Urban vs Suburban - 2 styles enter, one style leaves!

[Corndogger]

Originally Posted by DizzyEdge

Yeah I kind of feel like the 'debate' is out of date. The key is to have well thought out design guidelines for both inner-city redevelopment and new suburbs. For suburbs, a reasonable density with as many inner-city perks/advantages as are reasonable for a new area, plus a design which will facilitate gradual conversion to 'inner city' over a century with the least amount of disruption and community re-design as is possible.

I'm not sure exactly of the solution, but I'd like to see design and/or policies to reduce the time and amount of 'dead zone' between being a lower density community and a higher density inner-city one.

By dead zone I mean a transition time when an entire or significant amount of a community is blanket upzoned, leading to perhaps decades of slow replacement of low density housing with highrises or non-residential uses, which seems to lead to owners selling the sfh to landlords who may not keep up the properties, or to investors who may demolish the buildings leaving them dirt pads for years.

Eg, the area around downtown Red Deer, Victoria Park, etc.

I'd be curious of staged upzoning, perhaps 10% of the community at a time might reduce the amount of time that the entire community is being degraded on its way to eventually be a new type of community.

It would be ideal if they could figure out a way to keep communities vibrant all of the time. Maybe they need to have much more flexible zoning. What I'm getting at is new communities from the start would be designed to allow for various types of housing and businesses from Day 1 to prevent people from complaining about changes to the neighborhood. For example, SFH and 20+ story condo towers could be allowed to coexist if that's the way the market moved. If someone didn't like that they could move to an existing community that had more strict zoning laws. I don't think this would result in planning "disasters." Market forces and demographics would likely result in orderly transitions within neighborhoods.