Calgary Event Centre | 36.85m | 11s | CSEC | HOK

Do you support the proposal for the new arena?

  • Yes

    Votes: 88 64.7%
  • No

    Votes: 39 28.7%
  • Maybe

    Votes: 9 6.6%

  • Total voters
    136
Considering how much funding they were getting from the city, for them to throw a hissy fit at this stage is very annoying and is a bad look for people running multi-million dollar companies. Do you want to get my little sister to run this thing? Because she'll be more mature about it. Like fuck guys, put on your big boy pants and move on.
 
Multi million, try multi Billion. CNRL's market cap is currently valued at $47.8B US
Year end 2020 Edwards was holding 22 million shares alone of CNQ. And don't forget that he moved his primary residence from Calgary / Banff to London UK in 2016 (conveniently after the NDP won and raised taxes)

Not to make this a witch hunt against the man but it's important that people understand who CSEC is

And if anyone has spare time over Christmas and can get your hands on a copy, this is an interesting read on the economics of building arenas (https://www.fieldofschemes.com/)
 
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I think concerns of the Rivers District plan being in jeopardy are a bit dramatic. People need to remember, we still have an arena there with the Saddledome, so the same number of arenas that were planned to be in the final master plan.
 
That's a fair comment. If these things were not originally in the contract, then they should not be added in after the fact. That being said, I have trouble believing the streetscape part is new and is probably part of why they wanted CMLC out of it.
does CSEC have an approved BP? does the City get to decide they can opt out of policies and DP requirements if they are part of an application? All this shows the fact that the average person doesn't understand development and CSEC sure doesnt. They should come to Vancouver and see the pretzel twisting we have to do to get stuff done.

The deal didn't change so much as the deal was predicated on proposal that wasn't approved... now CSEC is just wanting the City to eliminate the DP requirements (that would be simple crony capitalism) for the proposal.
 
does CSEC have an approved BP? does the City get to decide they can opt out of policies and DP requirements if they are part of an application? All this shows the fact that the average person doesn't understand development and CSEC sure doesnt. They should come to Vancouver and see the pretzel twisting we have to do to get stuff done.

The deal didn't change so much as the deal was predicated on proposal that wasn't approved... now CSEC is just wanting the City to eliminate the DP requirements (that would be simple crony capitalism) for the proposal.
I was thinking the other day about that Vancouver condo where the owners had to foot the ~$500k bill to replace a 30-year old rooftop tree because it was a requirement of the original building permit that there be a tree on the roof. Calgary can’t even get developers to utilize the exterior materials they promise in their submitted renderings.
 
I think concerns of the Rivers District plan being in jeopardy are a bit dramatic. People need to remember, we still have an arena there with the Saddledome, so the same number of arenas that were planned to be in the final master plan.
**Enormous rant, beware**
My problem stems from the fact that land developers and builders are separate in Calgary. "Land Developers" value the land in East Victoria Park based on a couple of public investments like the expanded BMO centre and the Event Centre like it will be the catalyst for something but it is never fully realized. Add in the Green Line and *boom* speculative land values on the part of developers. Builders then can't make sense of the $psf required for what speculative land developers think this grandiose "urban district" will be worth and are unwilling to pay that much for the land to be able to build something people could occupy in the near-term on something financeable now.

To me it is an absolute waste of time and kills our ability to build a better city, today. East Village public infrastructure improvements were based off a TIF (Tax Increment Financing scheme) when the Bow Tower was being developed. The Bow didn't end up building the southern portion and we lost a historic building replaced with a fenced wood deck and parking lot and we got some development in East Village that will take another 20+ years to build out fully. Ultimately, the Bow Tower development as it sits today in my opinion has negatively impacted our urban fabric. The Bridges took at least that long to build out after we blew up the General Hospital, and East Village is an even larger scale. CMLC and others think that based on the BMO Centre, Green Line and Event Centre that Victoria Park will be a viable place for downtown reinvestment and will happen soon. Based on what exactly? Market fundamentals? If that was the case people would be buying up the land to develop right now (or years ago).

Seemingly everyone forgot Victoria Park used to be a neighbourhood with homes, businesses and apartments that catered to some of the lowest income Calgarians. They tore it down to expand the Stampede as they had grandiose plans. Those never came to fruition, and the land became gravel parking lots that are a scar on the city. Had they kept the homes and businesses, it could've looked like Inglewood today and the urban fabric would've remained intact and developed naturally over time (not to mention continued to house some of the City's lowest income earners in the interim). The neighbourhood would've filled in and gentrified as the life cycle of the community permitted. But no, "urban decay" requires action here, and we bulldozed it all and replaced it with nothing. We hinge all our plans on land development speculation in a boom and bust economy and tear down whole neighbourhoods for Stampede expansion (or other business interests) that never end up happening. Then we create new urban master plans anchored on big ideas to fix these problems we have just created, and those plans never happen. Decades later we have gravel parking lots offered at ridiculously high prices, based on nothing but speculation that is not grounded in reality that allow these gravel parking lot wastelands to remain for decades that ruin our urban fabric, in perpetuity.

Frankly, East Victoria Park is worth whatever people are willing to build on it today and nothing more. Based on current speculative land pricing, only things like the Guardian and Arriva towers have been developed in decades. If this maintains, gravel parking lots are this area's future for the remainder of our lifetimes, with possibly two towers in the next 20+ years if we're lucky. Price the land at what builders are willing to pay to build 6-storey buildings. Closer to the river build townhomes. Stop having these useless, grandiose plans for podium towers, our market fundamentals are different than Vancouver's. Just build things that make sense for today's climate that can be financed now, and fill in this place that is in every respect a great location. If no one is building things for hopes of better and cooler master plans and Vancouver-style podium developments, we should rethink our city-building priorities. Price these parcels like they are University District or even Seton, as they have not demonstrated to the market that they are worth land values that permit towers. Anything else is speculative and overvaluing the land at this point.

Fill in our urban fabric with low-rise now, get these sites being productive tax-wise, and stop thinking Calgary is 'world-class' and treat it like a slightly more important Dayton, Ohio. When we have a nice cohesive urban fabric and we have a UDRP, Administration, CPC and Council that enforces urbane development, and city-wide policy and an LUB that encourages good street-level interaction and decent building materials, maybe we can build an urban fabric. The fact that the Rivers District Plan calls for towers is laughable. In what market is that productive when you release 14 new greenfield, heavily subsidized suburbs with enourmous amounts of new infrastructure to fund every few years? Get a grip, and create plans that lead to prices for land that can allow for competitively priced multi-family product and stop speculating on something becoming the new "entertainment district" that will just be another pipe dream to add to this City's failed projects.

We have too many land developers trying to rezone land for towers on 30+ year plans, or huge developments like the Event Centre that are supposed to be hail mary "placemakers", and not enough solid, small projects in our Centre City that fix or add to our urban fabric. It stops Calgary from having small and organic growth in neighbourhoods like East Victoria Park that saw the bulldozing of formerly productive, low-income places for speculative, full-block tower developments that created desolate, sterile urban environments that have plagued Calgary for decades.

On the brightside, i've been noticing a lot more urban fabric building projects in our surrounding inner-city community and local builders with a vision for the city which is promising. Let these same builders do something with East Victoria Park, with projects that make sense today that won't take forever to build out. No more master plan pipe dreams, build a good urban fabric of smaller, de-risked projects for today's market.
 
hurray, make that $5bn road that no one in the actual city uses a success. are we about bike lanes or ring roads?
I work at the airport and I can assure you that the airport trail is quite busy! Maybe you never use it, but that doesn’t mean nobody else does. It’s certainly not Deerfoot busy or even McKnight busy, but it’s definitely steady! And will open up to more traffic when it’s fully connected to Stoney.
 
First, perhaps if the arena didn't include a parkade for 140 multimillionaire suite owners it would have been affordable to CSEC (even if they built a garage across the street to protect those precious Lexuses from the snow and paid a crossing guard to hold the hands of the captains of industry as they walked across the big, scary street.)

Second, perhaps if Murray Edwards paid some taxes, there would have been enough in the pot to help pay for the unexpected existence of sidewalks.

On the bigger picture of the towers vs.'six stories now' from Calgcouver's excellent rant above, on one hand I think their point is well made; especially with regards to the bulldozing of housing in the past for gravel lots. But the counter point is that what gets built there is what will be there for 50, 60, 70 years and hopefully forever. It's an area with a lot to recommend it, in particular proximity to the downtown but also the Green Line, the Elbow and so on. At some point, I wonder if we build six stories now, we wind up in a bind where the best areas are all filled at moderate densities (see also Sunnyside, which is a perfect location but should have at least twice the density) and we're struggling to either put density in second tier sites or just sprawl more.
 

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