Quote:
Originally Posted by Beedok
In part because they give the suburban folks the privacy they're after by being good and distant from the street.
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This can be a good argument against excessive height. In some cases, condo dwellers can wind up inhabited boxes twenty and thirty stories above street level, taking elevators down to their parking garages, and driving everywhere, never interacting with the streets around them.
In the case of Hamilton, building too-tall will work against curbing sprawl, not for it. If we hypothesize that there is current demand for (say) 2,000 units, you might accommodate that demand in five tall buildings built on five vacant lots (or, in this case, on the lots of irreplaceable heritage buildings). You'll get some retail on five different lots, and will by and large spare all of the precious surface parking which help enable dwellers of distant suburbs to cheaply access their jobs in the downtown core.
If you put those 2,000 units in thirty mid-rise buildings with retail under each and every one, you will have displaced a lot of low-value land uses, and provided for many more square feet of retail or commercial space for residents. That space, and the more human scale of the buildings, can create the kind of real street life that will spur on a virtuous cycle that attracts residents and in turn more services and in turn more residents, and eventually really leads to an alternative to the suburbs.