Quote:
Originally Posted by Goldfinger
The best thing to do is to start clawing back Municipally funded social programs and start moving people into Toronto where funding is shared. It's a cycle we cannot afford any longer. The poor look at Hamilton as a great place with lots of cheap housing and excellent social agencies. This then becomes a magnet for all kinds of people from everywhere.
The best way to reduce poverty here is to stop attracting it. One of the biggest problems here is that we have a incompetent city council that is accountable to no one and has the power to raise taxes at will.
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great comments here, although it goes much deeper than council just being 'incompetent'.
In fact, they have been extremely competent at providing zoning, highways and land for more sprawl in recent decades - all of which drain the economy financially. Instead of trying to attract new business and jobs to Hamilton we've spent all of our time attracting more cardboard box homes in no-man's land. We've literally seen business pass us by because we've been 'too competent' at focusing on all the wrong things.
Now the tax base is something like 80-20 residential instead of a more healthy 50-50 split, or even like back in Hamilton's heyday when it was 70-30 industry.
We need real leadership in this city not the bullcrap we've been getting from backroom crooks like DiIanni and Cooke simply trying to fatten the pockets of their buddies and post-political career employers. They've been destroying our city and the people who vote them in a 2nd time deserve exactly the kind of city we've got.