New Ottawa Civic Hospital [930 Carling Ave + 520 Preston St] | U/C

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by Uhuniau

There are HUGH hospitals in the middles of downtown Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Quebec City, Halifax, Boston, Manhattan.

Apparently Ottawa is the only city in North America where it is impossible to build a hospital in the core, or in an area with existing buildings and land-uses.

Yet again, people are determined to find every excuse, no matter how flimsy (and boy, some of those excuses are flimsy), for why something can't be done, instead of finding the relatively easy path forward where it can. The challenges, such as they are, of building a new hospital at a site like Tunney's, or hell, even building around the existing Carling Avenue campus, are miniscule compared to other major urban hospital projects in other places.

And they usually involve some sort of large scale property acquisition or expropriation and some sort of large-scale demolition. I have no objection to that, but in a city with so much vacant land (and local political tradition that the federal government is responsible for providing the site for hospitals) it is a little hard to justify a large-scale demolition process.