We are all speaking the same language and have similar hopes and goals. But, to be clear, one can be not be too good to be around such people, but I can't imagine that anyone actively wants to be in the middle of a place with zombies and people passed out and trash and shopping carts full of belongings. And not everyone necessarily feels safe. And it isn't necessarily safe.

And it is good that there are some well-dressed types downtown. But the ratio of well-dressed/well-heeled people versus homeless/addicts can not be compared to Toronto in any way. People in suits seem pretty rare to me in Hamilton and are probably limited to the courthouse and a few small businesses and law offices. Toronto has thousands of people working at those kinds of places plus financial institutions plus consulting firms, plus plus plus. And there are plenty of homeless/vagrants, but they are way less visible in most areas, especially during the day.
 
BCTed said:
We are all speaking the same language and have similar hopes and goals. But, to be clear, one can be not be too good to be around such people, but I can't imagine that anyone actively wants to be in the middle of a place with zombies and people passed out and trash and shopping carts full of belongings. And not everyone necessarily feels safe. And it isn't necessarily safe.

And it is good that there are some well-dressed types downtown. But the ratio of well-dressed/well-heeled people versus homeless/addicts can not be compared to Toronto in any way. People in suits seem pretty rare to me in Hamilton and are probably limited to the courthouse and a few small businesses and law offices. Toronto has thousands of people working at those kinds of places plus financial institutions plus consulting firms, plus plus plus. And there are plenty of homeless/vagrants, but they are way less visible in most areas, especially during the day.
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This is a really odd point to make. Hamilton doesn't have a lot of financial firms. We don't need people with suits on. We just need a few more people that are typical middle class people roaming.

In my time living in downtown, I feel more safe and more comfortable now than I did when we first moved here and an average weeknight was deserted downtown. Now bars and restaurants are open even on Mondays and Tuesdays because there are enough people. Especially during COVID you could see the impact having nobody around had on the perceived feel of downtown.

Hamilton is surely changing and adding 5000-10,000(at least 4000-5000 from currently under construction units) middle class people downtown, an area that currently has around 30,000 people living here will absolutely make a difference in safety and perceived safety.

Again, it won't fully solve the issue until we do more to ensure that people with mental health and drug addictions are properly helped and supported, but the same way nobody feels unsafe on the Danforth on a Saturday night, I think people will start to feel far more comfortable downtown with the continued infill of people and business. I've already noticed it going out of the house nearly every single day and evening. People are coming here more, dressed for a night out, grabbing dinner and drinks, or moving into multiplexes, apartments and shopping around downtown.

From what I've seen living here for 6 years and coming downtown for a decade the ball is already snowballed. It may slow a bit during the current economic slump, but it surely won't stop now, we're long past the point of no return barring a actual economic depression.
 
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You mentioned well-dressed. The ultimate version of well-dressed to me is suits. Subtract the suits from the equation and Toronto is still not comparable in any real sense to me.

And I do hope you are correct re: the momentum. I have lived in Hamilton on-and-off for my entire life and it has never looked so bad to me in terms of vagrants/junkies. Plus the tents alongside everything. But it can be true that there is both momentum and increased homelessness/mental health/drug concerns.
 
BCTed said:
You mentioned well-dressed. The ultimate version of well-dressed to me is suits. Subtract the suits from the equation and Toronto is still not comparable in any real sense to me.

And I do hope you are correct re: the momentum. I have lived in Hamilton on-and-off for my entire life and it has never looked so bad to me in terms of vagrants/junkies. Plus the tents alongside everything. But it can be true that there is both momentum and increased homelessness/mental health/drug concerns.
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Hamilton's downtown is looking at a 15%-20% increase in the number of people living downtown in the next 5 years. That's a huge jump in people actively using downtown as their home. Not to mention many living in condos and are more likely to be out and about. Like I said, in my time living here since September 2018, we went from businesses being closed Monday-Wednesday and nothing selling food after 8PM except Burrito Boyz to having fancy restaurants like Le Tambour at Murray and James open during the week, multiple bars open until 2am, 7 days a week, and plenty of food options late. James St on a Monday can still be quiet, but it used to be a dead zone Monday through Wednesday. Like, absolutely deserted.

A lot of people are forgetting the huge impact 20,000 visitors to Copps arena will have nearly every weekend when HUPEG fills that arena for concerts and events. On Toronto Rock nights Hamilton's downtown is buzzing with people and we will often stick to staying in because there aren't enough restaurants and bars to meet the insane demand of people.
 
All good points guys! Glad to see it went in a good direction!

I lived in stoney creek my whole life - hamilton was seen as the "dirty place" stoney creek refused to associate with, until we got amalgamated in and had to accept our dirty reality lol..

Growing up I was downtown a lot as I went to mohawk college for 6 years - back when the bus station was still in gore park. At this point gore park was fairly decent, however I remember the time that the mental institutions were closed down and suddenly there was an influx of mental patients downtown muttering to themselves shouting and screaming ..

I remember when king william was a ghost town, the lister block and william thomas was boarded up, and james street was a ghost town - where homeless would wander up to you and ask you for money - where people would punch each other out right in front of jackson square. The lister block being restored saved king william. I hope the buildings being restored in the gore (if they don't collapse first, wilson blanchard..) saves the gore as well.

I remember seeing the decline of the eatons center into what it rotted into after eatons collapsed. I watched as everyone moved out to the subarbs and the downtown emptied out - one only has to look at photos of the past to see how busy the core used to be, so I agree, the re-influxation of people into the core IS the first step - but in the vacuum we've sorta made hamilton into the "mental health" capital of ontario, taking people from all over - remember the scooter phase? When the govt was footing the bill for their scooters and they were everywhere? That was a plague. Making drugs essentially legal with methadone clinics .. didn't work. Tent cities.. have not helped. Enabling and rewarding bad life decisions is not the cure.

Nobody REALLY wants to help these people - the city is more concerned with simply hiding them away so that people who come to the core cannot see them - but we all know that wherever these "services" move to is simply going to tank that area of the city. Mac should have a giant mental health area of the city where people with mental issues can get the help they need, but of course then that's a mental hospital thing and people start to clutch their pearls "those people are people too!" - they were once people - zombies , as mentioned above is what most of them are now, and you don't treat zombies the same way you treat "normal" people.

my mom used to work for the sisters of st joseph and they had a program called hamilton out of the cold where they would provide them with a meal and a place to go when they had nothing - I think that was largely stopped during the pandemic - but we need more things like that - we need people who address these peoples economic condition - sit down with them and figure out a solution for a path forward, and if it is determined they lack the mental faculties to self-govern themselves - they have to be taken off the streets and put into a program either to help them, or to unfortunately contain them. They can't be on the streets. And yes it will be a drain on tax dollars, but it just isn't safe - both for them and sanitary conditions, and also for anyone else.


All this tent living and garbage raises a real risk of plagues re-emerging that we haven't seen since the great depression that unsanitary conditions breed. Not to mention rat infestations.

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Once the "infestation" is removed to somewhere else however we need more to do downtown - yes eating is all well and good - copps and live entertainment is good - clubs here and there, although thats a challenging one - clubs don't generally last very long due to cell phone culture - seen too many come and go..

but what else? What will all these hundreds of thousands of people downtown do? What did they USED to do downtown for fun? Well there was the opera and cinema - so jackson theatre and theatre aquarius will probably be packed.. I don't expect to see vaudeville or burlesque returning though hehe...

we had the horse racing.. that will never return.. we had the roller rink - THAT will never return.. I should map out one day all the things we used to do - but yes once we put in enough people back downtown we have to start thinking about more entertainment venues for people to interact downtown - I know we are no longer part of the commonwealth but seeing parades down james or king st again - ticker tape parades and whatnot would be awesome - as people hang out their windows.

I would also love to see FLAGS return - back in the day almost every single building had posts for flags to fly on the front of their buildings, and it was a very patriotic thing Love to see more canadian flags fly. I feel hamilton has lost its prideful identity - we've been told we're dirty and suck for so long I think we've started to believe it.
 
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Let's not forget the ultimate decades old dive bar, This Ain't Hollywood transformed into high end French bistro Le Tambour.

That speaks volumes for the evolution of James St and downtown Hamilton and of things to come in the future.

I'm not in the target market 😅 but it's nice to have fine restaurants give an air of sophistication/refinement to downtown.
 
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Wigs said:
Let's not forget the ultimate decades old dive bar, This Ain't Hollywood transformed into high end French bistro Le Tambour.

That speaks volumes for the evolution of James St and downtown Hamilton and of things to come in the future.

I'm not in the target market 😅 but it's nice to have fine restaurants give an air of sophistication/refinement to downtown.
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I will admit I have not visited it yet - have to take a wander down and see.. don't often venture that way anymore
 
Wigs said:
Let's not forget the ultimate decades old dive bar, This Ain't Hollywood transformed into high end French bistro Le Tambour.

That speaks volumes for the evolution of James St and downtown Hamilton and of things to come in the future.

I'm not in the target market 😅 but it's nice to have fine restaurants give an air of sophistication/refinement to downtown.
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Also Le Tambour is pretty excellent. We went the other night for the first time, and would recommend. Their wine selection was pretty good too.
 
Chris R. said:
Also Le Tambour is pretty excellent. We went the other night for the first time, and would recommend. Their wine selection was pretty good too.
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It's probably a miraculous transformation compared to This Ain't Hollywood lol

When I showed my Buffalonian friend photos he said "it's hard to believe that's the same space" and was pretty impressed compared to how he remembered the inside!

They must have spent a pretty penny on the interior. Glad to hear it lives up to the hype.
 
If you wanna see an amazing transformation go inside the mansion nightclub - aka the old femmebassy - the place most of us wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole it was so gungy and gross.. the bathrooms were just horrendous.. now it looks like something out of toronto.
 
MarkusPoolio said:
you're scum!
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On the subject of how you perceive people in relation to your own ideology, no ordinary person on here cares about what you think or how others make you "feel" on here. This isn't a woke forum to my knowledge. This is a forum about architecture, not how much you hate other users on here. This is where adults talk. Post meaningful debates or don't post at all. I brought up several important points. Me focusing on the reality of the situation doesn't make me scum - it makes me observant.

Many people like to claim these people are people too. No. They were ONCE people, now they are largely zombies, and you don't treat zombies the same way you deal with properly functioning people - these people have mainly torpedoed their brains with drugs (not just dabbled with them, utterly destroyed them) and thus will never think coherently ever again and are a danger both to themselves and to others as well as to the perception of the city - they chose to be this way through their own bad decisions many of them (not including those who for some reason are simply homeless due to some non drug-related tragedy, we can help those)

The majority of these people, we cannot help - their minds are too far gone, or we lack the programs to help them and the resources to ensure they don't relapse. Those people need to be in a home. Funny how the mention of that seems inhumane to so many yet us sticking our own elderly in the exact same scenario is met with indifference. If you cannot contribute as a properly functioning member of society then you do not deserve to BE among functioning members of society until such a time as you CAN contribute as a functioning member of society.

Frankly many of us are tired of people like you who try to control the narrative by personally hunting down anything you don't like or that goes against your ideology. Differing opinions exist for a reason, and do not deserve to be demonized because you simply don't agree with them. Hate me all you want, you doing so cannot cancel me here, so either accept it, complain about it every chance you get like a child, or move on. I don't contain empathy for bleeding heart ideologies, nor do your opinions of me matter to me. I'm not here for a job interview or a humanitarian prize - I am here to talk about architecture and the issues of our city (the issues themselves, not what stating said issues makes people react to from their own said issues and thus accuse you of), and that should be what you should be focusing on too.
 
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Taken July 27th. Just some different vantage points.
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