It takes years to get anything done in Brighton and Hove, as the history of many big developments has shown.
Young men have become old and grown grey beards waiting for work to start on the Jubilee Street site in the city centre and on the land next to Brighton station.
The city has done its best to revive a sluggish economy during the past five years by capitalising on its strengths as a cultural and tourist centre. But it needs more than that to continue the trend.
Important sites on the edge of town of little landscape value, such as Hangleton Bottom, need to be unlocked.
Imagination and cash are what developers need to make the most of brownfield sites such as Shoreham harbour.
The Brighton and Hove Economic Partnership has ideas, most of them good ones, for increasing jobs and prosperity.
What it now needs is cash from other sources, such as the South East England Development Agency and the Single Regeneration Budget, to deal with otherwise intractable problems such as Preston Barracks and the harbour land.
The city also needs a firm decision from the Countryside Agency on where the boundary should be drawn for the new South Downs national park so the Downs can be defended and sites of little value like Patcham Court Farm released.
Councillors themselves should be bold, insisting that difficult sites can be developed. In the past we have too often had too little too late.
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