Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
T These factors partly explain why growth in Canada is happening in cities like Toronto and Calgary, not small towns like Baddeck, and they are part of the reason why Nova Scotia's efforts to concentrate growth in sparsely populated areas are doomed to fail.
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This is very true--despite how horribly congested the GTA is, and how increasingly difficult it is to commute into the centre of the city, there's still bucketloads of office development going up, enough to bolster a whole new small office district in the old rail lands south of the current CBD.
Working remotely will undoubtedly be part of the mix in future, but like businesses (banks, tech, etc) still seem to find value in clustering, not just in particular cities but even in particular parts of cities. The example of Cagary is illustrative: A downtown that's ultra-dense with office uses, despite that the rest of the city is almost uniformly low density (and less expensive to set up shop in). It seems like a bizarre arrangement, but that's just the way businesses cluster.
So imagining that white-collar employment will be spread throughout the province to replace the failing blue-collar industries extremely wishful thinking. We just have to accept that some towns--a lot of towns--are going to shrink, and that's okay. It's not just in Nova Scotia, of course, people have a lot of difficulty accepting changing growth patterns.
On the topic thread, however, it's still an open question if there'll be sufficient demand any time soon for International Place, so as others have said, turning it into a residential project would make a hell of a lot more sense. It'd also be a huge game-changer for Granville and may spur developers to agitate for an expediting of the Cogswell rebuild.