All that public money investing in projects and the failing land strategy still seems to be let everyone build towers like the Guardian. I have touched on this before but all we are seeing is speculation driving up the cost of the land. CMLC says you can build 10 FAR in East Victoria Park even though it is currently an undesirable wasteland of underutilized gravel parking lots? Then the land is priced according to that unneccessarily high FAR. The Guardian saturated the demand for condos in that neighbourhood for 10+ years. The scale of these projects are far too big IMO. Give them up to 3 or 4 FAR for most of these sites. I would rather see this entire neighbourhood be built out as 6-storey apartments with stacked townhouses and townhouses towards the eastern edge and fill in these gravel parking lots as soon as possible. The land is worth whatever someone can make a development work at, not constantly waiting for some master-planned community vision to tell you that a 25 or 30 storey tower is just right. I would rather us see the community fully built out in 25 years with 6-storey buildings and some townhouses than see two more Guardian-sized towers in the same amount of time surrounding by a desolate wasteland. We don't have Vancouver or Toronto amounts of demand for apartments particularly in this prolonged economic downturn. Sell the lots for what someone can make money on today and it'll build out. The vision for and land strategy of East Victoria Park assumes levels of multi-family demand that will see full buildout probably not even within our lifetimes if we keep building huge ass towers that soak up all the demand for units in that neighbourhood for a decade. All of this investment of public dollars will push up the expectation for the land price you can sell it at and developers will only be able to make big developments work at those prices. It couldn't be more obvious that the majority of developers here are focused on selling the land for the highest price not building the best possible building they could for current conditions. To many land flippers and not enough developer/builders with vision that can execute. I genuinely think if you gave densities that are identical to University District this area would build out in no time and be more productive for people and the economy than whatever this land strategy is doing for us.
The problem isn't the zoning, the zoning is actually pretty on point for a city our size. A huge problem is that we don't charge an appropriate level of property taxes on suburban homes. The cost of servicing that kind of sprawl with infrastructure is significantly higher than inner-city communities, but the cost of living doesn't proportionally reflect that. What we're effectively doing is subsidizing our city to sprawl at the expense of everyone else, especially the dense urban neighborhoods.
As a buyer not educated in urban planning, why wouldn't you want significantly more floor area for a lower cost? Of course its the same people who will never vote for an increase in their own property taxes, curse at bike lanes for being too expensive, and that widening roadways would solve congestion *internal scream*. Since municipal politicians serve voters, the policy follows. There's a reason many of the highest density cities in the world are the way they are, because they have geographic barriers limiting their growth outward.
TLDR: The problem isn't that we're overvaluing our inner-city lands, it's that the ones on the outside are proportionally too cheap.
Here's a few ways to fix our problems:
-Hard cap on greenfield development expanding the city,
nothing new outside what exists.
-Adjust property taxes to more accurately reflect cost of providing services, low density sprawl is a luxury that should be afforded.
-Significantly more incentives for affordable housing, not every new development needs marble counters. Recoup from increased tax revenue on sprawl.
-Require a percentage of each development be affordable, and a percentage of units with >2 bedrooms.
-Allow secondary suites everywhere, no more single family zoning.
-No minimum parking for new developments, developers will provide it where it makes sense. We already have >10M stalls in Calgary.
-No more widening roadways, induced demand is a death sentence.
-Focus on providing a
diversity of housing types/densities.
-Stop promising train lines to the edge of the city. If we want a train line from Inglewood to 16th Ave N, why do we have to build a stop to 130th Ave S too? If people in Seton wanted accessible transit, they wouldn't live in a suburban wasteland. It also prevents the, "why is it $4B" argument.
-Streetcars. We need a 17th Ave Streetcar, I can't believe we don't already.
