Quote:
Originally Posted by windypeg
A residential building better than a parking lot? Yes, yes it is.
PS Simplicity I'd love to hear what types of projects are viable in Winnipeg in your opinion. Strip malls? Tim Hortons franchises?
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There are lots of projects that are viable in Winnipeg. They're just the sorts of projects that everybody tends to hate. Our city pays a premium for suburban living and takes urban living at a discount. I don't move the market, it just is what it is. And it's ass-backwards from most places. We have certain costs here that don't exist elsewhere. TrueViking spoke about this before. Our soil conditions are terrible, we have limited supply of concrete, and we can barely construct for 4 months of the year. We're also paying the labour rates of places that attract a much higher per square foot sale/rental rate because that's how regional labour markets work. All of that costs lots of money. Add to that the fact that our market doesn't produce crazy rents or even wildly out-to-lunch housing prices, and we have a market that simply doesn't support of lot of what people are seeing elsewhere.
You think anybody would put a stucco high-rise in downtown Toronto? That's simply a cost decision. So when somebody puts up a highrise apartment structure downtown Winnipeg and wants half of it to be affordable, rent-geared-to-income, you can bet it's going to be the cheapest conceivable build. And that's if this thing ever gets built. For some reason the costs are always the last thing to be considered. Which is why they're value engineering the project as we speak. Eventually somebody has to lend the project money; if it doesn't show a reasonable rate of return it won't get financed.
I can't understand why people think this is somehow negativity. Our realities are very different than others. You're better off wrapping your mind around those than being let down every time a project looks different than its renderings. This goes for that Centerpoint Parkade as well. Did anybody ever actually think that somebody was going to come along and pay $24/sq ft for new commercial retail space on Carlton? They certainly shouldn't have because nobody ever has. And they didn't; that's why its not there. Those businesses that got the boot were probably paying less than half of that. Did the developer get rid of those because he hates Downtown Winnipeg? No, he got rid of them because they'd sit vacant for the rest of eternity helping to drive down the demand of the many, already existing vacancies.
If you want beautiful architecture, go to a city where it costs $630/ft for a one bedroom condo. Here, we take what we can get...