Quote:
Originally Posted by Jjs5056
Do you ask anyone who dares to complain about the Westward Ho's use as senior apts to check their privilege?
|
I don't read people anywhere shitting on the Westward Ho owners like you just shat on NAC's efforts.
Secondly, the conversion of the Ho to senior housing happened at a totally different time. In 1980 when the Ho closed because downtown was a miserable neighborhood, you couldn't give away condos in the Embassy Tower. The Ho has now been an affordable housing complex for longer than it was a hotel. So it's quite difficult to lament a period that's long gone.
Finally, bringing up the Ho is a red herring that deflects the conversation.
Quote:
|
As far as I knew, this was much more so a place to discuss urban design than to discuss social program and policy.
|
I don't really care for some "well-designed" downtown that serves only a small silver of society that can afford the highest end of market rate. Those neighborhoods tend to be sterile and boring. Urban design has as much to do with building community through developing structures that actually serve people. Who else would you be designing for?
Quote:
|
Just because Parsons Center for HIV/AIDS does great work doesn't mean their building destroys downtown's connection to Hance Park.
|
If you're not putting up the money to destroy a structure for some aesthetic or intangible connection, stop complaining about those who find an interim purpose for that structure. Your ideas don't have a basis in the market.
The Parsons Center interrupting a connection from downtown to Hance Park is a tiny, tiny percentage of Hance Park's problems. If Hance Park were in a real dense city and not sunbaked with small trees and dead grass all the time, people would simply walk around the Parsons Center. There's simply nobody to regularly enjoy it.
I'll take a building that serves people that are struggling within a stonesthrow from a light rail station (advanced HIV disease tends to paralyze people and ravage their incomes so there's a lot that don't drive) over some idle fantasy that doesn't actually serve anyone.
Quote:
|
And, just because NAC provides services to Native Americans doesn't mean that the design of their projects are awful.
|
You seem to have this constant fantasy that every building needs to have ground-floor retail when it's absolutely untenable. Downtown's retail market is utterly terrible when it comes to median incomes within a 5 mile radius and will for years as Amazon wreaks havoc on everything. Retail is dead dude. Creating spaces that can't be occupied for all number of reasons is not a good idea when those construction costs can serve active needs.
And why should 2nd Avenue should be added as a commercial corridor when there's not one iota of retail on it, and the established commercial corridors of Central and 1st Avenues are bedraggled with vacancies? 2nd Avenue has practically no foot traffic besides homeless that use the street furniture and has practically no auto traffic. Where do you expect the customers for your retail fantasy to come from?
The fact of the matter is that NAC's residential projects are in residential neighborhoods and are well-designed for them.
Quote:
|
Live/work has been successful all over downtown - Artisan Village is nearly always filled, and Alta Phoenix has had 4/5 spaces leased since being built.
|
Artisan Village is not true live/work--after years of struggling and high vacancies, the HOA changed their regulations to allow property owners to lease out the commercial space to nonresidents.
Alta Phoenix has been open a decade and has 20% vacancy. This is not a sign of success.
Both projects are on established commercial corridors. 2nd Avenue is not a commercial corridor, isn't on any planning document to be a commercial corridor, and shouldn't be a commercial corridor.
Quote:
|
Live/work units would help integrate the projects into the neighborhood and provide upward mobility for its residents to own a home and small business. I know, that's a horrible thing to say... design that benefits the neighborhood and the underserved?
|
I don't think the recently-homeless and low-income disabled are in much of a position to be owning and managing retail stores with no customers as soon as they get off the streets.
Quote:
|
Your last comment misses the point entirely. Nearly every modern city dedicates space within their market rate projects for affordable units.
|
Since it is impossible for affordable housing developers to compete with market-rate developers in these cities, desirable liberal cities have built BMR into their zoning approval process. These cities have the luxury of saying no to new development because a better project will almost always come along that makes a better use of constrained space.
NAC ended up with the land, development sites and teardowns are available all over downtown, there's still a shortage of real developers, and you're never going to see BMR codified into Phoenix zoning, so comparisons to other cities that are a million miles ahead of the urban curve as Phoenix don't make any sense.
Quote:
|
It doesn't matter what goes up around the affordable housing downtown; keeping a group of lower socioeconomic class in a secluded development is still seclusion. It still allows whatever challenges the group faced previously to fester, for adjacent property values to drop, and for pedestrians to avoid uninviting monoliths of people who are not like them
|
Yeah, you're right, the disabled could just walk again if they were in a mixed-income building... If only the neurologists and spinal therapists could understand good urban design we wouldn't have these problems.
And for christs sake, if people are afraid to walk near a building that houses indigents and the disabled, I don't want them ANYWHERE near Downtown Phoenix. They can stay in South Gilbert or Scottsdale or wherever sheltered existence they live and keep treating themselves to Olive Garden.
Quote:
|
Even if that last point held true, this 2nd project between McKinley and Fillmore will give NAC at least 50% of the real estate on that block. Yea, that's integrated.
|
You could do your damn research on the Assessor's office on who owns the Fillmore lot before you stare facts down in the face and deny their existence. While you're there, you could look at the aerial maps that automatically deny your 50% miscalculation.
Quote:
|
How bored are you to rant under the assumption that anyone would come to this place and have negative things to say about the residents of any project? When has that ever been the case? Everyone else gets the benefit of the doubt their critique is toward the architect/developer? Give me a break.
|
You're ... calling me out for being bored and ranting? Really?
This is a supreme irony given your utter dissatisfaction with pretty much all projects expressed through your unreadable walls of text. There was nothing factual in your assessment of the project and it deserved to be called out.
Moreover, I made no assumptions there. To wit:
Quote:
|
Yep, this looks like another shitty NAC project.
|
And when you want potential NAC residents somewhere else other than the hoity toity downtown of your fantasies, you are actually saying negative things about them. You seriously lamented those poor sheltered idiots that might have to walk by a building for them a goddamn paragraph or two up.
Prev
Linear Mode
