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Urban Development and Proposals Discussion

As much as I am an urban booster, I think there is truth to those numbers. Anything I have read on happiness studies almost always boil down to a few things: how close your friends and family are, if you feel your work or life is meaningful, if you express gratitude in your daily life, if you are free from oppression and poverty. Rural life, because it is typically more tight knit, does favour some of those things more than in urban settings. Knowing only a few people, but quite intimately, is much better for your happiness than knowing many people, but with weaker ties. I think it illustrates that urban areas need to pay more attention to how they foster social connection.
 
kora said:
"People who live in small towns are happier than everyone else" .... I wonder how we can build cities better to solve this problem.

"A team of happiness researchers at the University of British Columbia and McGill University has published a working paper on the geography of well-being in Canada ..... the researcher’s chief finding is that a striking association between population density and happiness ...... people in cities often have fewer social connections nearby, and feel less connected to their communities than people in rural areas."

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada...ppier-than-everyone-else-researchers-say.html
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A few things to keep in mind with regard to this study:

First, when you correlate residential density at the national level, you're mainly getting the difference between people who live inside metro areas versus people who live outside metros. You're not getting the difference between people who live in pre-war inner-city neighbourhoods versus post-war suburbs. In fact, when you look purely at residential density, the sprawling suburbs don't look particularly different than the most Jacobsian utopias of urbanity. 5000-6000 people/km2 could be the downtown East Village or suburban Martindale in Calgary. It could be the Beaches in Toronto or suburban North York.

Second, because of the way we've built our metro areas in this country, the vast majority of Canadian city-dwellers live in sprawling, torturous hellscapes where they spend most of their day stuck in their car, fighting gridlock as they travel between office parks, outlet malls, and residential subdivisions. They live in an environment made up of surface parking lots, concrete noise barriers, and garbage-strewn plots of dead grass. I'm not surprised that they're not as happy as people in rural areas. But that doesn't mean that density inherently makes people unhappy. It means that we need to do a better job at making our cities more livable.

Third, "happiness" is a powerfully vague term that means a lot of things to different people - which is why most social scientists aren't particularly interested in it. However this study actually asked people "how satisfied" they are with their lives. If you are a person with personal ambitions or who is a small-l liberal (that is, someone who is comfortable with and desires change), then you are probably going to score yourself slightly lower on a scale of life satisfaction. These also happen to be personality traits that correlate with urban living.
 
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I know that living in a small town can go both ways. Having lived in Olds, and lived in Canmore. I loved living in Canmore for multiple reasons, and despite Olds being around the same size, had a different experience living there.
I think the whole study and article is dubious at best, as there so many aspects to happiness that a proper study comparing happiness in big cities and small towns is virtually impossible to do.
 
I've spend a lot of time in Olds and would never consider living there, people there don't seem any happier than people in Calgary. The biggest benefit to living in a small town I can see is the lack of traffic and congestion, but you also live in a place where nothing really ever happens, which is boring, and bored people aren't happy.
 
Interesting concept. Not sure why they are limiting it to 2 floors though on the entire piece of land...there are plenty of examples of buildings that butt up against overpasses.
 
Good on Dave for pushing for a development on this lot. Concept sounds like a great one and having multiple food services inside will mean businesses can close and change without the whole building sitting vacant with a for lease sign up.

Nimbus said:
Former Mayor Bronconnier's company has plans for the triangle shaped lot in East Village adjacent to the Drop-In Centre. We've heard mumblings about this in the past, CBC out with the story today:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/east-village-bronconnier-foodhall-1.4689094
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This is not what I was expecting. I hope it works out. I don't understand why this would be limited to 2 floors should they want to build higher.
 
maestro said:
This is not what I was expecting. I hope it works out. I don't understand why this would be limited to 2 floors should they want to build higher.
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DiscoStu said:
Interesting concept. Not sure why they are limiting it to 2 floors though on the entire piece of land...there are plenty of examples of buildings that butt up against overpasses.
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Yeah, wondering the same thing. Even 3 or 4 extra floors would be worthwhile.
 
DiscoStu said:
Interesting concept. Not sure why they are limiting it to 2 floors though on the entire piece of land...there are plenty of examples of buildings that butt up against overpasses.
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Make some money in the mean time and land banking for the future would be my guess. $5 million to build + land, 28,000 square feet leaseable (or effectively leaseable with higher rent on private spaces carrying the common area), at lets say $30/sqft rent plus operating and taxes. Over 20 years you can generate a 15% return every year.
 
Mountain Man said:
This would likely be a temporary thing if he's only looking at 2 storeys. Being right beside the drop in, I can see this food court overrun with homeless and drug addicts though...
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Like, certainly. Unless there is some sort of Dickensian style security presence at all times, which would be almost just as off-putting for everyone there.
 
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