Quote Originally Posted by Gistok View Post
OK, yes you have contributed DN... my bad.... sorry. But it's your Peanut Gallery moments that can be at times.... for lack of a better word... exasperating...
Well, thanks for that. I'm not attacking anybody or anything. And if you don't like the little quips, just ignore them. But seriously, sometimes it blossoms into a good conversation! [[Believe it or not, I think I've really improved my behavior on here in the last year or so!)

Anyway, here are some of my doubts, for what they're worth:

How much input did the people who live in the neighborhood have in this sort of deal? I'm always doubtful about the real, measurable benefits for the people who live nearby. Will any people who live within a few miles of the hospital work there? I mean, crying, "Jobs, jobs, jobs!" is one thing, but I wonder how many people from the immediate vicinity will work there.

Increasingly, these sorts of big-ticket developments are negotiated with local people, usually through CBAs. They get to ask all sorts of really fundamental questions BEFORE the deal is inked. If it's going to expand, that's great, but I would like to see some mechanism to ensure that the expansion offers good jobs for people in the neighborhood.

And, on the "eds and meds" strategy, am I the only person who thinks it's kind of crazy to devote intense public effort to fostering the expansion of non-profits? It seems a modest question to ask. If indeed the city will have to put additional effort into policing a larger area or routing more traffic, if the fire department has to devote additional resourced to protecting more development, where does this additional money come from? Know what I mean?

And, once the business is complete, what happens to this gargantuan development once it goes out of business? We have so many empty hospitals in this city, I wonder about the wisdom of building megacampuses that can't be reused as something else. A lot of these developments involve ripping out the street grid and not integrating them into their neighborhoods. The aesthetic effect isn't attractive to my eye.

Oh, I know: It sounds good on paper. No mistake that public officials love to announce 10-figure deals on their watch. But I question just how good a deal it really is.