Comment 57163

By Ezaki Glico (anonymous) | Posted January 20, 2011 at 05:40:57

pseudonymouscoward: "So should we conclude from this data that sprawl is still in the driver's seat?

The trend since the early '90s, if not before, has been that around 95% of building activity within Hamilton's borders took place outside of Ward 2, and most of that above the escarpment. (This would mean that there should have been about $30m in residential builds during 2010... does that sound about right?). I would normally have expected that a few large public projects (eg. transit terminal, library/market, Lister) would alter that picture significantly, except that they probably align with the roll-out of stimulus spending, which gave priority to projects that would spend the bulk of their budgets by the end of Q1 2010. The goal of this initiative was naturally to goose up spending on shovel-ready projects, providing jobs as well as momentum to a sluggish economic driver, but in the process encouraging a lot of poorly vetted and shabbily executed work as well as potentially skewing the picture -- and perhaps explaining some of the "20-year record" (it having been approximately that long since the last major recession, and maybe the last big stimulus spend). But without a spreadsheet of where the dollars were dumped into the ground, we can't really assess the geographic bias of that billion dollar boom. And in any event I could be overly baroque in my explanation.

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