Raise the Hammer

Infill lands have skyrocketing values across the GTA where development is happening, the reason why some parts of downtown Hamilton have not benefited from this trend is precisely because no redevelopment has happened in more than 20 years. Stagnation brings stagnation, change brings demand in the form of new housing demand and higher demand for lands, hence higher prices. Our city needs to embrace change in order to bring in more people, more density and more economic activity. That's the reality and either we elevate ourselves from a stale debate and continue to do nothing while other municipalities around us thrive or we learn from them and try to come up with a made in Hamilton plan that addresses our needs and our realities while embracing change.

I am not Steve, whoever that might be, and I am not a developer, not a builder, not a promoter, nor a trade. I am a businessman who is sick and tired of ignorant people opposing citizens like me who make a living from my hard work. I pay my employees, pay my taxes and I generate some much needed economic activity. Exactly like developers, I am part of the solution to our distressed areas of our city, not part of the problem like you want to portray developers to be. Company owners are in business to make a profit and there is NOTHING wrong with that! Hopefully one day people will accept that and maybe that day insignificant NIMBY comments like: "pillaging developers" will stop once and for all. I know many developers and they deserve less BS and much more credit for what they do.

How about visionary developers who create homes for thousands of families every year in our region? How about risk takers who employ tens of thousands of people that are our neighbors and friends and family? How about people who fight everyday against NIMBY and red tape and short sighted vision in order to develop our downtown core that is in dire need of investment? How about all those positive things? None of that seems to matter to most of the comments posted above, that’s exactly why we are stagnating as a city.

Then you talk about water mains, please let me laugh out loud here LOL! As if this problem had anything to do with a couple of new highrises! This comes from decades of negligence and under-financing to maintain and update the current infrastructure. Everyone knows they will need to be changed in the next years and if our city can finally be run by people who will face those issues and not push them to the side and simply shrug their shoulders, then we could have real debates on how to address decades of under-financing of our infrastructure. This is a problem our politicians have put aside for 30 years because they are too afraid to raise property taxes. They turn to other levels of government for money, well they don’t have any more money than we do, so we will all have to pay for it, all 519,949 of us!