Raise the Hammer

A wonderful video. There are few points that are missing: (1) 25000 people will arrive in 7500 cars. 2500 of those will go through the North End Neighbourhood. The 1200 children living there did not seem to be a factor in the video. (2) 8 local citizens including me, spent five years studying the Barton-Bay area and concluded, along with all the professional planners and experts and commenting agencies that the area should be developed for housing to bring hundreds of families to live in the wonderful area depicted in Graham's video; (3) Bob Young has scoured the capital markets looking for even one person or company willing to invest in the West Harbour stadium, and he found none; (4)Six internationally renowned sports marketers visited the site and all provided Michael Fenn with the opinion that the West Harbour stadium site will fail economically; (5) If it were successful, it would be used 100 days a year and empty 265 days a year. Just sitting there. A concrete hulk. (6) No one who is currently promoting the West Harbour site has spent any time in the living rooms of the people who made the choice to live in the city core, next to the West Harbour, nor the parents of the children who live there, and so the promoters of the West Harbour site have in effect told the people on Caroline and Hess and Queen that they can be horrendously impacted in their daily lives for the good of the current dream. Unfortunately we've seen this dream before and we know it didn't work. What works is people like Graham and Ryan and Dave and other individuals making small differences in our city life which cumulatively make this a much better place than all the million dollar mega projects will ever do. Our salvation is not in a stadium. It is in thousands of tiny steps, working together.