Too Late to Turn Back

I was thinking the other day about writing this blog and about all the problems that Oshawa has and why previous leaders in this city did nothing about it. I was reminded about our previous Mayor, Nancy Diamond. For the life of me I couldn't figure out anything good that she did for the city aside from planting flowers downtown and renaming it "The Village District" like that will solve any problems. I seem to remember during her 12 year reign seeing more and more empty plots of land "spring up" so to speak. I could rant on and on about the clusterfuck that was Nancy Diamond's Mayoral tenure but..........maybe I will in the future.

The point of this article is to highlight a fundamental problem that the city has had since it's inception and that is the city's actual layout. Now I'm no architect or a city planner but it seems to me that Oshawa doesn't follow of a normal city in the way it's laid out. Everyone talks about the North End of the city and how it's for stuck-up, rich people, which may be true. There are a lot of nice neighborhoods in the North but that really shouldn't be the case since Oshawa is on Lake Ontario in the very South End of the city. The rich and affluent sections which would normally be on the water in any normal city are not there. Instead, what we see there are blocks of ultra low rent, small and crammed together apartments. There used to be a stigma attached to anyone from "the Lake" that they were nothing but dirty criminals collecting government cheese. I'm baffled at how years ago someone decided it would be a great idea to build these cheap-ass apartments on prime waterfront property, essentially rendering it and anything around it useless. The other shameful part of the lake is the park we have there. This is a big, beautiful park right on the water that is packed with families all day long. Yet, at night police regularly have to patrol there, police helicopters light up the shoreline looking for floating bodies and the city also pays for a security guard to always be there at night.

Short of demolishing the buildings and rebuilding with houses this problem has always plagued Oshawa and will continue to do so and it has been there since Oshawa was conceived.