General Sports and Recreation News

[Viewfromthe42]

KPL, WPL, RIM Park; Waterloo and Kitchener have plenty of facilities where it's easier to get to from the city that it's not a part of.

True, but K and W don't have the Cambridge dynamic, do they?

I view a decent amount of the complaints about location as "It's not in my neighbourhood, I could imagine a better location, therefore it's bad." Interesting, since right now they're arguing for a more central, costly location, rather than one that's less central, if easily 401-accessible, in contrast to the Regional Courthouse, where they argued for a more costly (multiple locations) system, or at least one closer to Cambridge and thus less central to the region.

But it's a common feeling in KW as well. Go into UpTown, and you'll find multiple neighbourhood associations who will speak supportively about letting more people live, shop, and use non-car transportation in the area, but each neighbourhood on its own believes that someone else should see these accommodations, and that their particular neighbourhood is unsuitable for it. My old neighbourhood, now UpTown North, is seeing homes filled with mould, disrepair, even bat colonies pushed for heritage designation, more likely as a means of preventing change than of preserving anything, but I'm on the side of the spectrum that feels that UpTown and Kitchener (~30%) already has enough untouchable land and even larger effectively untouchable land due to sight line preservation (interestingly, this was recently shot down at the OMB as a reason to deny development, regarding a Toronto application), that we don't need to preserve the umpteenth style-X house that's nearly falling apart (whereas I can understand and support desire to preserve, if not always by leaving completely untouched, truly unique and non-similar heritage places), nor allow "our road" or "our tree" to be protected from the evils of bike lanes or sidewalks, where every instance of this is viewed as though it would be destroying all properties and all trees, stymying even small but extremely helpful tradeoff changes.