Considering the suburban location, I would say this is a major win. As a local resident, I am pretty excited about the fact there will be a 3rd walkable grocery store (rumours of a potential fourth if
West Springs Landing lands one as a lead tenent), and the fact that it maintains the retail high street (does any other grocery store in town do this?), I am willing to look past a relatively small surface parking lot at the edge of the community bounded by an arterial road. In terms of units above it, yes that would be ideal, but I am amazed at the density being achieved already with this community. Maybe not a 10/10, but I will gladly take the 9/10 this one seems to be.
Fully agree. This is a significantly better designed grocery development than CO-OP Midtown, which is obviously in a far more urban setting with much higher pedestrian traffic. Turns out you can line a big-box store with more human scale, pedestrian fronting retail and wide sidewalks. Sure we could have put the grocery entrance on the SW corner intersection, but this is the next best thing with retail activating what would have been a big blank full-block wall.
My only critique is the classic problem of these large, master-planned communities - they are internally consistent, but struggle to integrate to their surround developments.
In other cities, some of the struggle for large projects to integrate to each other is mitigated by the focus on public arterials; random developments integrate to the major street that drives the consistency, pedestrian and transit-focus. Over time the corridor is the destination, not the developments themselves.
Calgary doesn't do this well because we don't believe in street-fronting activity on a large portion of suburban streets. 85th Street SW - one of our better designed suburban stretches - we still don't really believe activity should front directly on these types of streets so force all the off-corridor development, strip malls and store entrances in inefficient places.
Because it's all Truman, this is somewhat mitigated in the area in general by the scale of what is being done - if we can't use 85 Street as the main street, we will just create our own. Large enough developments can get away with this if they execute well. Even still, the integration challenge is visible to the north of the grocery site, where the strip mall to the north is just walled off and not planned together at all.
Overall though - this is exactly what we want in the burbs and frankly many far more urban places that 85 Street (although I wish it was built at 69 Street Station rather than the north end of 85 Street).
trumanhomes.com
.... ????) also more surface parking. There's a no frills and a Co-op just on 85th.
www.condosdeal.com
