Charles St GRT terminal redevelopment

[jamincan]

1 I didn’t say it wasn’t. This is literally an opinion forum, and the article we are commenting on is an opinion piece.  But are you really going to tell me an arena is more important than housing in our city right now? If so, you can tell that to the thousand people now homeless on our streets.  Or are you going to argue that after all the other cities fail to break even building arenas somehow we magically will?

I'm not convinced an arena is the right use of the location, but I do know that large blocks of city-owned land in prime locations are not going to come up every day. I think it would be a pretty huge failure of our imagination to just build housing in service of the immediate housing crisis and not look forward to anticipate future needs or opportunities. Why reserve land at King and Victoria for a transit centre at some point in the future when there is a perfectly functional and historic train station just 10 minutes walk away? Build more housing instead!

2 An arena can host other things, but go see how often similar arenas in similar cities are used. Most nights they are empty. In London, in Kingston. 

What about Copps Coliseum? Centre Videotron? MTS Centre? I never really got the impression that the John Labatt Centre (or whatever they call it now) was a failure either, is there more information on that?

3 this too is your opinion. You’re welcome to hold it. You can not disparage me at the same time. I’m looking at the reality in our city. 80% of our population cannot conceive of going somewhere without a car. That’s simply the reality here. 

His comment wasn't a personal attack. Accusing him of that doesn't further the discussion.

We are building our city for the future we want, not the present. If that weren't the case, we would be building more expressways, roads, and subdivisions.

As for its current location it is a 10 minute walk from an LRT station and on that walk you will pass at least two restaurants. I think you don’t know the area it’s located in well.  More, if an arena was so good for local businesses and development, would t it have attracted more businesses to the area?

Yes, the current area is huge and has tons of surface parking, it’s just another reason the terminal isn’t a good location, it isn’t a big enough site to host the facilities we currently have.

The current location has excellent access by car. It has terrible access by transit. There are no two ways about it. I'm not sure of it's current status but for a number of years the Rangers actually ran a bus shuttle from various restaurants and DTK on game days to address the shortcomings of transit-service and local restaurant offerings.

I'm not sure if an arena is the best choice, but I would be disappointed if the location shifted from public land to private/semi-private land. That is a shift that is not easy to reverse and has ramifications far into the future and we have to be able to do better than just a bunch more housing.

It does seem to me that the region has very little good event spaces. There are few good spaces for conventions, for example, and those that exist are small and poorly located for longer/larger events. Our hotels are spread through the region further exacerbating that issue. Sports venues are inadequate for hosting competitions - for example, the Waterloo Rec Centre could have had an Olympic-sized pool, but they chose to build a play structure on one end instead, and now the pool is far less functional than it could have been.

We are a mid-sized city, but we are growing and as our importance and stature increases, we should be able to plan for more than just being a backwater on the edge of the GTA.