Even in the heat of summer, the debate over the West Side stadium and convention center rages over water coolers and conference tables, via the Internet, radio and television. On both sides it has become a cause, inflaming civic passions that falsely recall the days of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.

One of the advertisements flooding the airwaves for the past few weeks is a commonsensical sounding plea from a fake organization called the New York Association for Better Choices.

The fact that this is a paid front organization for Cablevision – the owners of Madison Square Garden and my beloved Knicks – is not what bothers me, although it is a bit disingenuous. It is not the million dollars it has sunk into the pseudo-populist ads either: It is the false choices the New York Association for Better Choices presents to New Yorkers.

The ads show firefighters and coffee shop waitresses opining that the city and state’s combined $600 million investment in the stadium and convention center could better be spent on education.

The problem is that budgets don’t work that way. When money is saved in one area, it is not automatically transferred to another budget column. Money not spent on the stadium will not magically relieve school overcrowding or buy kindergarten supplies from here to kingdom come – it will be absorbed into the bureaucratic ether, $300 million in city dollars never heard from again, gone to finance debt services or pension costs.

In the arena of government spending, I generally have a bias toward things that allow all New Yorkers to see their tax-dollars at work. That’s why the first line of expense in my book should always be safe and clean streets. The city spends an enormous amount in smaller capital projects each year, ranging from renovation to new construction. But it is the big developments that matter, developments that improve the quality of life and define our city for decades to come.

There is a troubling tendency in the contemporary New York character to oppose development. This is ironic considering our city’s history over the past 400 years is one long epic of development. But the modern conservation movement has its roots in reaction to a tragic mistake for New York – the destruction of the beautiful old Penn Station – to make room for the new Madison Square Garden.

That civic assassination spurred a movement that ultimately saved Grand Central Terminal and whole historic neighborhoods from almost certain destruction. New Yorkers began to stand up for the preservation of our neighborhoods, history, and architectural heritage. We owe this movement a great and continued debt of gratitude, because without it, New York City might look like a lifeless, warmed-over Houston instead of a character-driven city of diverse neighborhoods.

Most famously, Ms. Jacobs and her fellow West Village and SoHo residents stood up to the cold-blooded arrogance of Robert Moses and his attempts to bulldoze part of their neighborhood, as he had so many others, to build an elevated highway across lower Manhattan in the late 1960s.

The problem is that so many local activists keep running off the fumes of this worthy fight. It distorts their judgment, to the detriment of the city’s long-term good.

The essential element in historic preservation is having something worth preserving. In the case of Jacobs vs. Moses, it was a unique neighborhood of architecturally significant loft buildings and the artists who lived in them. In contrast, the area on the far West Side contemplated for the construction of the stadium and convention center is virtually empty, a bleak landscape of rail-yards, chain-link fences, and storage facilities. There is nothing objectively to preserve – but that hasn’t stopped sentiment from colliding with common sense.

At a recent conference hosted by Citizens Union, featuring prominent speakers both pro and con, moderator Joyce Purnick from the New York Times compared the flurry of civic debate over the West Side stadium to the ill-fated Westway project, which flailed about during the 1970s and early 1980s. In retrospect, Westway seems like a largely benign and beneficial use of federal and state funds – under the plan the city would not have paid a dime – to submerge the West Side Highway below 40th Street underneath a park, allowing unfettered access between neighborhoods and the Hudson River. But the bogeyman of big development reared its head, and activists hungry for a replay of their epic David and Goliath fight stopped the civic project by turning it into legalistic war of attrition, killing it by a death of a thousand cuts.

The final cut came in the unlikely form of a striped bass. In the early 1980s, fishing in the Hudson River was both unpopular and unadvisable, but that did not dampen concern for the plight of local fish. It turned out that the government foolishly falsified an environmental report about the impact of the project on the striped bass, and this provided enough evidence of ill will to stop the project.

Westsiders’ heroic defense of the wild striped bass now seems a bit shortsighted. It calls into question just who represents the cause of good government – people who wanted to create a park and submerge traffic at virtually no cost to the city or the folks who just wanted to keep the status quo, no matter how unattractive or impractical.

As Ms. Jacobs reminded us, “The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.” The current state of the far West Side does not offer choices, but the absence of choice. New York City does not have a a football stadium or a state-of-the-art convention center that can host large-scale events such as the Olympics. The advertising effort corralled against the development is transparently rooted in the self-interest of the folks who own Madison Square Garden. They logically like their monopoly on hosting large events in a decades-old arena, but their self-interest should not be mistaken for that of the city.

An Independent Budget Office report issued earlier this month showed that the debate over the stadium and convention center cannot credibly be continued over the issue of money. Although the IBO determined that the Jets’s previous estimates for the economic benefit to the city were too generous, it confirmed that the stadium and convention center would still pay for itself, generating $28.4 million annually – well over the annual debt-service for its construction. With hundreds of millions of dollars generated over the next several decades – to say nothing of new jobs, apartments, stores, office space, and hotel rooms, as well as a new park overlooking the river, and an open door to opportunities such as the Olympics – this admittedly ambitious undertaking is ultimately a good deal for New York.

The test now will be to see whether the coalition in favor of the stadium and convention center can stick together or whether it will be divided and ultimately exhausted by the same collection of rear-view mirror activists that falsely project the images of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses on every major development in our city, from Westway to the West Side stadium and convention center.