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Calgary's Downtown Dilemma

I’ve said this sooo many times! I really hope it happens. Nexen Tower would make a perfect vertical farm. Floor plates too large for residential conversion but floor heights high enough for corn and orange trees etc.
 
I really don't see much value in vertical farms. They're an interesting gimmick but not really a serious solution to any problem.

Dedicating our best real estate and most valuable square footage in the city to a low value producing use like farming just isn't economically feasible, at least in the long term. We have plenty of land in Alberta; that's not an issue. If we do find a strong economic reason to do hydroponics, we can do them in specially constructed facilities on land where it makes more sense (say, near some of the small satellite towns around the city).

Filling a bunch of office towers with plants wouldn't do anything to revitalize downtown either. We should be filling them with people.
 
jhappy77 said:
I really don't see much value in vertical farms. They're an interesting gimmick but not really a serious solution to any problem.

Dedicating our best real estate and most valuable square footage in the city to a low value producing use like farming just isn't economically feasible, at least in the long term. We have plenty of land in Alberta; that's not an issue. If we do find a strong economic reason to do hydroponics, we can do them in specially constructed facilities on land where it makes more sense (say, near some of the small satellite towns around the city).

Filling a bunch of office towers with plants wouldn't do anything to revitalize downtown either. We should be filling them with people.
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I see the value for things like herbs/micro greens.

There are some restaurants in the city that already do this themselves (Teatro Group), but not all restaurants have the space/resources to do it.

If all downtown restaurants were able to source fresh produce, daily, within a couple kilometres, rather than from 20+ km (or hundreds/thousands of km in the winter) I think that would be great.

I don’t think we need floors and floors of these vertical farms, but if they can convert a few, that’s thousands of square feet of vacant office space now occupied.
 
adamyyc said:
I see the value for things like herbs/micro greens.

There are some restaurants in the city that already do this themselves (Teatro Group), but not all restaurants have the space/resources to do it.

If all downtown restaurants were able to source fresh produce, daily, within a couple kilometres, rather than from 20+ km (or hundreds/thousands of km in the winter) I think that would be great.

I don’t think we need floors and floors of these vertical farms, but if they can convert a few, that’s thousands of square feet of vacant office space now occupied.
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Ya I suppose I should clarify that my skepticism is more geared towards the larger scale stuff you see in renders, like this:
1656133216217.png

Smaller scale hydroponics like you mentioned are more realistic, and if the economics work then all the best to any groups that do this. But I don't think it's likely to be successful at large scales (like the 3 million sqft of office space suggested in the future) or in the long term (when demand for space recovers and prices go up).
 
I don’t think anyone here was proposing or assuming open-air vertical farms.. in Calgary of all places 🤣 just… farming in towers.

Anyways, Adam hit the nail on the head, precisely about shortening supply chains and creating a more sustainable community. It’s the only way forward, really.
 
So last I read, there was ~13M sqft of empty office space a few months ago (it may be slowly filling up now with oil recovering).

The first 3 projects took 414K of sqft off the market; these two are another 251K of sqft. The estimates from the city is that 6 million square feet need to be taken off the market to balance it.

So in total it's cost ~73M to take 665K sqft off the market, so if we're going to keep funding these this is going to take something like ~$600-$700M, unless the economics change.

Hopefully it's enough to kickstart a cycle where conversions happen without city support but this is looking like an expensive endeavour long term
 
Rendering of United Place misses the mark for me. I like the colour of the brick better than the proposed white. Hard to tell if they're proposing to make any changes to the negative space at each floor (areas between the windows), but I'd like to see them go darker (black) than the current brown colour. Opening up the ground floor will be a major improvement, although I'd prefer to see the retaining areas be brought to sidewalk grade and bring any walkway steps/ramps closer to the building.
 
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