[raisethehammer]

i think you're bang on retrofit, except one thing that Don MacLean reminded me of last night at the transportation meeting - we aren't talking about a complete clean-up of brownfield land to make it suitable for residential development or parks (like Liberty Village in TO).
Much of the land in question is industrial land that only needs to be prepared for MORE industrial development. As I'm sure you know, land needs to be decontaminated to a certain level depending on the use.
Hamilton's politicians are full of crap when they say we need the suburban land for jobs...we've had a TON of that land in the past decade and wasted ALL of it on sprawl boxes and townhomes - 403 extension, Linc, top of Red Hill. I'm tired of being told that we need more land for 'jobs' when in reality that land will be used for more cardboard box homes and box stores.
We have one of the best ports in Canada that we need to learn how to leverage better instead of trying to pretend that we have a real airport that can somehow act as a catalyst when nearby airports like Buffalo,Toronto and London are bigger and better than ours.
Let's work with our assets instead of always trying to copy everyone else.