Ezra is 8 storeys and it the right height. I think all the big trees at the south end of the park will cause more shadowing than the buildings will anyway.
I am increasingly skeptical of shadowing concerns for most redevelopment, such as 12 v. 8 v. 6 stories on Riley Park. Mostly this is because shadows are way too often treated as a nuisance to be avoided, rather than a more nuanced pro/con conversations. Avoiding shadows increasingly reminds me of the endless parking debates - where there's gut reaction is to "need" a certain amount parking, but the logic starts to fall apart a bit when tested with real world situations that are more nuanced.
In the case of Riley Park, the area most impacted by shadows is the southern most fringe of the park, which currently looks like this below. Even here shadows from a 12-storey building across the alley to the south would have negligible impact from mid-May to mid-September.
But forgotten almost instantly in any community debate is we really aren't debating a 12-storey building, this is what's proposed with step-backs at floor 8, and the whole building pushed far to the south of the site:
So when we say we are "shadowing a park" what we mean is we are shadowing the southern fringe of a park, which is already in permanent shadow, for a few hours a day on the shoulder seasons of hottest part of summer.
Development shadow debates also ignore that shadows in parks and streets are increasingly an asset in hotter summers - it doesn't mean this building needs to provide this, but it's just not as a simple as shadows = bad the way that the applications go so far out of their way to minimize shadows at all times.
Winter of course, is a different story. The problem here is that whatever they build is too high if the goal is to minimize shadows as the sun is so low and there's so few hours of sun to begin with, it's mostly a moot point in the depths of winter. At our latitudes a building of any height will cast a reasonably large shadow in the depths of winter. So if we want no shadows in winter maybe 2 to 4 stories is the answer? Maybe we should ban spruce trees in parks as well, they don't let light through in winter.
Most people want the light in winter but understand we can't all just have bungalows and cut down spruce trees everywhere. So we end up with hybrid rule based on the equinoxes of March and September where the shadows are big, but not too big to "balance" things. It's muddled policy that's pretending to be a quantitative scientific approach, but is really just a negotiated position on the degree in which people feel that shadows are bad.
So rather than being distracted with pretty modest differences in height options and hypothetical shadow impacts on the park (that may not even be a bad thing), what should debate focus on? If impacts to the park are the thing we care so much about, why don't we get developments like this to actually make the park better?
For example this is the park access on the southern edge where this development is proposed - ugly and totally underwhelming for such a celebrated community asset that Riley Park is. If you are not local, you'd not even know that through that broken chain link fence is one of Calgary's best urban parks. Why don't people advocate to do something better here?
Compare to a fairly basic secondary park entrance in New York. Perhaps we don't need the New York-style wrought iron fence and hyper manicured look, but surely continuity of the sidewalk, consistent pavement materials and an actual entrance would be better? This isn't actually a lot of money and it's the type of stuff we should be advocating development help trigger investment in, rather than just obsess over hypothetical shadows on a really ugly and dilapidated park access.
calgaryherald.com
