Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. You cannot be a slave to a bunch of planners and a restrictive strategy when a new opportunity nobody saw coming suddenly appears.
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It's complicated but fundamentally I don't think it's ever correct to create rigid long-term plans. Nobody can predict the future, so nobody can create a perfect plan; the projections they used for HbD are already wrong and we're only a few years out.
HbD is actually somewhat worse than that since many of the requirements were wrong from day 1. A 20 storey maximum for height on a lot with a 27 storey DA issued is not reasonable, for example. There have been other problems like the landscaping requirements that have held back multiple developments (Spring Garden/South Park and Drum condos) for months. It doesn't take a lot of that stuff to bring a plan to the point where it would have been better never to introduce it in the first place.
One fundamental problem with "planning", I think, is that the term conflates a number of activities of varying levels of importance and objectivity. For example, planning for basic services like water and electricity is important. Setting buildings heights at 13 vs. 17 storeys in cases where either building could be accommodated by infrastructure is not nearly as important and is much more subjective.
I think the consequences of bickering over every proposal and constantly dragging developers through the mud are far more severe to the city than the consequences of allowing uncontrolled urban infill would be. Nobody can come up with a clear reason why these buildings would be harmful, but everybody can see the hideous crater that's there right now. We are obviously paying other costs to maintain the city bureaucracy, developers must pay for planning and legal fees, etc.
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