[Hindentanic]

That's exactly it...they didn't want to pay the money for a larger structure or a fully-fleshed ground floor interiors all of which they have to pigeonhole into some potentially historically preservable structure that has very little of its historical streetscape integrity left. It's also hard for the city to overly insist for such, as the developers have to make the numbers work within their own available budgets, timeframes, and operating plan.

You almost wish the city could somehow create or expand the criteria of a development fund or abatement incentive whose purpose would be to offset the costs of putting habitable space on the ground floor of parking garage or incorporating garages off the ground floor of buildings or their streetfronts. Akin to affordable housing incentives, this would be complicated as hell and critics and opportunists would circle, but mistakes like this wretched garage are very difficult to undo, and the city is not in a good position economically downtown to constrain downtown development opportunities with so many demands such that downtown developers can't build anything. If we're going to be sinking billions of dollars into multi-tiered highway flyovers so that commuters on the far suburban fringe can save an additional minute on their commute, surely we can invest a small bit of that into parking solutions for downtown that leave the downtown core viable.

Oh well, I wonder what the Smith Brothers or Atlee B. Ayers would think seeing that the centerpiece of their once visionary dreams for "Bowen Island Skyscrapers" would ultimately be a parking garage that looked like a cage at the zoo.