A lot of why BLVD does better - apart from a more ground-oriented, appropriate urban design - is 12th Avenue's cycletrack and the 13th Avenue greenway components serve to strengthen the pedestrian linkages across the chasm of Macleod's couplet. So yes - changing the roads are a key part of making any development reasonable in the area. So will any additional park/pathway connections into the Elbow River pathway system, however it's a fairly neglected corridor with little room for a network on the north side of the river at all, let alone on this parcel. Better public realm and less hostile quasi-freeway only goes so far with a podium like this though.
The only hope for improvement now rests on materials, which one of the weakest and least reliable pillars to base a project's success on. Materials are also never enough to overcome complete urban design failures.
I continue to think in line with my original opinion when the renders were first discussed - this project is a rare example where the level of density is actually the core problem - it's just too much. 10 storey chunky podiums are very difficult to integrate in a city (beyond maybe Manhattan or Shanghai), doubly so when they are just parking and not something more active (i.e. an urban mall, residential etc.) I would have happily lost the middle tower and it's associated parking levels if it brought the podium down a few floors.
The density is so high that the usual bonuses (increased local foot traffic) won't be overcome by the drawbacks. The design is far too blunt and traditional - just an over-scaled inward looking, parking + apartment development with little thought to living there or nearby. It's on the scale of a Vancouver or Toronto mega-development, but with none of the level of design those cities attempt (not always successfully) to make neighbourhoods at this scale livable. For example, this scale of development so close to an LRT station could have done a high-quality LRT integration like Marine Drive or Brentwood Town Centre in Vancouver.
It does say something about our process:
- the most impacted site is city-owned to the north. Which will now be permanently in shadow. Does the city not have a role to protect the viability of it's own lands? This site can no longer be an effective park or open space due to permanent shadows - yet I don't think it complained at all the way a private landowner might have.
- I don't know what the density bonusing calculation was but the city got 22 affordable housing units in this one. Is that enough to offset the impacts?
- Why can we add 1,300 units to a neighbourhood - equivalent to adding a Cliff Bungalow or Garrison Woods or University Heights - but have it not trigger public realm upgrades automatically throughout the area?
