Raise the Hammer

The explosion of vitriol I've just read says a hell of a lot about what happens to people when they spend weeks producing EVIDENCE and ARGUMENTS in favour of their position, and are met with only nonsense. It's absolutely infuriating. I have yet to see one serious argument in favour of the East Mountain. Any actual points made for the EM site have been sparse and far between, and usually utter nonsense (like claiming it only takes a dozen minutes to drive there from downtown).

It's so easy to sit in our nice little comfortable North End and forget the the war is still raging on the "frontier". We've been busy with community-building exercises downtown, and we've helped make the North End into by far my favourite Hamilton Neighbourhood. All of this is an amazingly good thing. But we can't forget that the engines of sprawl are still running rampant on the edge of town. We won the ARGUMENT about sprawl - not the battle.

We are not a rich town. We can barely afford to maintain our existing city. We cannot afford to finance the conquest of everything between St Catherines, Caledonia and Carlisle. At least, not if we want functioning roads, water pipes or schools downtown. Every time we finance one of these developments - and we do, whether we like it or not - it's taking money we could have spent on downtown, or even the existing, already developed parts of the mountain. It isn't always easy to make this argument about stores, homes or schools (very visible, but the numbers are awful complicated) - here's a clear-cut case. Big redevelopment project for downtown snatched up and hauled off to the East Mountain.

This is what it's all about - the stadium, Aerotropolis, Meadowlands (East, West, clappisons etc) the Red Hill and Linc Expressways. Creating a city where only farms exist now, then letting their other developer chums fill in the spaces with suburbs and strip malls. All of this gives a bunch of private investors the opportunity to literally design our city from scratch - in the vision they see for it. We will need to live with these decisions for decades, and many of these suburbs are going to have to be razed before any liveable community can be built there.

Oh yeah, and the last time this town hosted the Grey Cup we lost our shirts, at least in terms of public funding. Big games spectacles rarely come through on the massive windfalls they promise.