Raise the Hammer

schoobabe, nobody is suggesting that anyone be removed from downtown. We're only advocating for a mixed-use downtown. My body of work on RTH is pretty clear - I loathe places like Bloor/Yorkville and other high price ghettos. I would love downtown Hamilton to have the mix of people as described by Rusty in the St Lawrence Market area in TO. But in case you hadn't noticed, all the new residential developments proposed downtown right now are geared towards the same group of people - social housing recipients. The neighbourhood where the Connaught sits is one of the poorest in Canada. It's no east Hastings, thank goodness, but we need to start developing a better mix and as everyone knows, historic buildings like LIster, Connaught, Pigott etc.... are able to command higher rents if converted to residential due to their history, cache , whatever.

As I said in my original post last week, this project doesn't belong in the Connaught. why don't they bring a smaller hotel with some condos into the Connaught and build a new tower next door with this rental housing plan. I would be absolutely fine with that. Oh I forgot, the government doesn't doll out millions for hotel rooms and condos. And that brings me to the next part of this that is so frustrating. We've been saying it for years on RTH and others in the city have been calling out our so called private developers who won't do anything without 'accidentally' demolishing beautiful old buildings and using tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.

The Lister project is a complete joke. We are emptying out the Right House to move those departments into Lister. So, a landlord who has done a marvelous job at maintaining their building and keeping it occupied downtown for decades is having it's tenants moved out so that the local old-boys club can fill their pockets. It's wrong on all levels.