More residents are the key to Downtown’s success, according to a panel of Downtown business owners and policy experts.

At a webinar last week hosted by Contrarian Boston, an independent publication covering the city, the panelists said the future of the neighborhood relied on improvements in mixed-use development.

“Bringing more people to live Downtown is sort of the holy grail of Downtown urban policy,” Dan Dain, an attorney in the neighborhood who has written a book about the history of Boston, said in the meeting.

“Generally, you measure whether cities are successful based on how much they’re used. If cities are used only during the workday, there’s not as much vitality as you would have if people are there nights and weekends. If you have people on nights and weekends, they’re supporting different mixes of business. You have bright lights on streetscapes, crime tends to go down. So there’s a whole bunch of benefits to having mixed-use neighborhoods.”

The city’s website states over 200,000 people work in Downtown every day. However, in 2020, only 13,768 people lived there, according to a Boston Planning Department report using U.S. Census data. The neighborhood also had the second highest vacancy rate for housing units in the city at the time, following only the Seaport district.

“We need more foot traffic downtown,” said Justin Sorbo, a personal trainer who owns a small gym on Pearl Street in the neighborhood. “One way or another, Tuesday through Thursday, it’s a decent situation, but other than that it’s pretty flat.”

Downtown has been the target of multiple efforts to bring in more residents over the past few years. Most recently, a new zoning proposal called PLAN: Downtown was announced a few weeks ago but has faced major pushback from residents. The plan allows for buildings along Washington Street with a maximum height of 155 feet, unless the building’s use is affordable housing, in which case the height limit is 500 feet.

Residents and organizations in the neighborhood have said they feel betrayed that the plan fully discarded the recommendations the city had asked them to make and cheated that they were only given three weeks to publicly comment on it.

The Boston Preservation Alliance, for example, has drafted a sample letter for residents to send to city officials like the mayor and the chief of planning, urging them to at least extend the deadline past February 5.

Many were also concerned that a valley of high-rises would diminish foot traffic, mixed-use vibrancy, and tourism in an area that heavily depends on it.

The panelists in the meeting did not talk about PLAN: Downtown or answer a question about it. However, Dain, whose law firm specializes in representing commercial real estate developers, said that Boston’s history with urban development like the Big Dig makes it hard to get anything else done.

“People were traumatized by the Big Dig, and it’s making similar major public investments extremely difficult to pull off,” Dain said. “I think it’s one of the major reasons that we’re not able to build the housing or do the investment in public transportation.”