Which inner city area is king?

[MissingMiddle]

I adore Inglewood, but it needs a little love.

Do something (anything, please?) with all the corner parking lots at main intersections; as mentioned a grocery store would be a monumental addition. Similar to what we're seeing in Kensington and Marda Loop, replacing a couple single family homes at a time with a 4 storey complex would go a long way in contributing to the vibrancy of the community without ruining its character like a 30 storey would. There's also a definitive design style that could be carried forward. Lastly, fix the sidewalk widths, remove the street parking on 9th, and make it 2 lanes of traffic. All of that would create the streets to accommodate the people required to support the local small businesses.

I love the feel of the neighborhood, but we have to give it the help to improve its vibrancy and self-sufficiency.

 

[Urban Outdoorsman]

I adore Inglewood, but it needs a little love.

Do something (anything, please?) with all the corner parking lots at main intersections; as mentioned a grocery store would be a monumental addition. Similar to what we're seeing in Kensington and Marda Loop, replacing a couple single family homes at a time with a 4 storey complex would go a long way in contributing to the vibrancy of the community without ruining its character like a 30 storey would. There's also a definitive design style that could be carried forward. Lastly, fix the sidewalk widths, remove the street parking on 9th, and make it 2 lanes of traffic. All of that would create the streets to accommodate the people required to support the local small businesses.

I love the feel of the neighborhood, but we have to give it the help to improve its vibrancy and self-sufficiency.

I definitely agree that super wide sidewalks and less traffic in Inglewood wood be amazing, but unless the greenline gets built (and even if it does) that plan would only really work if the parking spaces were offset somehow, probably a parkade otherwise it might prove troublesome since most the people who visit Inglewood get there by car

 

[Just build it]

Okay, I spent too much time on this, but here's my take on what I like in a community and where they stack up. What I want is:

• Groceries - walking distance to a good supermarket that won't gouge you
• Dining - some variety; I want quick takeout for the night I don't want to cook, and a date night place and everywhere in between
• Walkability - As few car sewers as possible, especially the roads with the amenities
• Parks - Local, interesting parks that are easily accessible; I want a 5 minute walk to an interesting half-block green space here more than a great park that's a trek.
• Paths - High quality bike infrastructure connecting to the best paths in the system; I don't want my workout to be 40% over before I get to a nice path.
• Downtown access - Walking distance, easy walking if possible
• Transit - Frequent, reliable service; ideally multiple high quality options.

View attachment 297981
What IMO these communities need to be better:
Beltline - Can't mess with the best. Taking a lane off Macleod in each direction; adding sidewalks and a cycle track would be the biggest help especially on the east side.
East Village - For me, the Superstore opening was the difference-maker (without it, EV would be maybe 10th ranked); it now just needs some more dining options
Kensington - The only real issue here is that the closer you are to dining and the downtown, the further you are from groceries and the LRT.
Mission/Cliff Bungalow - Similar to Kensington except the LRT is less accessible. Redoing Elbow Island park was a recent good move.
Eau Claire - If it had a supermarket and less rich jerks, what a great spot.
Downtown West End - The car sewers kill it; if you could take a lane off every road and rebuild the bottom two stories of every building, it would be perfect.
Lower Mount Royal - A lot of the vitality benefits of the Beltline, just a little far from the downtown. Better transit along 17th would help; so would better cycle tracks on 11th.
Lower Tuxedo - I think this area has a lot of potential; there could be better local green space and the main roads suck especially 16th Ave.
Bridgeland - On paper, you're near the LRT, near the downtown, near a nice emerging main street. In reality, you're only ever near one of those. Also needs groceries.
Inglewood - The NIMBYs are out of control; there's no less dense community this accessible to downtown -- if there was some more density, the area could support a real grocery store. Wish the sidewalks didn't roll up at 5 PM.
International Ave - Good variety in dining; the area needs public realm improvements and more reliable transit. (Max doesn't mean anything when the headways are 20 minutes.) But there's value here.
Marda Loop - The most overrated IMO; there's just not enough there there yet if you think about dining versus Kensington. Crowchild cutting off expansion to the west doesn't help.
Montgomery - The #1 bus needs improvement out this way, and there needs more activity here as well.

Nice work on this, it's much appreciated. I do disagree with some points. I think Marda Loop and Bridgeland are the same or better for dining options as compared to East Beltline. Bridgeland is at least as good as centre or East Beltline for parks. Central memorial park in the centre Beltline is probably the best of any in Bridgeland or Centre\East Beltline, but Bridgeland's central park has come on strong. There's are also some other small park around the neighborhood including Tomn Campbell Hill. Bridgeland maybe could be at least as high as the West or central Beltline for Transit, in that at least it has the LRT station within walking distance. These are just nitpik points, and also just my opinion. Overall though, I agree with most of what's on the list and is a nice comparison. Thanks for posting.

 

[MissingMiddle]

I definitely agree that super wide sidewalks and less traffic in Inglewood wood be amazing, but unless the greenline gets built (and even if it does) that plan would only really work if the parking spaces were offset somehow, probably a parkade otherwise it might prove troublesome since most the people who visit Inglewood get there by car

That's actually a super common misconception in urban planning, and is outlined very well in Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities. The idea is that there's a finite number of people who move to/through an area, and if you restrict the ability of one mobility type then is has to be accommodated somewhere else. That argument makes too many simplifying assumptions which are incorrect when modelling reality.

Induced demand is real, so creating more space for pedestrians actually brings more pedestrians, because now its a much better environment to use. Eliminating parking or restricting roadways doesn't usually push traffic onto other parts of the system because it's not a zero sum game. The key is to encourage a diversity of transportation modes and a diversity of uses, using 2/5ths of the roadway for parking is one of the least efficient ways to use space. If anything, eliminating it would encourage more people to come in the long term.

Better mass transit, and a higher population density in Inglewood would help a lot.

 

[Urban Outdoorsman]

This is a bit of an aside, but another thread got me thinking. How is it that almost none of the best highstreets/neighborhoods don't have hotels? Correct me if I'm wrong but Kensington, Bridgeland and Inglewood are all lacking a hotel. Kensington especially being on the train line would seem like a no brainer to me.

 

[ByeByeBaby]

This is a bit of an aside, but another thread got me thinking. How is it that almost none of the best highstreets/neighborhoods don't have hotels? Correct me if I'm wrong but Kensington, Bridgeland and Inglewood are all lacking a hotel. Kensington especially being on the train line would seem like a no brainer to me.

Kensington does have a hotel; Hotel Arts Kensington (formerly Kensington Inn) -- Oxbow is the restaurant there. Inglewood has a couple of B&Bs.

But overall, I'm not sure this is all that unusual. There are no hotels in Kitsilano or Commercial in Vancouver; on Hawthorne in Portland; in Queen Anne in Seattle. There are only one or two on Whyte in Edmonton, in the Pearl District or NW Portland, in Capitol Hill in Seattle.

High streets aren't really for tourists as much as they are for residents. Inglewood's great; if someone I knew came to Calgary for a week, I'd definitely suggest they get out to Inglewood for an afternoon. I wouldn't suggest they spend an entire week there, or even two full days. So who would stay in a hotel there? People coming for a weekend, sure, but how many people is that? Especially because if you stay in Inglewood, it's harder to get to say Mission or Kensington. If you stay in the downtown, both areas are easy to get to.

Part of the challenge is the hotel model, which has a bunch of infrastructure around it. Much of it is for the protection of guests and staff; some of it is perhaps excessive, like conference spaces or room service or daily room cleaning or 24 hour front desk -- although different people will have different opinions of what the excessive and what the important stuff is. All of that makes it hard to operate a 15 unit hotel, which might be a better size to meet the potential demand for staying in Mission or Inglewood.

The actual area that really needs hotel space IMO are the west and northwest. There's hotels along the 16th Ave corridor including the University and Motel Village all the way out to COP, but then there's nothing for the suburban west between that corridor and Grey Eagle, and nothing for the suburban northwest between that corridor and the airport. This is again the challenge with the hotel model; there probably isn't demand for 100 rooms at say Sirocco or Beacon Hill, but there might be for 15 or 20. Family reunions, weddings, etc. We stayed in a hotel for a couple of days when our apartment was flooded; my mother stayed in a hotel for a week when she had sold her house but her condo wasn't ready.

 

[CBBarnett]

This is a bit of an aside, but another thread got me thinking. How is it that almost none of the best highstreets/neighborhoods don't have hotels? Correct me if I'm wrong but Kensington, Bridgeland and Inglewood are all lacking a hotel. Kensington especially being on the train line would seem like a no brainer to me.

I'd only add a historical perspective and the connection between intercity/international transportation patterns and destination value, which best describes where hotels are and where they are not, generally. Inglewood and East Village both had hotels (National Hotel, King Eddy Hotel, Cecil Hotel) in the past as a left-over from the working class, rail-centric travel pattern of the time. The Palliser is a higher end and more deliberate transportation connection as well.

Fast-forward a few decades and it's all cars and airplanes. Motel Village for a first-stop out to the mountains and Barlow Trail as a first stop from the airport, both car-focused. Cut Barlow Trail off and all of a sudden Airport Trail hotels spring up. Transportation connectivity is still paramount. Meanwhile, downtown went from small rail-focused working class to boom town corporate centre - dramatically increasing it's destination value, while changing the typical visitor. Calgary as a city is bigger so the city has grown it's background need for hotel space in general in a more disaggregated way (for visitors, short stays during water pipe breaks, family reunions etc.)

For neighbourhood's like Kensington and Inglewood, @ByeByeBaby said it best - these places are for locals overall. Visitors can just as easily hike over from downtown hotels where overall demand is much higher. Sure, a hotel or two might be part of the picture in these neighbourhoods, but until something more dramatic happens in either transportation connectivity or destination value, hotels not likely to be the focus. For example, a high quality regional rail connection to the mountains, Edmonton and the airport might be enough to tip the scales to trigger hotels to cluster nearby a central station, especially if we see continued regional growth (see every large European train station for example). Similarly, if a ring gate to a new habitable solar system opened randomly tomorrow in Riley Park, Kensington might get a few more hotels as well.

 

[Urban Outdoorsman]

I'd only add a historical perspective and the connection between intercity/international transportation patterns and destination value, which best describes where hotels are and where they are not, generally. Inglewood and East Village both had hotels (National Hotel, King Eddy Hotel, Cecil Hotel) in the past as a left-over from the working class, rail-centric travel pattern of the time. The Palliser is a higher end and more deliberate transportation connection as well.

Fast-forward a few decades and it's all cars and airplanes. Motel Village for a first-stop out to the mountains and Barlow Trail as a first stop from the airport, both car-focused. Cut Barlow Trail off and all of a sudden Airport Trail hotels spring up. Transportation connectivity is still paramount. Meanwhile, downtown went from small rail-focused working class to boom town corporate centre - dramatically increasing it's destination value, while changing the typical visitor. Calgary as a city is bigger so the city has grown it's background need for hotel space in general in a more disaggregated way (for visitors, short stays during water pipe breaks, family reunions etc.)

For neighbourhood's like Kensington and Inglewood, @ByeByeBaby said it best - these places are for locals overall. Visitors can just as easily hike over from downtown hotels where overall demand is much higher. Sure, a hotel or two might be part of the picture in these neighbourhoods, but until something more dramatic happens in either transportation connectivity or destination value, hotels not likely to be the focus. For example, a high quality regional rail connection to the mountains, Edmonton and the airport might be enough to tip the scales to trigger hotels to cluster nearby a central station, especially if we see continued regional growth (see every large European train station for example). Similarly, if a ring gate to a new habitable solar system opened randomly tomorrow in Riley Park, Kensington might get a few more hotels as well.

Wow thank you for referencing The Expanse

I can see where you guys are coming from. Most of my experience traveling has been mostly hostel based. Usually hostels try and center themselves around nightlife and centrality. A place like Kensington or Beltline would be great for a hostel. It's just a shame that Calgary doesn't seem to attract the hosteling type. And the one we have is in East Village and it's only a matter of time before its gone.

 

[MissingMiddle]

Don't hate, I'm actually genuinely asking, what's the hype with Marda Loop? It's seen lots of development and has some good restaurant spots, but why there in the first place?

 

[CBBarnett]

Don't hate, I'm actually genuinely asking, what's the hype with Marda Loop? It's seen lots of development and has some good restaurant spots, but why there in the first place?

A combinations of money, downtown and institutional access, successful marketing and favourable zoning. Most importantly is likely the success of Garrison Woods to replace the Canadian Forces base that was once there that triggered the start of the reurbanization (late 1990s / early 2000s) and the continued interest a few decades later.

To put Marda Loop in perspective to some of the others, I generated a quick chart for population change. Granted it's a larger area than some of the others and single use, but impressive nonetheless. It's no Beltline, but it's certainly getting the redevelopment scale needed to transform into something far more urban and interesting.

 

[UrbanWarrior]

New proposal for Kensington's Riley Park. It'll fit great next to the splash park.


Sol Ring - 1000 km - 1,373 units

 

[Surrealplaces]

A combinations of money, downtown and institutional access, successful marketing and favourable zoning. Most importantly is likely the success of Garrison Woods to replace the Canadian Forces base that was once there that triggered the start of the reurbanization (late 1990s / early 2000s) and the continued interest a few decades later.

To put Marda Loop in perspective to some of the others, I generated a quick chart for population change. Granted it's a larger area than some of the others and single use, but impressive nonetheless. It's no Beltline, but it's certainly getting the redevelopment scale needed to transform into something far more urban and interesting.

View attachment 299336

All the inner city neighborhoods are showing healthy growth. Bridgeland and Inglewood look slower than others, but have been adding residents since 2019 and the graph will look different in a couple of years.. Bridgeland especially will show some big gains in the next 2-3 years.

Back to Marda Loop. I could easily live there, even though it's a little ways out from the core compared to the others. I find the area overall has a nice feel to it. Once Courtyard 33, and Harrison are done it'll have even more bustle. Arc 33 will transform the high street more than any other project.

 

[adamyyc]

All the inner city neighborhoods are showing healthy growth. Bridgeland and Inglewood look slower than others, but have been adding residents since 2019 and the graph will look different in a couple of years.. Bridgeland especially will show some big gains in the next 2-3 years.

Back to Marda Loop. I could easily live there, even though it's a little ways out from the core compared to the others. I find the area overall has a nice feel to it. Once Courtyard 33, and Harrison are done it'll have even more bustle. Arc 33 will transform the high street more than any other project.

When I moved to Calgary from Toronto 3+ years ago, there were only a handful of neighbourhoods (Bridgeland, Kensington, Inglewood, Marda Loop, etc.) that we were interested in living in, because they offered similar amenities to some of our favourite neighbourhood in Toronto (i.e., access to groceries, pharmacy, coffee shops, restaurants, etc. within walking distance). In our younger days, we would have lived in Beltline, EV, or Mission, but we were ready to start a family, and we wanted more space (we had spent enough time living in 600 sq. ft. on Yonge).

Ultimately, we chose Marda Loop because it offered everything we needed within <1km.

Even though Marda Loop is seeing major redevelopment, I don’t see it becoming a destination for visitors the same way the other neighbourhoods on the list are, because it doesn’t benefit from history (the way Inglewood does), proximity to the Bow/Elbow (the way several neighbourhoods on the list do), or major attractions (the way East Village does). However, Marda Loop is beloved by those who live here, and the recent, current and future development (e.g. RNDSQR, Sarina, Co-Op, Mainstreets, etc.) will only further improve the neighborhood for its citizens.

 

[CBBarnett]

All the inner city neighborhoods are showing healthy growth. Bridgeland and Inglewood look slower than others, but have been adding residents since 2019 and the graph will look different in a couple of years.. Bridgeland especially will show some big gains in the next 2-3 years.

Back to Marda Loop. I could easily live there, even though it's a little ways out from the core compared to the others. I find the area overall has a nice feel to it. Once Courtyard 33, and Harrison are done it'll have even more bustle. Arc 33 will transform the high street more than any other project.

Yeah every inner city community is doing well - they all have come a long way since the end of the decline and stagnation phase that most found themselves from 1960s - 1980s. Density and population aren't everything, of course - but they really do matter to create that critical mass and pedestrian-level vibrancy.

Beltline just casually adds a few hundred apartments every year it seems. Bridgeland has several, Beltline-scale projects on a much smaller base population and a higher quality public realm, it'll pop right up in no time. Same for Marda Loop with Arc 33, Harrison and Courtyard - projects at the next stage of density and scale to really add a boost while the remainder of the neighbourhood doesn't show any sign of slowing down with infills and townhomes yet. Critically in Marda Loop, the streets are all very small and reasonable - a rarity for many inner city neighbourhoods that often have competed (and lost) with car commuters for space and livability.

One more slightly different perspective from my dataset, is change in density over time. Of course this needs a caveat - some neighbourhoods look less dense because the boundaries contain big empty spots like parks, the stampede grounds, rail yards etc. - but still useful for comparison.

 

[UrbanWarrior]

Yeah, I always nullify Stampede Park (0.4 km2) when counting density of the Beltline, since it is entirely privately held lands that will likely never be developed/are undevelopable due to their use/ownership. A very unique circumstance among downtown cores pretty much anywhere.

Other than that, I just don't agree about the Marda Loop streets part of your post. 33 Avenue is terribly busy and oppressive. The sidewalks are super narrow and there aren't nearly enough controlled crosswalks and virtually no traffic calming measures. 33 of course is the main street of the neighbourhood, but yes of course the other streets are calmer/small/"reasonable".