Dear City of Edmonton - There are a number of empty lots and run down building downtown. Please focus all of your efforts on dealing with these before allowing one of the few decent remaining heritage buildings in the area to be destroyed.
Are you aware that this is not SimCity and the CoE doesn't actually dictate which lots will or not be chosen by developers, right? And that negative reinforcements, like barring all "unwanted" developments usually just pushes developments away while, on the other hand, "positive" reinforcements are expensive?
As much as I would love to see the vacant lots get developed before even considering tearing out old buildings, there's only so much the public administration can do to bar current owners of lots and buildings from pricing and selling their assets however the hell they want (I actually believe the many levels of government already have waaaaaay to much power over stuff, to be honest). Currently vacant lots are a lot more expensive to buy than some buildings, for two reasons: most of them are being used as paid parking lots, yielding revenue; it's cheaper and faster to build in clean, leveled lots than demolition + build (more permits, more time, more labor, etc...). On the other side of this, maintaining an existing building is expensive, property taxes are higher and a lot of building owners are dealing with cashflow issues that can be solved by selling assets.
The only way for the CoE to curb this movement would be to make several policy changes that would fast-track historic designation, compensate the building owners dearly, increase property taxes for vacant lots (especially in denser neighborhoods) and reduce the incentive for surface parking such as lowering/extinguishing paid public parking, subsidizing transit to increase ridership, etc... All is this is politically and financially expensive, lengthy and not guaranteed to yield the expected results. Other than that, the only way for the public administration to ban the current movement would be to arbitrarily block any such development, which would strengthen the "unfriendly to development" brand that Edmonton already carries and crowd-out existing and future players in the development industry, especially in Downtown. I do believe that the City needs to crack down hard on the "buy, demo and flip" movement, introduce conditions in the approvals, force the developed to actually provide proof of financial capability to develop, only release the final approval once they have a market assessment audited independently, so we don't end up with another BMO site.
As cold-hearted as it might sound, sometimes you need to cut of the hand to keep the arm. If we want some of those initiatives I mentioned before to be somewhat feasible, we need to take on every reasonable opportunity to densify downtown, add in more residents and businesses, increasing the demand to a point where it will be just as profitable to develop a surface parking lot as it is to demolish an old building (or at least, just marginally less profitable, but better for reputation and public relations, making it more profitable in the long term).
That's my two cents.
engaged.edmonton.ca
