While waiting outside Casa Linda’s Another Broken Egg restaurant Sunday for the lunch line to diminish, a couple of readers walked up and asked me about this month’s cover story, "The $100M Question". The dad said he and his wife had just been talking about the story during lunch and complimented our magazine’s cover story for envisioning a walkable mixed-use development.
We talked about how the story was a giant hypothetical, and we agreed that it was unlikely the city would ever tackle such a project, but I was glad to see that the story is generating discussion. That was our intent when we put the cover story in this month’s magazine, as well as when I wrote about it in my column and also discussed it in our podcast.
Again, we’re not saying that the city should be taking on private developers. But if the city is willing to commit $500 million-plus to build and own the downtown convention center hotel, why couldn’t the council find another $500 million to spread among different neighborhoods in the city?
Or maybe spending hundreds of millions dollars in taxpayer-guaranteed funds isn’t a good idea in the first place …
