10123 106 Street | 155.14m | 50s | Westrich Pacific | Arc Studio

What do you think of this project?

  • I like it a lot

    Votes: 7 28.0%

  • I like it

    Votes: 14 56.0%

  • I neither like nor dislike it

    Votes: 4 16.0%

  • I dislike it

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • I dislike it a lot

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    25
We need to convince more people to live downtown. All my friends are renting basement suites in the suburbs or buying greenfield developments. How can we make downtown and Oliver more desirable places to live? (At least in peoples 20s/30s, the easiest ages to get DT).

These projects seem big, but 15,000 university students graduate every year. Over 70,000 attend institutions like uofa, Mac, nait, norquest at a time. We should easily be able to fill all these new towers!
 
Maybe the cost of rent downtown/Oliver is prohibitive.

Went for a long walk this evening in Oliver and downtown - I've lived in the area for six years after always having been on the north side. I'm still surprised how few people I see walking around. These are the two most dense communities in Edmonton and yet I see relatively few people on foot.
Winter, not surprisingly, is significantly worse.

I spend a lot of time in river valley and I walked to work before working from home now. A big reason I moved downtown was walkability and being in a more dense area. But thinking of moving to other side of the river - not sure if there are more 'active' people over there, but it seems a bit busier.
 
thommyjo said:
We need to convince more people to live downtown. All my friends are renting basement suites in the suburbs or buying greenfield developments. How can we make downtown and Oliver more desirable places to live? (At least in peoples 20s/30s, the easiest ages to get DT).

These projects seem big, but 15,000 university students graduate every year. Over 70,000 attend institutions like uofa, Mac, nait, norquest at a time. We should easily be able to fill all these new towers!
Click to expand...

I'm sure everyone will have their own opinion on this, but mine is that council has concentrated many of their investments downtown on items that, while they be nice steps forward, are not the things that inspire people to make the biggest purchase of their life.

Imagine Jasper street reconstruction between 109 and 114th. Yeah, it's nice to have a little more room on the sidewalk...probably should be how it was constructed in the first place...but that isn't going to be the kind of things that makes somewhere buy a condo downtown.

Edmonton Funicular. Cool project. Not impressive enough to be a re-occurring attraction. Not a reason someone buys downtown.


Everyone could probably put together this own list of projects, but to me, the thing that could actually move the needle is the completion of the new "central park" around Boston Pizza on 107th. I know it's in the process, but surely there is a better way to prioritize that project so it gets DONE and not just contemplated. The other thing I would do is setting up a tax incentive so that it was cheaper to operate a retail business downtown in the same space as a comparable retail space elsewhere in the City. You bring a vibrant business community with bakeries, coffee shops, restaurants, clothing boutiques, etc...people will want to live near those places. We have some pockets of that already, but not to the scale needed to see the "downtown explosion" you are calling for.
 
^^uh COVID as well... for this past spring it was as busy as I have ever seen it in Oliver.

I've walked many parts of Shanghai, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto and even NYC with far less people out and about as one would imagine. Part of the issue here is that we do not provide high enough quality of spaces for people, with Vic prom and Paul Kane being exceptions.
 
Affordability is a big thing. I mean nobody is expect for the same money the same kind of space, but a lot of projects are still obviously priced ABOVE what people are either willing or able to afford. Even if some projects used 25% of their space as market micro-units, I think they'd have a lot higher chance of success. I grew up as a minimalist nomad with no real desire to settle down and find there's no real option for people like me. If more Cambridge/MacLeod Loft-like spaces (550 sq ft studio's or smaller) were offered they'd find a market. Believe me. There are a ton of people myself included that would rather trade space in the burbs for life downtown if it meant a tiny suite with a modicum of privacy and great walkability...
 
Aka city planners and developers say they want artists and creatives (writers, actors, artists) to live there and create lively cities full of activity then automatically price them out of any project the soon as they go to market... Classic gentrification trap!

And no I don't think it should be up to the non-profit sector to create specialized housing for them in a piecemeal fashion. An Affordability for ALL budget ranges for all market should be at the top of ANY project approval if you ask me... Economic apartheid is still apartheid whether you like it or not... To quote The Simpsons...

275025.jpg
 
The problem is Edmonton developers don't know how to design an artist facility and the City administration doesn't know how to zone/approve one even if the former wasn't true. Los Angeles has it figured out in a district that they call (imagine this) the "Arts District" -- Edmonton should study this area. Boyle is a good location; so is Alberta Avenue and so is 124th Street. Again, I can't wait until COVID has waned (I am not going to give away the secret sauce formula until we have a chance to implement it).
 
archited said:
The problem is Edmonton developers don't know how to design an artist facility and the City administration doesn't know how to zone/approve one even if the former wasn't true. Los Angeles has it figured out in a district that they call (imagine this) the "Arts District" -- Edmonton should study this area. Boyle is a good location; so is Alberta Avenue and so is 124th Street. Again, I can't wait until COVID has waned (I am not going to give away the secret sauce formula until we have a chance to implement it).
Click to expand...

Thats my point. Since they can't all they should be doing is making sure AFFORDABILITY FOR ALL is the key principal. The market will correct itself IF you make affordability for all a priority. Otherwise y'all just designing another elitist gilded pens for simple-minded sheep at the expense of everyone else. Although I suspect developers are largely aware that this is the narrow niche market they are all painfully trying to capture...
 
And NO that doesn't mean play anorexic and push your veggies around until people don't notice that you haven't actually eaten anything. Or in this case, build anything.. Aka pay off the city to develop some random shitty scheme on the edge of the city on surplus land. In theory again this works to get more bang for the buck but the reality is that they are developing housing in places where transit is already crap and will never improve to the standard needed for truly viable service.

Transit Oriented Development and Affordability need to be hand in hand for a healthy city. After all these are the people most likely to use transit for their primary mobility source. Even if you have to offer a density bonus on projects or even a social housing buy in, so be it... Although I wish it wouldn't have to come to such draconian measures. Alas...
 
Housing affordability is also a skewed metric that rarely takes into account the long-term costs of commuting and vehicle ownership. I know that doesn't help out young families starting out who may not be able to afford a larger mortgage or higher rent, but that's part of the larger problem where what appears on the surface to be more affordable is simply a can that keeps getting kicked down the road - a road which will need to keep getting widened and have more money funnelled into maintaining it for parallel reasons.
 
No matter what levers you push/pull, you will always be able to purchase a comparable unit for less in the suburbs compared to downtown. As the market goes up in one, it goes up in the other as well. Affordability in the core will always be relative.

@Daveography, I think you discount the fact that people do think about the long-term "true" costs of where they live. It's just a matter of when people look at the short-term upfront cost, a number of them don't view the value proposition currently offered in downtown. If you don't feel it is "better", why would you pay the premium?
 
Here's a hint -- artist's quarters need to have a money-making aspect to them. Not exactly a live-work scenario as the term has come to be known, but more of a live-work-sales studio-public showroom configuration where an artist can calculate the value on terms that are more than just cost. The City and the conventional thinking has a tower where artists can live (and maybe work if there is room for their particular endeavor) with common display space on the ground floor (NO GOOD). So, before a venture is undertaken to provide space for artists, the said "renters" or "owners" (preferably the latter) need to engage in the design process to come up with a very unique and specific structure. Otherwise the process excludes artists who are metal fabricators, sculptors, glass-blowers... you get the picture. The public needs to be able to travel from floor to floor to see the artist in their own space -- so typically the buildings will have exaggerated floor-to-floor measurements, designed to allow gas spigots, high-voltage outlets, and adjustable lighting. And then @Daveography's notion about not needing a vehicle (commute) comes into play. I knew several artists back in the day in Edmonton and I currently know a slew of them here in SoCal -- the complaint has always been the same -- "give me work space where I can live and where I can show my works to the buying public". Artists can easily sustain themselves if all parts of the equation are evident. The building would also have to have a large service elevator (can double as a passenger conveyance), a shipping/receiving area and a building manager/concierge facility -- preferably adjacent to an eatery/pub like ground floor appendage. In L.A. the Art District is plug full of old warehouses (used to be the Warehouse District) with exaggerated floors, huge "lifts", metal sliding "barn doors" and loads of exterior lighting (fire-rated Georgian wired glass windows). It started to gain its new nom-de-plume when a number of artists formed collectives and co-oped themselves into existence -- now it is one of the most sought after real estate in the City.
But it doesn't have to be old warehouses -- with the new timber-construction allowances these types of buildings could be easily duplicated with a modern flare and the Boyle is primed to be lanced. Also a good starting place might be the upper two floors of the Farmers Market on 97th street -- it would help to make the place a more permanent emplacement and (hint-hint) there is HUGE parking lot(s) adjacent where, once the idea caught fire, it could expand organically.
 
Following up on my last digression -- this might be the best place for me to post my Happy New Year All.
Hopefully the New Year is filled with lots of forward positive thinking for all who dwell here. The future is going to come at us in fast and furious fits and starts -- way more rapid-fire than we have experienced in the past.
Personally, this is the year that marks my return to Edmonton -- accompanying me will be some outsized plans with some outsized personalities. We will be working with Boston Dynamics to create a world class robotically-driven manufacturing facility that puts our products on the street to enliven, enrich, excite, and enthrall. We will be partnering with a couple of local developers to create what I think will be world-class-attention-grabbing projects. Edmonton will be our crucible, our head office, our planning centre, and our innovation laboratory. We plan to make main streets hum-m-m-m-m-m. Some of our employees are contributors on this forum.
The video here is meant to show that anything is possible and that our imaginations should be exercised and stretched to the greatest extent conceivable.
 
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