Pretty cool, I hope it works out for them, and other cities can do the same. The more liveable density in our core neighborhoods, the better. Downtown Calgary can be a pretty drab concrete hellscape, so hopefully the residents can add some colour and life to the place.
I’d love to see the same concept executed in Toronto.
The downtown core is actually pretty spectacular, and the only thing going on right now is companies trying to force people to RTO because of the massive costs of all those towers and other real estate.
I would rather get rid of the mix of sports betting and Move to Alberta/Manitoba ads on the GO train in favor of a campaign to move people into converted high rises. Maybe we can solve a teensy tiny bit of our affordability problems, but that is highly unlikely.
Wait… As a Manitoba resident… I am completely unaware of a Move to MB marketing campaign being held in Toronto. What does it look like?
Basically it just says stuff like “Are you tired of high COL? Come move to the middle of nowhere where the COL is low!”
Mostly it’s targeted at younger Millennials who simply cannot afford homes in the GTA, generally citing better affordability out west.
The Alberta campaign is the same, except it also totes high job growth across the province.
I have family who have moved out West into a house that would be locally priced at over a million dollars but due to being out in Sask it was about half as much as that. I’m very tempted to move out to the prairies myself since my job is entirely remote, and it’s truly just considerably more affordable out there.
Here’s a picture of the Alberta ads, I can’t find one for Manitoba right now for some reason: https://i.imgur.com/fF0c6nY.jpg
I’m biased, but Alberta is still reasonably cosmopolitan, at least. It’s also not as cheap as we thought apparently, because of the other costs of living.
I don’t know about Manitoba, but I would have to be truly damn broke to consider Saskatchewan.
I grew up in rural Alberta where Medicine Hat was the closest big city to us. I wholeheartedly agree with you re: Saskatchewan.
Just before COVID I moved to Winnipeg to start a business. Needed a nice garage I could use as a workshop to get off the ground. I joke with my friends from elsewhere “I bought a garage and it came with a free house”. We’re to the point where my business is outgrowing it and commercial property is on the horizon. 4000sqft industrial spaces here about about $1M to buy. I can’t imagine even entertaining that idea if I had to spend $1M on a house first…
Calgary in general is traditionally very spartan, architecturally. The situation is noticeably improving with the years, though, and honestly IMO an all-brick complex can still feel vibrant, if it’s filled with happy people.
Eventually, it lost its human scale, residential population, vitality, sense of safety, and most of its sunshine. An equal amount of effort, she says, will be required to turn it back into neighbourhoods once again.
Some of these seem like weird issues to take. Our civilisation is an intrinsically larger than human scale undertaking; if you want to avoid that, you pretty much have to go back into the wild. Similarly, every tall downtown is shaded, because of the square cube law of basic geometry. Honestly it’s impressive how much light we do manage to let in.
In every thread where someone suggests that office towers should be converted to residential in order to increase housing availability and cut on carbon emissions from commuting, there’s a counter that this conversion is all but
impossibleimpractical. And yet.Nobody with any idea what they’re talking about said it was impossible.
It’s just expensive and time consuming to do.
The conversions I’ve been affected by took longer than building a new structure of similar size.
You basically need to completely redo the plumbing. At that point, it’s often cheaper to just bulldoze it and rebuild.
Redacted.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
With a start-up fund of $200 million — and a goal of investing $1 billion over the duration of the program — the city offered developers a sped-up approval process and, more importantly, $75 per square foot in incentives to convert empty office towers into residential apartment buildings.
But without taking anything away from the grand ambitions of the Calgary plan, or the initial success it’s seen (it isn’t easy to convert one empty office block into apartments, let alone six million square feet worth), there are a few questions that need to be asked on behalf of the future residents of the 2,300-plus new homes about to be built.
Something that makes this easier, he says, is the realization that those streets no longer need to do the things they did in the past, when everyone came downtown at the same time, and left together, resulting in incredible peak-traffic volumes.
“Where that settles, you can start taking bits away and adding to the public spaces for those other types of mobility, like bicycles, better transit facilities, but also programming lanes of traffic that aren’t used during peak times,” he said.
Paul Fairie, the principal co-ordinator of the Downtown Core Neighbourhood Association, also thinks something needs to be done about the big, empty east-west avenues, particularly on the weekends.
For Sandalack, the everyday urbanism that Paul Fairie talks about — the coffee shops, dry cleaners, daycare centres and so on — can’t happen if the interaction between buildings and streets is wrong, as it is in most of downtown Calgary.
The original article contains 1,850 words, the summary contains 259 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
On a somewhat related note people have brought up the window thing a lot for this topic.
This BC article topic goes over a example: https://www.burnabynow.com/local-news/burnaby-resident-concerned-about-windowless-bedrooms-in-rental-units-6501435
Tldr: They’re required for fire safety, ventilation and natural light but there’s alternatives to fulfill those requirements.
