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  #81  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 1:50 AM
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Originally Posted by JHikka View Post
Is that insane project in Innisfil still, uh, proposed? I seem to recall some recent proposal for a wide urban planned development in what is now greenfield outside Barrie.

The Orbit? Apparently it was approved and construction is to start in 2022: https://ontarioconstructionnews.com/...ruction-start/

Though I very highly doubt that it'll ever actually materialize as depicted.




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  #82  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 2:38 AM
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I prefer this new development in Vilnius: Paupys https://www.skyscrapercity.com/threa...post-170792519 https://paupys.lt/en/
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  #83  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 3:43 AM
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I haven't been to the KW region in a long time, and... yeah a lot more has changed than I expected. The amount of new construction probably eclipsed Richmond over the last 10 years, and a fairly dense mid-rise skyline has sprung up all around Laurier.

Though most of it looks horrendous and I'm a bit concerned about the complete disregard for tree canopy and pre-war architecture:

before

after
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  #84  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 3:46 AM
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Well that’s sad.
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  #85  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 3:53 AM
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Yeah... that's not good.

I'm not sure that's what this is about though. (Waterloo is a real city, with a real downtown, right?)

Last edited by Doady; May 11, 2021 at 4:05 AM.
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  #86  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 4:37 AM
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Waterloo doesn't really have a downtown: it's main strip "Uptown" is really like a small town - Elmira has better bones - surrounded by parking lots, out of place suburban-style high rises and a few prewar SFH areas. Not as bad as Hamilton's destruction, but still pretty terrible.

I'm not saying Northdale is better - but in some ways it feels more like Toronto.
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  #87  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 8:37 AM
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Originally Posted by manny_santos View Post
Whalley, from my understanding, mostly developed after WWII. I've seen an aerial photo of the area from 1949, there was almost nothing there back then other than a cluster of buildings around King George and 108 Ave.
It's pretty dire, but what is there isn't that bad in terms of making up a city as opposed to say Newton which has a fake feeling downtown they have tried to create. But we walk around the Whalley area quite a bit now, well in daylight lol, night time so much. There are actually a lot of things opening lately, there are two new Mexican grocery stores recently opened, and some Mexican restaurants, also an African grocery store and possible cafe opening in the old KFC. It would be nice if there was a better grocery store in the KGH/108TH area, Nestors is ok but its quite expensive. We end up driving to Superstore a lot.

With the city hall now it really is starting to feel more like a proper place. It's going to take a good 10 or more years but it's not that bad really. since they moved the homeless shelter off KGH at the site of the old flamingo hotel and the one on 105th it's been much better on KGH. Police sirens go off at least 3 times on any given night/evening and the police helicopter is a regular sight/noise on the weekends.
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  #88  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 10:30 AM
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Originally Posted by dleung View Post
I haven't been to the KW region in a long time, and... yeah a lot more has changed than I expected. The amount of new construction probably eclipsed Richmond over the last 10 years, and a fairly dense mid-rise skyline has sprung up all around Laurier.

Though most of it looks horrendous and I'm a bit concerned about the complete disregard for tree canopy and pre-war architecture:

before

after
I lived on that block on Albert in the 80's and it was pretty well intact in terms of single family homes, some occupied by families others as student places but still with a single family home residential feel.

https://goo.gl/maps/EuCjtkESorv8RaBU8 I walked past this house many times and admired it. In about 1987 a family lived there. Now it seems to be the holdout and it could go next.
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  #89  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 12:52 PM
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That area of Waterloo is hideous but also kind of fascinating. Looking on google maps there do appear to be a number of interesting businesses throughout which are on the ground floor of new buildings. Mostly Asian takeout type stuff. I can't imagine the pandemic has treated the area well though.
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  #90  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 1:47 PM
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While it's sad to lose trees, the alternative could be worse IMO. To keep those trees, they would have had to have much larger setbacks than what they ended up with, which are already large (to provide room for road expansion, I assume). I think it's unusually brave of them to allow the setback distance and built form to change piecemeal like that. In most NA cities (Calgary for sure), if you have a block of SFHs, it's a block of SFHs forever, perhaps with some townhouses of the same form thrown in slowly over time. The only way it changes is if the whole block rots enough that the whole thing can be demolished and started over.
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  #91  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 2:41 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SpongeG View Post
It's pretty dire, but what is there isn't that bad in terms of making up a city as opposed to say Newton which has a fake feeling downtown they have tried to create. But we walk around the Whalley area quite a bit now, well in daylight lol, night time so much. There are actually a lot of things opening lately, there are two new Mexican grocery stores recently opened, and some Mexican restaurants, also an African grocery store and possible cafe opening in the old KFC. It would be nice if there was a better grocery store in the KGH/108TH area, Nestors is ok but its quite expensive. We end up driving to Superstore a lot.

With the city hall now it really is starting to feel more like a proper place. It's going to take a good 10 or more years but it's not that bad really. since they moved the homeless shelter off KGH at the site of the old flamingo hotel and the one on 105th it's been much better on KGH. Police sirens go off at least 3 times on any given night/evening and the police helicopter is a regular sight/noise on the weekends.
I spent 3 years working in good ol' Whalley in the mid 90s. The place got pretty....interesting at night. Had my car broken into at least once per year. Sketchy, sketchy, sketchy.


cbc

The area was rebranded Surrey City Centre (and there was a cluster of about 4 highrise buildings), but it was still Whalley around the edges. The parking lot of this mall (Surrey Place Mall, now rebranded something else) had the highest car theft rate in all of North America for a period during the 90s.


miss604

People from White Rock looked down on people from Crescent Beach who looked down on people from Guildford who looked down on people from Newton who looked down on people from Whalley. Once you hit Whalley, you hit rock bottom.


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Last edited by MolsonExport; May 11, 2021 at 2:51 PM.
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  #92  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 2:44 PM
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Yes, this mirrors what I said earlier about downtown Vieux-Hull. In the Canadian context it's kind of like downtown Lévis or Dartmouth. And while the latter two might have certain attributes that Vieux-Hull doesn't have, I'd say that overall Vieux-Hull actually feels more like an urban downtown than either of them.

Looking across the border a decent analogue for Vieux-Hull might actually be Jersey City, New Jersey. (With everything being proportionately super-sized there of course.)
One factor that greatly distinguishes Old Lévis functionally from all of Old Hull, Dartmouth, Hudson County NJ, and Longueuil's "downtown"/subway station hub, is the absence of bridges.

In an alternate universe where Côte du Passage connects to a direct bridge to Quebec's core on the other side of the river, I predict this area would look like a sad hybrid of what it currently is (some of it would still exist) combined with a Longueuil/Ste-Foy/Burnaby style highrise core of bland residential towers.


(Unlike the four cities mentioned above (Ottawa, Halifax, NYC, Montreal), Quebec City has no non-suburban access to the other shore.)
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  #93  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 2:47 PM
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Really interesting thread BTW! Haven't even read all of it yet. The role that (inflexible, safety-obsessed) modern regulations play in the fact that no one can build "real" downtowns anymore is a topic that's interested me for years.
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  #94  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 3:19 PM
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Side note: it wasn't. But it was 20th century systems thought.
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  #95  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 3:33 PM
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That Albert St. transformation honestly brings me so much joy because its just so rare for a suburban-style, SFH street to actually be transformed into middle scale urban street. The before certainly isn't the worse SFH stretch that I've seen (for that there would be no sidewalks, a wider street, fewer trees and newer/blander houses) but SFH areas are so common and it's so easy to create new ones that even nice ones have little to no value to me. On the other hand, midscale/density urban nabes seem to be so hard to create in Canada that to see new ones created thrills me even if they're mediocre.

The thing is, it's just so damn hard to expand the urban (as opposed to suburban) footprint of cities in NA. You can develop brown/grey fields like Cityplace, add density to areas that are already urban like existing downtowns/inner cities (plus certain major thoroughfares and nodes) and that's it. Utae Lee raises the issue in his discussion about the missing middle. Often we hear the phenomenon explained as just being a result of market forces or rational planning practices in that developers are just buildings where there's demand, or that density is directed where there are strong transportation connections and services. But in reality, the primary factors are political. The people living in certain areas don't want to accept their fair share of urban change. They know their cities are growing but they demand that all growth happen in other areas and to not affect them.

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  #96  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 3:59 PM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
Really interesting thread BTW! Haven't even read all of it yet. The role that (inflexible, safety-obsessed) modern regulations play in the fact that no one can build "real" downtowns anymore is a topic that's interested me for years.
I find the contradictions of conflicting priorities in urban planning quite interesting and I don't think the conversation generally gets as much attention as it should. Sometimes (not always) these regulations have good intentions, but the end result is often a very compromised built form that isn't what anyone really thinks is good. And even more importantly, we've made construction so onerous that property values are through the roof, and affordability is a huge problem.

If we got rid of a lot of these regulations (setbacks, height, parking etc) the result might be a little "messier", but I can't say I find the typical north American built form very desirable anyway, and the benefits of more construction, lower prices and more creativity would outweigh the costs.

The natural reaction of urbanist types when there is a problem of some sort in cities is more restriction. But the result of that is not that developers build the thing you want, they just can't build things you don't want, and where they do build it's a mutated version of what the market wants, squished into the limitations of city regulation. And what results is our garbage urban environment. The vibrant urban communities abroad were either built by rulers who had the power to demolish vast tracts of land and replace it with something else or were just the result of pure free markets - people building what they need where they want. Our cities are neither of those, and I don't think the model has been proven a success.
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  #97  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 4:12 PM
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Our attempts at more traditional forms of fine-grained urbanism come across almost as parody these days.

This is an extreme example granted, but the point stands.

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  #98  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 4:26 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse View Post

The thing is, it's just so damn hard to expand the urban (as opposed to suburban) footprint of cities in NA. You can develop brown/grey fields like Cityplace, add density to areas that are already urban like existing downtowns/inner cities (plus certain major thoroughfares and nodes) and that's it. Utae Lee raises the issue in his discussion about the missing middle. Often we hear the phenomenon explained as just being a result of market forces or rational planning practices in that developers are just buildings where there's demand, or that density is directed where there are strong transportation connections and services. But in reality, the primary factors are political. The people living in certain areas don't want to accept their fair share of urban change. They know their cities are growing but they demand that all growth happen in other areas and to not affect them.

While there are always any number of factors going on at once, I do wonder if these things are related. When people see new highrise developments or even a midrise take out an entire block of streetfront retail it's not hard to understand why they may be apprehensive of development in their area. Misguided as it may be. This applies more to central areas of Toronto (and other cities) where densities are already quite high but there are still opportunities for infill.

It would help if we were still constructing multifamily buildings like these in our neighbourhoods:

https://goo.gl/maps/mqHbNVyuUAZWZrvy8

https://goo.gl/maps/wBAFjA2XMjEXPQGc8

https://goo.gl/maps/BG79vWQHiMwmwRoZ8

https://goo.gl/maps/5sxnzKrR4MyhGtCr5


Just a few examples of buildings that were intended to blend in with the existing area precisely due to an aversion to large scale apartments.
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  #99  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 4:44 PM
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What's happened in Waterloo is just crazy. When I started school in 2012 there was a single new high-rise student rental (in the centre of the first picture), and the vast majority of students still lived with a bunch of people in a detached house, or a duplex/triplex. Over 4 years, King Street went from this:



To this:



Before:



After:




Obviously adding density is the only way to accommodate the massive growth in students. Still, some of my fondest memories are from the summer semesters when all the co-op students were in classes, had a massive intramural softball league, and would have backyard keggers every week. My most recent intern who's finishing up at Laurier basically said they can't even find places near campus to host them anymore. Would be a weird university experience to me to spend 4 years in a high-rise shoebox.
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  #100  
Old Posted May 11, 2021, 4:47 PM
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Originally Posted by niwell View Post
While there are always any number of factors going on at once, I do wonder if these things are related. When people see new highrise developments or even a midrise take out an entire block of streetfront retail it's not hard to understand why they may be apprehensive of development in their area. Misguided as it may be. This applies more to central areas of Toronto (and other cities) where densities are already quite high but there are still opportunities for infill.

It would help if we were still constructing multifamily buildings like these in our neighbourhoods:

https://goo.gl/maps/mqHbNVyuUAZWZrvy8

https://goo.gl/maps/wBAFjA2XMjEXPQGc8

https://goo.gl/maps/BG79vWQHiMwmwRoZ8

https://goo.gl/maps/5sxnzKrR4MyhGtCr5


Just a few examples of buildings that were intended to blend in with the existing area precisely due to an aversion to large scale apartments.
Yes, exactly!

If you force the majority of your growth to occur in the form of huge highrises being stuffed into a select number of areas with comically high density compared to their surroundings, then obviously the results may very well be awkward. But how can you build comparability modest density stuff like that when the relatively small percentage of places that are open to multi-family development must carry the burden of hosting almost all the city's growth?

If you removed the exclusively SFH zoning from all parts of the city and metro area allowing stuff like that to be built anywhere whether it be Roncy or some side street off of Martin Grove like this then there wouldn't be the same need for huge skyscrapers to take out fine-grained urban form in the centre. Someone123 once argued that such policies have been partly responsible for the poor track record of heritage protection in Halifax because the centre of town where the oldest and most notable buildings are is the one place where significant density can be added putting far greater redevelopment pressure on existing buildings.
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