FCC1982
Active Member
Yeah Baby!!
Lots of good tidbits on pending projects here the last couple of days
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Urban Development and Proposals Discussion
- Thread starter Surrealplaces
- Start date
Lots of good tidbits on pending projects here the last couple of days
Urban4Lyfe
New Member
The other fencing is directly south of this around an already existing building that Google maps has labeled Mission Square Apartments.
Roaring Flames
Senior Member
I'm completely shocked Councillors McLean, Wong, Chabot, Demong, Chu and Sharp voted in favour of a plebiscite.
Glad common sense prevailed.
Glad common sense prevailed.
DiscoStu
Active Member
Councillors are elected to make the hard decisions. If they aren't up to it, they may as well resign and let someone else wear the big pants.
ByeByeBaby
Active Member
Particularly rich since 2 of these folks (McLean and Chabot) voted against the public's wishes from the most recent plebiscite (on fluoride).
DougB
Senior Member
They should focus on real issues rather than those from Toronto and Vancouver. Rezoning the whole city is a big deal and is unlikely to be viewed as legitimate without a plebiscite. Bulk rezoning without broad public support will only encourage opposition to redevelopment. Unlike other cities, Calgary has plenty of vacant and underutilized inner city land for redevelopment, probably enough for 100K+ units. It also has ability to add millions of units on its fringes. Rather than a blunt approach to project #progressive virtue, the City should focus rezoning on areas of high potential like old strip malls, underutilized school sites and select main streets like its has with 37th Street SW. If the City were truly concerned with affordability, it would study what it could do to reduce construction timelines so that developers can pass on reducing finance costs incurred during construction. Up until about the late 2000s, for example, it was possible to build a SFH in about 4 months. Why has that timeline more than doubled?
O-tac
Active Member
The timeline is longer I would guess due to problems such as lack of skilled trades and sheer overwhelming volume of demand.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
I see it completely the other way around - citywide rezoning to a higher base density gives individual land owners more land rights and less government intervention to restrict how many homes you have on your land is a conservative value, or at least it once was?
More freedom for land owners is an amazing concession by the big, bad government - government isn't smart enough to outwit markets to create housing! Isn't that a conservative thing too? It sounds like conservatives these days are actually support government picking winners and losers and arbitrarily be up-zoning strip malls instead of leaving it up to individuals to make their own choices about their land.
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DiscoStu
Active Member
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with the blanket rezoning (honestly I don't know about this issue enough to have an informed opinion). But we vote people in to make decisions like this for a reason. Maybe those people are doing a terrible job, or making the wrong decisions... but at the very least they should have a clearer picture of these issues, and theoretically be more qualified and interested. Putting the onus on Joe citizen, who will probably spend 3 minutes looking into it, is just kinda lazy and cowardly.
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Red Star
Active Member
You took the words out of my mouth.
IMHO it doesn't make sense to do a blanket zoning upscale of everywhere in the city. Upzoning many areas will only increase the overall use of cars in areas that are poorly served by transit. For example, take this stretch of homes located at Deerfield Circle SE:
It's far away from a rapid transit stop and if row homes were to be built here, it would just add more drivers and strain the road network.
I think a more effective approach, would be to scale development around transit stations and roads with frequency bus service. When I walk around Calgary, it blows my mind how many vacant and underutilized lots are in Downtown, the Beltline and around transit stations. Take this block by Chinook for example:
There's a Scotiabank, an abandoned warehouse and a large parking lot sitting on 3 acres that's right next to transit station. In fact, the entire 1km radius around Chinook is completely underutilized.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when the 2023 National Building Code - Alberta Edition is released on May1, it will allow for the construction of 12 story wood frame buildings. You could fill Macleod Trail, and 36th street NE with relatively affordable 12 story buildings. Maybe the city could even carve out a caveat which could reduce the parking requirements and thus reduce the overall cost.
Take the Trico development on Macleod and 78th. It's not glamourous. It's not an architectural marvel. But it adds people and businesses to an existing area, with existing infrastructure and existing transit.
That leads me to my next question. Is it possible for the City of Calgary to identify vacant and underutilized lots and tax them at a higher rate in order to encourage development?
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Albertasaurus
Active Member
I'm not against the citywide rezoning - I think it's ridiculous that the vast bulk of a city approaching 2 million people is zoned for single family homes only - but I don't think it's the solution to our housing crisis. In fact, in some cases the opposite: the houses getting torn down in trendy communities like Altadore, South Calgary, Mt Pleasant and Capitol Hill are often older buildings that are a good source of affordable rental units being replaced by $700,000 rowhouses. That's not really helping.
Doug has a point that this city has massive tracts of undeveloped land in desirable areas - close to the downtown core, Eau Claire, just about every LRT station and underdeveloped main streets like 17th SE, Centre St, Mac Trail and 16 Av just to name a few that could accommodate hundreds of thousands of people. Perhaps we should find ways to incentivize/prioritize development in strategic areas that we want to see redeveloped (in in and around downtown) and close to primary transit.
Doug has a point that this city has massive tracts of undeveloped land in desirable areas - close to the downtown core, Eau Claire, just about every LRT station and underdeveloped main streets like 17th SE, Centre St, Mac Trail and 16 Av just to name a few that could accommodate hundreds of thousands of people. Perhaps we should find ways to incentivize/prioritize development in strategic areas that we want to see redeveloped (in in and around downtown) and close to primary transit.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
I think you are forgetting about markets, supply and demand. If a semi-detached or row house doesn't make economic sense in Deer Run, it won't be built in Deer Run regardless of the zoning.
But if it does make sense, let the market decide where and when this incremental intensification stuff occurs, an arbitrary 1 unit per lot rule imposed by the government is way too heavy--handed when we are only talking about adding 2, 3 or 4 units. There is no justification for that level of micro-management by government. The development process will still be required for all the infrastructure, safety and building code stuff.
On this location in Deer Run specifically, even if incremental growth occurs it won't cause crippling traffic in Deer Run because of two reasons:
1. Population remains 21% below peak population of 1998, or about 2,300 people.
2. Bow Bottom Trail SE was originally designed to be Deerfoot's southern extension before Fish Creek Park was established. As such, it's design like a high capacity freeway and has several multiple times more capacity the car volumes it sees as it doesn't connect to anything. The last traffic count I could find on Bow Bottom in this area was in 2013, and estimated 11,000 cars a day (6,000 NB, 5,000 SB). This makes this road less busy than 33rd Ave in Marda Loop, a 2 lane road.
Even if purely car-dependent, and a lot of houses turn over from 1 unit to 2 (or 3 or 4), there's no scenario in which these roads reach any sort of capacity limit. But not all houses will turn over, and all this will happen only over a long period of time so it's a moot point.
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DougB
Senior Member
That is an excellent example. Rather than rezoning SFH in Queensland, Deer Run and Bonavista Downs, why not rezone the excess RoW adjacent to Bow Bottom, as well as some of the alleys and parking that front it for 6 story apartments? A blunt approach like rezoning the entire city to gain an ideological win against SFH owners, when very few of those SFH will actually be replaced at higher density would be pointless.
DougB
Senior Member
Under skilled worker constraints, I would think that a developer would maximize its capital turnover by having fewer projects on the go so that it could complete them faster rather than spreading the same number of workers across more projects for longer durations. Companies are incented to turnover capital as quickly as possible, so that is why I would first look to government as the problem.