Lets send some T.O. business growth to Downtown Hamilton.

[flar]

Hamilton is boxed in by the greenbelt so it can't sprawl very much more than it has. Also, lower Hamilton is already very densely built, but underutilized, and is a natural candidate for efficient rapid transit and intensive development.

[raisethehammer]

I live in downtown Hamilton and pay higher taxes than people in Dundas and Ancaster.
And have been told by various city department heads that our tax money generally goes into a pot for 'city-wide' projects....for example, the rent money the city collects at the baseball field at Victoria Park - we asked "where does this money go?". We were told about the 'big pot'.
So we asked, where has it gone over the past decade. The sheepish answer - new parks in subdivisions and outlying suburbs.
Meanwhile old ladies break their ankles trying to navigate the moon-surface style pathways in Victoria park while some joe in Ancaster has a new slab of green in the middle of their neighbourhood thanks to my neighbourhood.
That's just one example. I could fill up the pages of this forum with many others....downtown business subsidizing the big chains in the burbs etc.....
Ancaster is taxed high because they've allowed money-draining sprawl to take over a once-fine town. I still pay about 40-60% more for a small downtown home.

[roch5220]

Originally Posted by flar

Hamilton is boxed in by the greenbelt so it can't sprawl very much more than it has. Also, lower Hamilton is already very densely built, but underutilized, and is a natural candidate for efficient rapid transit and intensive development.

Still, you need ridership to make the grade. 10K peak trips per hour tend to be the benchmark for LRT, which even the busiest routes going through high population density areas in Toronto (ie. Don Mills/Thorncliffe) don't make it - even though building there could spur additional ridership. Rapid transit routes into hamilton still couldn't generate the ridership to pass off anything other than maybe a YRT style bus system. And when I mean rapid transit, I mean inner city network.

http://ourgreenbelt.ca/about

But based upon the greenbelt map, there is room for Hamilton to sprawl even further outside of its immediate borders. When that is filled up, there is incentive for additional development outside of the greenbelt area, as the map shows. These areas are still within reasonable commutting distance (ie. the landlocked areas (landlacked by the greenbelt), its no further than people commutting from Oakville to Toronto. And People would moved to those areas because the price will be right.

[flar]

Hamilton isn't forecast to grow that much that it will need to sprawl beyond the greenbelt. Also working against sprawl is provincial legislation that 40% of new developement occur in alredy built areas by 2015. The density target for downtown Hamlton is 200 people and jobs per hectare, which is the same as for downtown Oshawa, Burlington, etc (for comparison, the target is 400 for downtown and other major nodes within TO). Toronto is still the centrepeice of the greater golden horseshoe, Hamilton is just one of many growth centres. This is all according to the provincial government's Places to Grow plan. Also, bus rapid transit is already being planned for Hamilton which will be integrated with intercity transit (GO) in the future.

[roch5220]

^^^ Don't forget that we were talking in the context of shifting some business to hamilton to 'reduce sprawl'. So in terms of growth, I am talking about the related growth that would accompany.