There were three things I noticed this week which showed the fiendish difficulties faced when striving for prosperity in this town.

The first was restaurant critic Audrey Simpson bemoaning the lack of top flight restaurants in town. She had a meal that would have made a hospital cook blush.

And she's right. All over town you can buy liver you could sand a floor with, mashed potato lumpy enough to use as facial scrub, vegetables ritually slaughtered in a microwave frenzy, pasta sauces so thin they're practically anorexic and pastry to make the cardboard industry weep with joy.

Well done, Audrey, for pointing it out, I say. She knows about quality, too. She was one of the very first hoteliers in town to open a boutique hotel, The Granville. It was small, stylish and all the rooms were decorated in completely different genres.

But for some reason top quality restaurants have been a long time coming to Brighton and Hove. So many have tried and failed. And so many of the operators in town, eschewing the risk, say that there isn't a market for them. But isn't that the point? We need to create one.

There are hundreds of good middle range scoff houses.

Restaurants from Donatello to Browns to Richards are as reliable as an each-way bet in a three-horse race. But the prevalence of this kind of restaurants to the apparent exclusion of anywhere that could even say the words Michelin or Egon Ronay says much about the strength of the economy in town.

Wages are too low and jobs still too scarce in a local economy that those of you who are traders will know has been blown off course this year just because of the weather.

But there is both light and dark at the end of the tunnel in my other two examples. First, Brighton town centre manager Tony Mernagh is looking at investing in a programme of high quality street shows because he said this is, "a powerful weapon to combat many of the uncertainties that are challenging retail at the start of the 21st Century. You can't have a day out on the internet."

North Laine is one of the most original shopping districts in the country and it's one key to the town's future. It not only generates retail revenue, but tourist revenue as well. It's a classic example of the ambience that drives the success of the town. And the money it attracts helps to keep unusual shops flourishing.

But the more prosperity rises with the greater success of the town, the more we have top class restaurants and quality shops, the more the town runs the danger of pricing people at the lower end of the wage market out, particularly public sector workers, whose pay doesn't rise anything like as fast as prices and profits.

At the moment the gap between aspiration and reality is widening too fast. Weekly wages in Brighton and Hove are 12 per cent lower than the national average. People are taking home about £18,000 a year.

And what can you buy to live in when you earn wages at that level? You can get a studio flat for about £55,000. And there is a reasonable supply of those in the middle of town, according to the estate agents I rang this week. But what if you've got a family? A two-bedroomed house costs about £140,000 and you'd need an income of about £40,000 to afford that.

So we have to box clever now. We have to come up with new ways of using public money to develop cheap housing in expensive areas, where high priced and lower priced housing are part of the same mixed developments. Then key workers in town, from bus drivers to nurses, can afford to live near their work. This will be a great regeneration of the centre of the town.

The third piece of news was that this week the council has submitted a bid to the Government for a considerable increase in money for housing. And with the Chancellor's Spending Review promising a bigger level of public investment by any government not just since the war but ever, there is a possibility that we might get it.

For without it the prosperity being earned by the hard work of people in town will be to no avail, as homelessness rises and the rich continue to be able to afford to live in a town where wages are too low and the cost of housing too high.

And instead of this being the place to be for everyone we will run the risk of being the place to be only for the well-off.