Get Out Of Lansdowne While You Still Can: GRAY

 

 

Lansdowne doesn’t work. It has been 11 years since the first renovation of the park and it experienced an $11-million loss in the last fiscal year … $1.9 worse than the previous year.

If you have been selling something for more than a decade and it still doesn’t sell, maybe it’s time to stop trying to sell it. Cut your losses. Get out of Dodge.

Of course, the other alternative is to fix the problems. Unfortunately, Lansdowne 2.0 doesn’t address those. It simply continues a bad idea that doesn’t work and that is likely to get worse over time. Somewhere sometime down the line you can you see people crafting Lansdowne 3.0 … perpetuating a basic failed idea. You can’t sell something people don’t want.

Call Lansdowne something else: a fiscal sinkhole or a money pit. Lansdowne can’t be fixed. It’s the wrong idea, at the wrong time in the wrong place. Here’s why:

Shopping mall: Big-box stores began replacing shopping malls decades ago. Take away the housing and stadium and what have you got? A shopping mall. Shopping malls keep losing their anchor tenants. Take the recent shuttering of The Bay as an example

Now even big-box stores are feeling the pinch. Online shopping is killing them. The internet gives convenience and the best prices. No travelling in the winter cold to buy something you can get cheaper online. It gets shipped to your home.

City Negligent On Saving Money: BENN

How do you solve the Lansdowne problem? You don’t. Huge expert retail chains can’t fix the online problem. Online is the future of shopping. Lansdowne isn’t one generation behind retail standards today. It’s two.

Location: Why would you fight traffic and pay for parking at Lansdowne when you get free parking and Highway 417 to the front of Bayshore Mall? It doesn’t make sense. You can park for free in front of Best Buy and Canadian Tire. And you don’t have to walk halfway across the Glebe from your parking spot to get to shops you can find in the suburbs with free parking. To get people from the suburbs to come to your mall, you need to give them a reason to go. The Redblacks are worth the trip because you can’t get that kind of football elsewhere in the city. So too the junior hockey 67’s. So too the women’s professional hockey club. But that leaves lots of dark periods for sports for the rest of the year when those clubs aren’t playing and the other teams located at Lansdowne aren’t that popular.

But other attractions you can get elsewhere. Movies, restaurants, bagel shops, LCBOs, Winners and Sporting Life offer loads of free parking … except not at Lansdowne. To get people to go downtown, there must be a compelling reason. The Redlblacks and 67’s are compelling. Chain stores are not.

Transportation: Bank Street is a mess. It stops cars and buses. Not only is free parking limited at Lansdowne, the trip can be a nightmare to a location where you must pay to park. People don’t like that.

In other words to paraphrase the great philosopher and baseball player Yogi Berra: People don’t go there anymore. It’s too crowded.

Mass transit is nowhere in the future. Trains to Barrhaven and Kanata have a higher priority and they’re unlikely to run for the next two decades. A Bank Street subway is impossibly expensive and would be built after the suburban LRT. Youngsters today might see it in their old age.

Compare Lansdowne with the Rogers Centre in downtown Toronto. The subway is nearby. So too trains. Buses. The Gardiner Expressway. Even Billy Bishop airport. The Rogers Centre is one of the most accessible locations of any stadium in North America. And it has a compelling tenant in the Toronto Blue Jays.

Lansdowne will never ever have those sorts of connections.

The Sports Teams: The Canadian Football League has always been a shaky operation, not only in Ottawa where teams have gone under, but across the country. Vancouver in the past has had ownership problems, Edmonton today is drawing flies. Montreal had no football for awhile as did Ottawa.

Furthermore, CFL teams appeal to an older demographic and do not cater to a changing population. New Canadians identify with soccer and basketball while football is foreign to them and too expensive to play. Soccer and basketball require a ball and some sneakers. Football? Robocop-type armour.

Fix Lansdowne 1.0 Before 2.0: PATTON

But here’s an issue that has not been explored much by Ottawa’s and the nation’s chattering classes. What of the future of the Ottawa 67’s and major junior hockey. Owners have got by for years paying young men a pittance to ride the buses of leagues such as the OHL. Now NCAA teams can pay players hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars to play university hockey … and they get a degree to boot. Nothing wrong with a diploma from Cornell.

How can the Ottawa 67’s survive when the best players are lured south of the border for big money?

The City: Why is a municipal government involved in retail, sports and entertainment? it has no expertise in any of those fields. The city can’t keep the roads flat let alone devise a plan for businesses of which it knows nothing.

Conclusion; After 11 years of losing money at Lansdowne, take the hint. Lansdowne doesn’t work and it will not work in the future. The question before council should not be Lansdowne 2.0 (which doesn’t address the basic problems of the project such as location and transportation) but rather how to extricate the city from Lansdowne 1.0. This project hasn’t worked, doesn’t work and won’t work in the future. Eleven years of losses speak loudly.

Smart business people, when they don’t see a future for their company, cut their losses and run. That’s what the city needs to do. The Ottawa Redblacks and the 67’s are nice to have but are they worth gambling half a billion dollars to maybe keep them? Probably not.

The most difficult problem facing the partners at Lansdowne is how to cut their losses and run. Let someone else, who is foolish enough to buy Lansdowne, take on this loser. And let that entrepreneur find a solution if there is one. One thing certain. If there is a solution to Lansdowne, it won’t be found by the City of Ottawa.

Don’t just reject Lansdowne 2.0 but abandon the fiscal sinkhole that is Lansdowne 1.0. This dog don’t hunt.

The city must recognize its considerable limitations and get out of the sports, entertainment and development businesses of which it knows nothing..

Run while you still can. Lansdowne is a 1970s idea fighting a failing battle in the internet age. Time and technology have passed Lansdowne by.

Take whatever considerable value there still is in this project and vamoose. Lansdowne is a loser and always will be.

Ken Gray is an award-winning journalist who worked at five major Canadian newspapers. He is an educator, broadcaster and at present is the editor and founder of the 16-year-old pioneering internet publication, The Bulldog.

 

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