Comment 25844

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted July 06, 2008 at 13:54:38

Here's an idea...let's place a permanent ban on selling landmark civic buildings to developers who behave like LIUNA. Grounds for such a status could include long periods of vacancy, lack of any investment in upkeep and repeated instances of negotiating in bad faith (ie: raising the price of a project by 50% right before work was to begin). Developers like Vranich would be blacklisted for their handling of buildings such as the old Federal Building on Main and Caroline, and would no longer be eligible to bid on land from the School Board or land protected for heritige or agricultural purposes. Furthermore, heavy taxes could be levied on such activities, instead of granting preferential tax status to people and corporations leaving some of Southern Ontario's nicest architecture to rot.

If you think this deal is a stinker, wait for LIUNA station. If our nation intends to survive skyrocketing oil prices, we're going to need to return en masse to rail transit, and the Hunter St. GO station is simply not able to handle that kind of capacity (with the Hunter St. Tunnel as a bottleneck). Now that Go and Via are returning to the old station, a shining example of old-time grandiose train-station architecture, much like Union in Toronto) which has actually had serious upkeep, it's only a matter of time until it once-again becomes a full-service transit station. When that happens, the $23 million profit LIUNA's racking up here will look like peanuts.

undustrialism.blogspot.com

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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