I think a lot of that development you're talking about is really more the work of Rob Simpson and CenterState CEO. They are the ones behind almost all of Downtown's (and the North Side's) redevelopment.
I have worked with a lot of those people for years. Ben Walsh didn't do any of that stuff. That whole food market, the redevelopment of Hotel Syracuse, the ICON building, the old Merchants Bank, Original Grain, and that block, the Verizon building - all of that is CenterState, not Ben Walsh. Same thing with the coming redevelopment of the Tech Garden at the AXA Towers. That's CenterState getting those grants from Empire State Development.
Ben Walsh comes from a great political family, but so far the only thing I've seen him do is grandstand about opening businesses back in April, saying the particularly dumb thing that "we've done a lot of testing" as justification for reopening, without regard to the results of the tests.