting up in the late 2000s when developers were so enamored with the idea that they started converting commercial office and city council got nervous about that.

No one would ever suggest that Vancouver doesn't have severe issues with street homelessness and open drug use, and yet Vancouver isn't at all experiencing the same sort of post WFH era hangover that SF and other US cities are experiencing.

It seems pretty clear to me that it's the over focus on commercial in Downtowns that is the city life killer here. Going to be really hard and expensive for cities that are suffering from a surplus of commercial to fix this.