Needs More Parking…

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• Mamma mia!

• more parking lots? gimme a break. why not renovate the old houses and preserve the architectural fabric of elsmere? by tearing the old houses down in favour of a parking lot the city would be creating another dead zone in our core. remember what happened to the neighbourhood behind the art gallery when the city decided to expropriate it for a new arena? we need more pedestrians and fewer parking lots downtown.

• I would tend to agree George, but in this case, having it off Erie Street preserves the Erie Streetscape. It's better than that lot by Kurley's fronting Erie!

  I guess another question is do our tax dollars buy these houses and demolish them and make parking lots for Erie St. Does the Erie St. BIA contribute any money? Is more parking really required?

  Questions for your councilor I suppose...

• The hallowing out of windsor continues.

  More of this will mean a strip like Erie will become a weird urban-suburban road. The street works now because it's part of a wider urban fabric. Once that knitted together feel is gone, eating out here or shopping will be like going to Spago's in Tecumseh. Nothing unique or city-like about it.

• Affanculo! More parking meters! :)

• Ha! And I'm still waiting to see what they're planning to do with the gravel lot that once was the plumbing store on Wyandotte and McDougall. The neverending story of surface lots.

• wt, from what I understand that lot is earmarked for incorporation into the expanded Tunnel Plaza, as will every thing from there west to Goyeau between Wyandotte St. and the alley north of Wyandotte as well as the east side of Goyeau.

• My God, buying those houses and demolishing them will cost over $200,000. This is an abuse of taxpayers' money. If the businesses want more parking, they should buy the abutting lands and pay for it themselves. How did this get to be the city's responsibility? No wonder why my property taxes go up each year. Do they do this a lot?

• Well, downtown businesses pulled out because of lack of on street parking, or in close proximity. So why should we stop this and kill another thriving business area.
  Tear them down as quickly as possible and get on with it.

• I don't like the parking situation downtown either but I'm willing to bet if I wore a pedometer and parked at the mall and shopped there for an hour, I'd put more miles of walking behind me than if I had parked in one of the parking garages and hoofed it downtown to a few locations.

  I would be more inclined to believe lack of competitive pricing killed downtown retailers. For the longest time they enjoyed a high markup and a strong U.S. dollar to bring the americans in. Then along came Walmart, and the U.S. dollar took a sh*t, and the rest is history.

  As for those wartime homes on Erie street, I think a well placed municipal lot would not be out of line completely. There are scads of them up and down Ottawa street, and a lot of nice old homes were torn to make way for those lots - not VLA shacks. Not sure if anyone complained about that?