Marc and Mada | 62m | 19s | Truman | NORR

adamyyc said:
I don’t think the interaction is going to be great on 33 with a lobby, 1 CRU, and a massive garage door near the NW corner for deliveries.
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On face value I see your concern, but after thinking about this a bit further I respectfully disagree... it's an urban format grocery store with a major walkable entrance to the main corner on 33rd. That alone puts it in the top tier of urban design attempts in this city. Residential lobbies generate a lot of walking foot traffic as well. Just because it only has 1 CRU and a garage door, I doubt this is going to be a dead sidewalk that negatively impacts the walking environment on the street. The 1980s and 1990s era Marda Loop developments on all sides are far inferior at street interaction than what's proposed.

Further, the 33rd Ave side has huge window walls and will be brightly lit. 33rd does not have the public parking garage entrance that will have constant traffic, it's just the loading zone - so a few trucks a day, typically at hours people don't notice. It's removing 2 strip mall parking lot ramps and replacing it with a constant street wall and zero strip mall parking ramps. Again, this is a massive improvement over current conditions.

I am sure I can find issues with below and it's not the small-format "traditional" main street design on 33rd that many people like, but I am struggling to imagine how you could do this better with the constraints of having delivery trucks, 600 apartments, a ton of underground parking and still managing to have 3 of 4 sides being activated.

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If this development actually happens and Marda Loop keeps going the way it is, I find it's less and less useful to think of the area as just a main street (or 2). What it's becoming is more of a village or hub style urban neighbourhood - retail and activity is mostly organized along the main corridors, but it's also distributed with a ton of off-main destinations that start to really bleed into the neighbourhoods around. The area continues to see local population density increases in all directions making the whole retail hub more sustainable off day-to-day traffic, not just customers coming in from elsewhere.

Not only is the area attracting developments at this scale that are really urban, it's also attractive that whole cluster of Leonard Group developments with niche small-format retail off-street. We've also seen several developments with bizarre off-street, courtyard-style retail. All this is adding up to being in increasing weird, but also increasingly interesting and vibrant place.

If Truman can pull this off, it'll be very exciting to see.
 
I moved to Marda Loop a decade ago because I wanted the mix of urban and suburban and have welcomed the additional development. Even if one of the developments down the street turned out to be an absolute disaster.

I share the position the BIA makes in the video. I'd be happy to get the Co-op and additional amenities with a little less height.

There are numerous empty or acquired and given-up-on lots in a 2 block radius that I would like to see developed as well. Maybe keep it to 10-12 stories like we are seeing in Kensington. Lots of places to add density it doesn't have to be forced into one lot in one project.
 
I like the height and project in its totality but I think it’s a valid concern to be adding such density to an already congested corridor. If they can at least start to acknowledge and address that then go right ahead and build.

To be fair, I think it would be easier to get around marda loop if half the area wasn’t under construction lmao.
 
I’m all-in for this development, but I really hate that it means that the sidewalks around the site probably won’t be useable until 2027/28. I’ve lived in Marda Loop for 6+ years and I’m starting to tire of the construction.
 
CBBarnett said:
All of this is a symptom of the main issue - sidewalks and pathways are still not considered priorities, particularly from a transportation perspective. I have spent a lot of years on this site complaining about this and refining my thesis about this:

Calgary treats sidewalks and pathways in this weird grey area somewhere between transportation and development. Strangely, funding for sidewalk upgrades is super complex and opaque, with multiple programs and projects all kind of doing similar things. Funding gets cobbled together from this wide variety of programs and sources, each with their own goals and objectives. Importantly, these different funding sources don't always have the same goals or have the same triggers to create an actual project.

Take the main street program, for example. The project area in Marda Loop seems to be in areas that had broad city-led up-zoning occur - essentially the goal appears to be to try to link public investment with planned growth.

The nuance here is the investment trigger seems to be investment for planned growth, not actual growth. Marda Loop has had half of 33/34th upzoned (the western BIA side), while the eastern side didn't get upzoned thanks to community opposition. As investment is aligned to the planned growth, the phasing focuses on the western side, despite actual growth occurring everywhere, and skyrocketing actual user demand (i.e. the number of pedestrians and cyclists actually needing the infrastructure) is visible everywhere nearby thanks to decades of infill.

Another common approach that triggers sidewalk and pathway upgrades isn't demand or zoning or growth at all - it's repaving. Want a bike lane and some curb cuts? Little actually can be done to make it happen unless the road happens to be a few years away from repaving and repainting (even then it's an uphill battle). Again, actual need or demand for safe sidewalks and cycling is not the trigger for investment, the amount of paint worn off by cars is the trigger for investment.

All this contrast starkly with arterial corridor planning for driving. The objective (move lots of cars fast) is always known and always the same, and the trigger is always known (there's more cars and congestion here than ideal, to the point it should probably be upgraded). Any arterial exceeds thresholds gets looked at and eventually added to a single list and prioritized for upgrades. Money (hundreds of millions of dollars each year) is then prioritized periodically to a specific corridor to do those upgrades.

So back to this development and what this all means:
  1. Because we don't take sidewalks seriously, we leave the implementation of them up to random developments like this one instead of a more systematic approach like major roads.
  2. This means sidewalks are negotiated and ad-hoc, both in timing and quality, making a complete and consistent network practically impossible to build.
  3. This ad-hoc approach even impacts existing programs, where sidewalk segments can be de-scoped as part of that negotiation to save a few bucks (in theory) for a development to pay for them instead in 5 to 10 years (assuming the development actually happens).
  4. If the city's approach sidewalk planning was more similar to arterial road planning, the construction would have been done decades ago, with wide consistent sidewalks already existing the entire length of the corridor. This development would just simply have to tie in to them and not block/disrupt operation of the sidewalk with construction.
  5. If we planned Crowchild the way we plan our sidewalks, it would randomly be changing between 1 and 4 lanes, have random paint and debris all over, inconsistent everything and have construction hoarding blocking 2 lanes indefinitely.
We need systematic reform to resolve these sidewalk issues. Otherwise we will keep having weird half-finished networks (2010-era 26 Avenue SW bike lane that just randomly ends after Crowchild; 17th Avenue sidewalks taking a decade to replace, Marda Loop's main street only doing have the corridor, with random exclusions that are dependent on development to complete etc.)
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Agree with everything. In fact the first sentence in each of your points points out exactly the problem. Somebody earlier said we‘re a big city now, so we should wear big boy pants. I am not certain that the City knows what“ Big Boy „ pants are. My own view, I don‘t think this is going to go through.
 
shermanator said:
I moved to Marda Loop a decade ago because I wanted the mix of urban and suburban and have welcomed the additional development. Even if one of the developments down the street turned out to be an absolute disaster.

I share the position the BIA makes in the video. I'd be happy to get the Co-op and additional amenities with a little less height.

There are numerous empty or acquired and given-up-on lots in a 2 block radius that I would like to see developed as well. Maybe keep it to 10-12 stories like we are seeing in Kensington. Lots of places to add density it doesn't have to be forced into one lot in one project.
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The project economics of one piece of dirt dont care about the shot comings of another piece of dirt
 
shermanator said:
I moved to Marda Loop a decade ago because I wanted the mix of urban and suburban and have welcomed the additional development. Even if one of the developments down the street turned out to be an absolute disaster.

I share the position the BIA makes in the video. I'd be happy to get the Co-op and additional amenities with a little less height.

There are numerous empty or acquired and given-up-on lots in a 2 block radius that I would like to see developed as well. Maybe keep it to 10-12 stories like we are seeing in Kensington. Lots of places to add density it doesn't have to be forced into one lot in one project.
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This project really pushes the precedent of the area, it wasn't long ago that 5 over 1s were pushing the precedent so I can understand how jarring this is to people. I guess what I'm missing and I am open to an explanation is what shortening it a few floors would do?

This design iteration is the worst I've seen of this development since they've turned it into a full block podium with nothing appealing about the ground level. I wish they would've kept the cool little alley or the public access to the steps on the SE corner but that is all gone. Unfortunately there's no going back to what made this development interesting but that should be the conversation, not the height. What they're proposing is more suited to their property along Crowchild in NW, not a main street development in Marda Loop. Here's hoping we can start to demand more quality in our high value locations in this city but I don't know how you do that?
 
CalgaryTiger said:
This project really pushes the precedent of the area, it wasn't long ago that 5 over 1s were pushing the precedent so I can understand how jarring this is to people. I guess what I'm missing and I am open to an explanation is what shortening it a few floors would do?

This design iteration is the worst I've seen of this development since they've turned it into a full block podium with nothing appealing about the ground level. I wish they would've kept the cool little alley or the public access to the steps on the SE corner but that is all gone. Unfortunately there's no going back to what made this development interesting but that should be the conversation, not the height. What they're proposing is more suited to their property along Crowchild in NW, not a main street development in Marda Loop. Here's hoping we can start to demand more quality in our high value locations in this city but I don't know how you do that?
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The open market determines "quality"

Reducing the height would negatively affect the economics / feasibility: it's just math
 
CalgaryTiger said:
What they're proposing is more suited to their property along Crowchild in NW, not a main street development in Marda Loop. Here's hoping we can start to demand more quality in our high value locations in this city but I don't know how you do that?
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I am not sure what this mean exactly - this form is not revolutionary, but competent to me: a tower/podium with 3 active retail streetwalls including a bunch of shops and a major grocery store, with generous sidewalks and lots of effort to minimize truck and car circulations across the pedestrian realm of a Main Street. Of course they could do a no-parking option here to further lean into a walkable main street ethos, but I don't think that would change the design much - still need the truck access.

I guess they could make the podium out of bricks? People love bricks. Apart from subjective stuff like colours and materials I don't really see how this can't fit in the community or any major gaps in the design that fits such density of retail and housing into a prime location. It's totally designed to be the anchor for the whole community.

What is it that doesn't work? Is it the design you are opposed to (i.e. too conventional, too boring materials, colours, style) or the form (i.e. towers and podium designs work on Crowchild, but don't work in Marda Loop)?
 
I don't think the community is going to come out against the tower because it's a tower, but because it means that block is housing 500 more people and their cars.

That effect could be mitigated by being near rapid transit, or being walking distance to downtown/other employment centres, or being near roads with higher throughput, but this block in Marda Loop is none of those things.
 
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I have no problem with the height, I wasn't clear in saying I want better quality and lower height. I was actually asking, why height is an issue? I have no problem with height here but what I do not like is that the residential along 33rd isn't stepped back so it isn't so imposing, maybe there isn't room with the central podium rooftop? People will care about the height, I assume this could have as much opposition as the Glenmore Landing development, as I said this is a whole new precedent for the area. When you're pushing the envelope with height and density, you're going to get more than the average NIMBY out.

CBBarnett said:
subjective stuff like colours and materials
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Specifically this is what I don't like, The Martel development across the street does a really nice job of having some different colours and materials than any other development I have seen. To me, this is more of the same and it could be anywhere.
 
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badc0ffee said:
I don't think the community is going to come out against the tower because it's a tower, but because it means that block is housing 500 more people and their cars.

That effect could be mitigated by being near rapid transit, or being walking distance to downtown/other employment centres, or being near roads with higher throughput, but this block in Marda Loop is none of those things.
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I actually wonder how much traffic in Marda Loop - or anywhere really - is "locally generated" v. cut-through. Is Marda Loop's congestion a product of too many people living there? Or too many services that cater to customers outside the community that tend to drive in to visit? Or neither - it's a product of cut-through traffic from non-locals of people going to downtown, Crowchild and other destinations. The answer is obviously a bit of everything - but therefore the solution isn't to stop density, because that isn't the real source of the problem.

Apart from commutes outside the community, approximately 100% of people living in this development would walk for their daily needs here - there's a literal CO-OP on your first floor, plus multiple banks, daycares, cafes, pharmacies, restaurants and dentists within a block. Marda Loop legitimately has at least 1 of everything people tend to use on a daily basis within 2 blocks, now with better sidewalks. Put another way, the units in this development (or any existing units within a few blocks) will have better walkable retail access than 99.5% of Calgarians. Depending on how you slice it, it can defensibly be argued that much of the Beltline doesn't even have that concentration and mixture of services that a development like this would bring to Marda Loop. That's impressive.

So that leaves commuter traffic - yes more cars will mean more traffic at peak hour - but meaningfully more congestion? It's already congested. Do people on 12th Ave in the Beltline notice the increased congestion from yet another 300 unit, 30 storey building being built in the Beltline? I argue no - once your community is vibrant, it's got a level of congestion to it. That's the deal. Congestion is self-limiting - if it's really bad, people stop driving or take different routes. Every local trip becomes on foot, freeing up car trips for non-locals. This happens in every popular urban district in the world. It'll happen here too.

Transit needs a rethink in Marda Loop, but it's hardly as if these 400 units are being built on the the moon - express bus to downtown a few blocks away, multiple milk routes throughout.
 
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