Comment 66266

By geoff's two cents (registered) | Posted July 15, 2011 at 21:27:53 in reply to Comment 66215

I should add that while I feel obliged to defend the specific document in question, I agree that it stems from a much wider problem - i.e. an almost antiquarian belief on the part of west siders that downtown Hamilton (and perhaps cities generally) is an inherently dangerous, god-forsaken place. In other words, there's a point at which fear of the lower city becomes a cause as well as a symptom of some neighbourhoods' potentially dangerous lack of evening pedestrian traffic. Student housing downtown - perhaps in conjunction with a new president's vision - would of course work wonders in helping correct this.

I should also add that I agree that writing off the entire eastern half of downtown is profoundly ignorant. Given my own experience, there are many quiet residential areas adjacent to downtown which I wouldn't necessarily recommend to young, single women who enjoy being mobile after 8pm, but there are definitely neighbourhoods within that area (International Village, say) that I'd have no trouble recommending. The fact that the document (along with many west siders generally) can't distinguish between the two suggests that its author(s) know very little about the city.

Likewise, any difficulties we had of this kind actually occurred on or WEST of James, which I think bolsters your point about just how ill-conceived and arbitrary the document's east-west boundary is.

Comment edited by geoff's two cents on 2011-07-15 21:28:50

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