All good points guys! Glad to see it went in a good direction!
I lived in stoney creek my whole life - hamilton was seen as the "dirty place" stoney creek refused to associate with, until we got amalgamated in and had to accept our dirty reality lol..
Growing up I was downtown a lot as I went to mohawk college for 6 years - back when the bus station was still in gage park. At this point gage park was fairly decent, however I remember the time that the mental institutions were closed down and suddenly there was an influx of mental patients downtown muttering to themselves shouting and screaming ..
I remember when king william was a ghost town, the lister block and william thomas was boarded up, and james street was a ghost town - where homeless would wander up to you and ask you for money - where people would punch each other out right in front of jackson square. The lister block being restored saved king william. I hope the buildings being restored in the gore (if they don't collapse first, wilson blanchard..) saves the gore as well.
I remember seeing the decline of the eatons center into what it rotted into after eatons collapsed. I watched as everyone moved out to the subarbs and the downtown emptied out - one only has to look at photos of the past to see how busy the core used to be, so I agree, the re-influxation of people into the core IS the first step - but in the vacuum we've sorta made hamilton into the "mental health" capital of ontario, taking people from all over - remember the scooter phase? When the govt was footing the bill for their scooters and they were everywhere? That was a plague. Making drugs essentially legal with methadone clinics .. didn't work. Tent cities.. have not helped.
Nobody REALLY wants to help these people - the city is more concerned with simply hiding them away so that people who come to the core cannot see them - but we all know that wherever these "services" move to is simply going to tank that area of the city. Mac should have a giant mental health area of the city where people with mental issues can get the help they need, but of course then that's a mental hospital thing and people start to clutch their pearls "those people are people too!" - they were once people - zombies , as mentioned above is what most of them are now, and you don't treat zombies the same way you treat "normal" people.
my mom used to work for the sisters of st joseph and they had a program called hamilton out of the cold where they would provide them with a meal and a place to go when they had nothing - I think that was largely stopped during the pandemic - but we need more things like that - we need people who address these peoples economic condition - sit down with them and figure out a solution for a path forward, and if it is determined they lack the mental faculties to self-govern themselves - they have to be taken off the streets and put into a program either to help them, or to unfortunately contain them. They can't be on the streets. And yes it will be a drain on tax dollars, but it just isn't safe - both for them and sanitary conditions, and also for anyone else.
All this tent living and garbage raises a real risk of plagues re-emerging that we haven't seen since the great depression that unsanitary conditions breed. Not to mention rat infestations.
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Once the "infestation" is removed to somewhere else however we need more to do downtown - yes eating is all well and good - copps and live entertainment is good - clubs here and there, although thats a challenging one - clubs don't generally last very long due to cell phone culture - seen too many come and go..
but what else? What will all these hundreds of thousands of people downtown do? What did they USED to do downtown for fun? Well there was the opera and cinema - so jackson theatre and theatre aquarius will probably be packed.. I don't expect to see vaudeville or burlesqeu returning though hehe...
we had the horse racing.. that will never return.. we had the roller rink - THAT will never return.. I should map out one day all the things we used to do - but yes once we put in enough people back downtown we have to start thinking about more entertainment venues for people to interact downtown - I know we are no longer part of the commonwealth but seeing parades down james or king st again - ticker tape parades and whatnot would be awesome - as people hang out their windows.
I would also love to see FLAGS return - back in the day almost every single building had posts for flags to fly on the front of their buildings, and it was a very patriotic thing Love to see more canadian flags fly.