Micheal Would (if he could) and Cynical Cindy are leaving these people to rot, and fellow hypocritical Lefty Phil Goof is equally culpable. Disgusting.
Money - millions to hundreds of millions - is earmarked for the mongrel mob, the ISIS bride, He Puapua hui's, a white elephant cycle bridge across the Auckland harbour....but nothing for suicidal business people whose lives have been destroyed by the white elephant CRL which is growing like Topsy and consuming untold billions for negligible gain.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opi...-albert-street
Nightmare on Albert Street
Rob Stock
05:00, Jul 28 2021
OPINION: What is being done to the business owners of Auckland’s construction hell block is cruel.
Their businesses and health are being destroyed by the construction project on the intersection of Albert St and Victoria St West in the heart of Auckland’s CBD to build the city’s light rail link.
When the project to build the rail link was developed all costs were calculated, except the cost to the people with the misfortune to have a business fronting the construction site.
That was a cost they would have to bear alone.
It is hard to convey how awful the plight of the shop owners in the area of the Albert St and Victoria St junction is.
Reporters often meet people who have suffered traumatic events, but it is still shocking to see grown men break down and weep.
On Friday, new Labour MP Helen White met business owners, in what felt like a genuine attempt to gather human stories to take back to Labour grandees in a bid to press the case for compensation.
After sitting though the meeting, I was talking with Vijay Chauhan, the 34-year-old owner of the Taj Mahal restaurant on Victoria Street, and Viv Beck, chief executive of the Heart of the City, when suddenly Chauhan turned his back, and began to cry.
Chauhan had not opened his restaurant in 23 days.
“It’s not good for my mental health to stand there all day listening to the noise with no customers,” he told me.
He was the fourth owner who had cried as they told their story to me on Thursday and Friday last week.
He was not the first to tell me he had been prescribed antidepressants, and was taking sleeping pills.
Earlier he asked White if it would take someone to kill themselves to make the Government do something to help.
What is happening to these people is so simple to understand, and yet it seems it’s too hard for the authorities to grasp.
There is a goliath construction project literally arm’s length from these people's shop doors.
Customers can only get to them by running a gauntlet of sewer smells, excruciating noise, dust, and dismal narrow passageways, while squeezing past burly construction workers.
You have to stand in Riven Liang’s barber shop at 98 Albert St to really understand how deafening the noise is.
“Do you hear the music?” he shouts to me, though we are standing next to each other inside, with the door to the street closed.
I don’t.
Then there is a momentary lull in the drilling and vibration.
Liang’s got a stereo on, and not quietly either. I hadn’t realised.
You'd have to be profoundly deaf to want to get a haircut in his shop right now.
Shobhana Ranchhodji owner of florist Roma Blooms used to get 25 customers a day come into her shop, as well as online orders.
Now courier drivers can’t get to her to pick up flowers, and she’s lucky to get two customers a day come into her shop in person.
Andy Ariano, a kind, quietly-spoken, dignified man, closed his restaurant Da Vinci on Saturday for the last time after successfully operating there for a decade.
It’s heartbreaking to see this forced on a man who has done everything our society wants from its people.
He’s stood on his own two feet, created jobs, paid taxes, contributed the life of our city, and he has been repaid with this.
What hurts these people most is that the open-handed generosity of the Covid era, in which those who suffered financial hardship through no fault of their own, were helped, does not extend to them.
Let’s be clear: This is not just about money. It is about decency and conscience. It is about not treating people as though they don’t matter. Real harm is being done here.
It was all so predictable, and yet, the cost of that harm was left to sit on these people’s shoulders, in order to build the rest of us a light railway.
It all begs the question: What sort of society does this to people?