Well they're not even trying across the road from Carlingwood at Fairlawn Plaza and Carlingwood-the-mall itself does not appear to be in any danger of disappearing any time soon anyway. Any redevelopment in the Carlingwood area will be limited to infilling Carlingwood's parking lots.
The point remains that Ottawa's intensification policies really aren't about intensification. They only get enforced when they are favourable to developers. The point of intensification - at least in theory - is to reduce the outward spread of the city and the costs of serving development by leveraging existing infrastructure and using underused land within the city more intensively. Related goals are to increase the viability of alternate modes of transport by reducing the need for a car and to help rejuvenate areas by increasing their density. But what we see in practise is intensification used to justify condo projects in the few areas that are already mixed use and walkable.
If intensification policies can be used by developers to push through projects, then those same policies should be used to stop ones that don't further those goals. If the policies don't allow that, then they should be rewritten so they can. This proposal actually has the effect of making the site less dense and less walkable (for all their other faults, at least malls are intended for walking) than it already is.
This location already has lots of people living nearby in high density residential, so I doubt any developer would actually have trouble finding people to live there. They might have trouble convincing people to pay megabucks for a condo, but intensification is not about building high-priced condos.
But I think you've touched on the key point in all this: Ottawa's developers really just aren't up to it. By the way, I wrote most of this last night but left it until today to post it so as to give it a reread before posting it... and this morning I read in the Citizen Councillor Hume going on about Ottawa's "insular" and uncreative developers passing up opportunities at sites like Train Yards and Laurentian HS.
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