Charles St GRT terminal redevelopment

[danbrotherston]

Convention centres and arenas are also pretty expensive to build, and I'm skeptical that it would be a wise use of public money. We'd face tough competition from London, Hamilton, and Toronto. I'd guess for as much as there are success stories of rinks/convention centres providing economic benefits, there's also a lot of places where they need millions a year in subsidies, and cost hundreds of millions to build.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, look at the failed urban revitalization attempts across canada in the 80's.  There will always be risk involved in a large public infrastructure project, look at the Montreal Olympics vs the Vancouver Olympics. The main objective once leadership determines they want to pursue something, be it a convention centre, a stadium or something like the Human Right Museum, is how can we achieve our goal that gives us the highest likelihood of success.  

Living life with a defeatist attitude is not productive "It might fail so why try".

I agree that defeatism isn't a good policy.

But I also think it's important to be smart. The malls in downtown failed because the people who promoted them didn't bother to understand how and why downtowns work. I think the same thing is happening with people promoting arenas. It's not to say that an arena can't be included in a revitalisation project, but I believe that if an arena is the thing you think will improve things, that simply isn't the case. Making downtown a place people want to be is the answer.

Here, let's ask a relevant question. The city already has an arena, I've been to it a few times. Is the presence of the arena in the auditorium neighbourhood making that neighbourhood more vital or more active than it would be without it? Or is it intermittently adding traffic, congestion, and parking complaints interspaced by being an empty inactive plot of land.

So why would we think an arena would do something different in downtown?