News   Apr 03, 2020
 6.4K     1 
News   Apr 02, 2020
 8K     4 
News   Apr 02, 2020
 4.7K     0 

Urban Development and Proposals Discussion

I hope the 26 storey tower goes ahead still. This area should have a few highrises due to the proximity to downtown...

Is anything going to happen to that big vacant lot on 1st? It's a steep site so it's challenging but something needs to happen there. Maybe they should just turn it into a park
 
That said, I share the frustrations with CAs. Unfortunately they're so entrenched in Calgary that I fear they will always have outsized influence in development matters and be looked at by many Councillors as the "de facto" voice of communities even though they're not.
It's a tricky one - at crux of the problem, CAs and communities are simply too small to be effective at representative decision-making on most issues. 90% of communities do not have enough population to generate enough volunteers to have a self-sustaining infrastructure and consensus building apparatus that can consistently be the "representative voice" of a local area.

The unsustainable small size is why CAs have such dramatic rise-and-fall in prominence and effectiveness over the years. Small groups can cobble together a coherent group with enthusiasm and get organized for a bit, then collapse or fall apart when energy fades years or a decades later. The small and volunteer nature mean CAs are super susceptible to be taken over by single-issue movements (e.g. all the CAs near the Glenmore Landing proposal). Meanwhile they have really limited financial or logistically capacity to maintain any stuff they own like community halls, or even keep up with providing local events and programming in the community.

Unsurprisingly, the most stable CAs in the current paradigm are the wealthiest ones with lots of time on their hands to volunteer and advocate. Larger CAs are more effective too, as they have easier time raising revenues and have a larger volunteer pool.

I do think there's a big opportunity if the city could reform CAs though consolidating them to a sustainable size and granting them a clearer scope of responsibility. Perhaps this is less about development, and more about the many infrastructure, street and park questions that could be way better managed if the city had a way to devolve things to an reliable hyper-local group. Top of mind is local street design and traffic calming - for minor streets I'd argue local communities should have more actual authority over how minor streets are managed rather than be subject to top-down, black box warrant processes that have difficult to understand thresholds for action and only a limited scope of what can ever be considered. CAs have no consistent or effective way to influence any of this local network stuff, despite it really being almost exclusively a local issue.
 
Last edited:

Back
Top