Raise the Hammer

I visit this site regularly. I've spread the word about it to former Hamiltonians who are still very pro-Hammer. The site regularly features great articles, with cogent observations about the city's travails, as well as offering up suggestions as to how to improve things. Some of these are common-sense, some are innovative, some are provocative. All-in-all, I'm very heartened by what's shown here.

However...

There's consistent talk about re-development, of planning, etc. And yet as I walk the streets of the city, as I take transit, sometimes I wonder if some of the contributors have blinkers on.

As I mentioned to a friend, now living in Toronto, but Mountain born and bred, there's an underclass to this city that it's quite easy to forget about. There is a ton of impoverished Hamiltonians. People with dead eyes. No hope. Young people you can tell have no sense of future, no plans, nothing.

Admittedly, all cities have an underclass. But Hamilton... Hamilton is another case entirely. We (my friend and myself) talk about the city as the great future place. Once it reinvents itself. Once it decides what it wants to be...and stops clinging to its past. Until then, it's little more than a ghost town with various thriving neighbourhoods thrown in for good measure.

I read some of the articles here about transit, about a resurrected downtown core...but I most often find myself wondering if the writers are missing the point entirely. That there are issues that will have to be dealt with before anything substantive can be addressed. And those issues have to do with the people.

How do you lift up a broken and battered underclass? It seems to me that an entire generation of 'Hammerites' have already been 'swallowed by the cracks'. Is anyone in the city actually talking about them?