[Simplicity]

I meant a horse personally. There's no reason downtown development affects me negatively, I should say.

But the point is an interesting one. The issue with it is that, if this is the point we're making for downtown development - that's its cheaper and more contributory to the budget - we do a hell of a good job handing those benefits back to the projects that are ostensibly there to provide them. And we skew the market in the process. That goes especially for the SHED. Who ever said they wanted to live in the SHED? Nobody. It's a construct. And since there's no actual demand driving it, you're forced to labour under the premise that a) of course you need subsidy, and; b) the faint hope that there's a significant enough knock-on effect of one development to organically create another. That's an exceptionally costly way to create a neighbourhood nobody is asking for at the expense of ones you could be making better.

I wouldn't get too caught up in the old 'foreigner investor' trope. Investors follow the returns - their investment decisions aren't guided by whether the city's downtown is presentable. And that's reflective of where the investment has gone. The suburbs have shown the return and there's a ton of foreign capital flowing into those developments. If you want to put the fear of god into an investor, tell him that a market he's looking at is driven by the government whimsically picking and choosing those who receive subsidy. That's downtown at the moment and as long as Centreventure is in the picture.