Northland Village Redevelopment | 19m | 6s | DIALOG

We end up with this development for four inter-dependent reasons:
  • Parking requirements - we encourage and mandate too much parking and force it to be off-street. Developer doesn't protest too much because area is suburban and car-oriented anyway (so is assumption on future market for residents). Some of it on the surface to make development more affordable, which we allow in this case.
  • Setback/orientation requirements - useless greenspaces, inward looking design that isolates and separates all development from each other. Combined with surface parking and an inability to imagine our arterial roads for being anything but high-speed vehicle spaces and we have a car-oriented medium-density place.
  • Design culture of city, developer and market - to overcome the regulatory and economic hurdles requires creativity and desire to do something different. Tricky because it's many many different interlocking people, perceptions and mindsets that need to change. In a lower-value redevelopment site (as opposed to a Bridgeland example) that has no history of urban development this is a tall order.
  • Economics - markets are soft, margins are tight, governments are receptive to arguments to reduce the burden. Not a bad thing - but it really depends whether economic conditions favour challenging all the requirements and cultural roadblocks to better density and design or not. In this case, and many others, the answer is mixed.
The city could try harder and remove regulations (setbacks, parking minimums) and add regulations (ban surface parking, allow parking on Northland Drive) but that would only get you so far. It would also trigger a ton of complex "who should pay for what? who has the liability? who compensates who for the development's community impacts?" questions. Assuming you get through all that, you'd still have to hope that your Regina developer can play within those new rules and you haven't accidentally broken all their project's economics.

Tricky stuff all around. But there are paths here for a better development if you can unpack a few of these elements and start tipping the scales.
 
Wasn't able to get a photo driving by, but it looked like there were drilling piles here.
Maybe for the residential component?
 
Looks like it. Deveraux is saying completion in October 2022:
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Circled in red for where this is in Phase 1 of the master plan.
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Sadly the parking lot being placed at the front and no retail are likely going to kill any hopes of there being a Mainstreet running through this redevelopment. Well scaled density, poor urban design. This could've become similar to what University District is becoming but near a future LRT station.
 
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It looks like one of those “doing the wrong things, but better” developments. I’m increasingly wary of density & intensification that doesn’t materially reduce car dependence.

We kind of end up in this weird spot often with TOD type proposals, where all the language and design nods the right way and says the right words, but the design and lingering car-orientation still has one foot into a non-transit world . The result is a muddled development that never really achieves what it could (and says it will).

A critique on my position is that true TOD or significant car-dependency reduction is unrealistic or too big of a leap; what’s proposed is clearly a good incremental improvement of the area.

But incrementalism isn’t how we built car-dependent society and ring roads, why should we slow play a TOD site? Or more specifically - why should the city have any rules that slow play a developer that wants to do things with less car-orientation? Our regular suspects of arterial road car-throughput only rules and parking requirements are again obvious in this design - counteracting the nice pro-TOD language/design nods of the rest of proposal.
 

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