Golfing guy
Active Member
School construction is 100% a provincial responsibility. School boards, not cities deal with this issue.
West District | ?m | ?s | Truman
- Thread starter MichaelS
- Start date
Maybe I'm not making myself clear. I'm saying that if the province or school boards are not constructing schools quickly enough, maybe it would be better (certainly practical) to do everything you can to work AROUND that in your planning.
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
What does this mean though?
lemongrab
Active Member
I'm also curious if you could elaborate. Maybe one idea would be building towers where very few school aged children will live?
That's one idea, but more generally, school capacity could figure into what developments get bonus density, or not, like we do with road and transit capacity. Family housing near an underused school gets a bonus.
lemongrab
Active Member
Well one would have to unpack the numbers, but I suspect at a certain level of density there is an inverse relationship between density and school enrolment. So high density should go where schools are already full, because adding more low density is actually more likely to exacerbate that problem.
Mountain Man
Senior Member
The City usually accommodates for future schools when laying out new communities by leaving a spot for them. Sometimes they have the "site of a future school" sign for 10+ years, but the city does their part.
trtcttc
Senior Member
I'm not suggesting you are wrong, but we literally have data on school age population change in an area and enrollment figures for each of those schools. I don't think it is unreasonable for a resident to oppose development if the schools and other amentities in their communities are full. Whether the city plans around that is a separate issue, but I find that to be a real concern and not just handwaved away like "NIMBYs being NIMBYs
The city planning taking that into account is ideal, but I do see that being a feedback loop. City doesn't approve housing near overcapacity schools, CBE/Province see the school as operating at capacity but not increasing and then doesn't build a new school there. So there is a bit of a push/pull here of we should approve housing and schools will get built. But I think it's reasonable for residents to push back in their own interest if that is the case.
They do and I think new communities are different. You buy/rent in the area without a school, with no promise of when it will get built. The other situation is you live near a school, then the city approves a whole bunch of new housing and now your kid needs to bus to a further school or take a lottery. I know this isn't a high density problem exclusively but obviously adding more units = more residents and some of those are going to be families.
CallmeCatbread
Active Member
Yeah the school complaint is the only one that has any merit, I think. Ideally we would plan schools more intelligently, but as has been discussed here, that's hard to do when you have to coordinate with different levels of government (particularly when those two governments seem to despise each other)
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
It is one level of government. The CBE and Catholic board is part of the province, the CBE and Catholic board know their enrollment numbers. School development, outside of zoning, has nothing to do with the City.
Failing schools are a choice of one level of government.
lemongrab
Active Member
There may be truth to this in some cases, but not this one. Let's remember what we're talking about: expensive tower units. Nobody is paying a huge premium to live in one of these with school age children.
But there are a bunch of nearby SFH developments that are going to contribute to school crowding:
NW corner of 85th/Bow = 120+ SFHs
77th/Bow = ~75 SFHs
77th/9th = ~64 SFHs
(to name a few, and I didn't dig for project plans, just estimated based on # of houses on adjacent parcels)
So at least 260 SFHs that will probably be occupied before the first tower even breaks ground. Maybe someone has the numbers at hand to translate that to expected school aged kids, but I'm sure it's 100+. I can't imagine more than a dozen coming from the tower(s). So IMO the school concern is bollocks if they didn't also raise concerns around the above (which will also translate into a few hundred more obnoxious SUVs...)
MichaelS
Senior Member
Kind of makes you wonder how the City's broader policy targets to limit sprawl will work out if this is the case. Will family living habits change? Or, will we just push them out to further and further communities, such as Crossfield and High River.
lemongrab
Active Member
I've ruminated on this a bit before and have a lot of thoughts, but I'll try to keep it to a few brief points:
It's totally fine - if not ideal - for families to live in low density housing with lots of green space/etc. (this is all from a bit of a privileged lens, but I think it can still apply across the board to some degree). Ideally it should not be the 'only' option, but realistically it will be the preference for generations to come
So IMO the goal should be to get empty-nesters out of their nests sooner, but there is a lot to unpack there and I completely understand the appeal of staying put. And extend the appeal of 'urban living' for young people so they don't have to retreat to the burbs...but more realistically for most is that they wait until kiddo is 3 yo before they buy the SFH and two obnoxious SUVs, instead of doing that at the first hint of pregnancy/trying.
And maybe if we make HD living and alternative mobility options more attractive in the late 20s early 30s phase, then the most appealing upsize will be an infill duplex with 1 car, a cargo bike, transit, and shoes (this is already the case for many, but certainly not the majority)
ie. getting young people to stay 'urban' 5 years longer and retirees to downsize 10-15 years earlier would do a lot to make a more sustainable housing mix that creates a better overall city
CallmeCatbread
Active Member
It's a ridiculously complicated issue, but one I feel we really need to make more of an effort at addressing. UCLA Housing Voice podcast recently re-released an episode about "family friendly urbanism". Among the things they talked about were first how the concept of SFH being the only acceptable place to have and raise kids is a very uniquely North American phenomenon. Basically nowhere else has that as culturally ingrained as we do. So it's not like it's this impossibility, just requires simultaneous adjustments in the design of the built environment and allocation of resources, and the overall mindset of the population (a tall order, I know).
Second, they talked about Vancouver as being a case study in successful family friendly urbanism in the NA context, specifically focusing on how community amenity contributions as well as extremely specific design guidelines (apparently there are guidelines on how to make sure your apartment unit has an appropriately sized mudroom??). Leaving aside affordability issues, these factors have apparently massively contributed to the proportion of families living in apartments. We have literally none of that sort of thing here so yeah no crap families aren't living in apartments. It's actively disincentivized!
trtcttc
Senior Member
Do we know the unit breakdown of the condos and how big they are? I live near a school with a recently completed apartment project nearby. It's those midrise types and have a good mix of 2/3 bedrooms. Lots of kids live there. Usually smaller families of 1 or 2 kids but it's not true that people with kids only live in SFHs. I don't know about these condos in detail but I can definitely see them targeting smaller families that cannot afford a SFH/duplex but still want to live in a desirable area with good amenities.
I was born in Asia and nobody I knew lived in a single family home, I didn't even know they existed until coming to Canada. Even in more rural areas there'd be small concentration of short apartments, but very few places with rows of SFH like North America. But I think it's not really a mindset but just when the cities developed. Older cities in NA had extensive transit and people lived in higher density areas. People just adapt to the land/population at the time and how convenient it would be to get around. Anyhow, it's important we allow people to have families in apartments and building apartments that support that. Calgary is much better than Vancouver/Toronto in that regard but definitely creeping towards shoebox condos. It's hard to prove a direct link, but there's likely a correlation between housing prices and people's willingness to have kids. At least I see it in my cohort of late millennials.