Quote: Mrs Barista "You seem so confident that "This development would massively benefit Hull". Which one, the one with the duplicate ice rink or the one with the supermarket and Greggs? Which version are you talking about?
If the former, let's be honest, who'd be on the hook for running a leisure centre, ice rinks, squash courts? If the Council, you'd be asking them to taken on a shedload of incremental running costs for no return in a financially constrained environment. If you were running them as private entities, they'd be no more "benefit to the people" than opening another David Lloyd centre and getting people to shell out £60 a month.
If the latter, we come back to retail planning capacity, a point you seem to be struggling with. Will this help the traders of Anlaby Road, St Stephens, Whitefriargate or Princes Quay? Or just further impoverish a city centre retail market challenged enough by vacant properties whilst out of centre or edge of centre developments suck the life out of them? The market for physical retail is declining with the growth in online. Why would it be such a good thing to mortgage the stadium against loans to build all this stuff when there's a risk the market shrinks further in 5 years and the bank calls in the security and ends up owning a community asset? All for an extra 5k seats for City's brief PL tenure, which won't be fully utilised anyway. Lunacy.'"
The plan was for a £114m sport village, not for an out of town shopping centre.
But your post is a perfect example of the mentality that leads to Hull missing out on such developments.
The prime reason given for not wanting to progress this idea, was that the moving of Hull Fair was not up for discussion. So we have an eyesore for fifty weeks of the year, just so that we can site a fair there for a week a year, a travelling fair that could be sited anywhere.
