BOSTON (CBS) – “Boston can’t be a place where good ideas go to die,” writes former city councilor and mayoral candidate Mike Ross in the Boston Globe. “With Friday’s announcement by Grand Prix of Boston that they are leaving town, however, that’s exactly the reputation we have earned.”

Actually, no, that’s ridiculous.

We’re just a few weeks removed from General Electric’s decision to move its corporate headquarters to Boston specifically because new ideas in the development and use of industrial technology are thriving here.

The forest of construction cranes towering over the Seaport and other areas of the city is testimony to its attraction to commercial investors. Soaring real estate values speak to Boston’s appeal to private investors as well.

And the city is mobbed with domestic and foreign visitors eager to experience what the city offers.

Ross points to a 20-year litany of sports-related projects that ran afoul of red tape and community resistance here – the South Boston football stadium, for example, and of course, the 2024 Summer Olympics.

But those ideas flopped because they were bad ideas.

Can you imagine a big stadium sitting empty eleven months out of the year on the waterfront where thriving businesses and in-demand housing have risen instead? And the less said about the debt blizzard of the Olympics, the better.

Maybe instead of finger-wagging at community resistance, our local elites should try listening instead – to the calls for better public transit and education and more affordable housing, energy and health care. Those are the good ideas we should be pursuing, not some noisy car race.