Quote:
Originally Posted by Repthe250
Why are you getting so personally offended that I, a skyscraper enthusiast on a skyscraper page (god forbid!) gives a little bit of a 🞵🞵🞵🞵 about the lack of thought and quality put into BCs towers these days?
This is a BC issue and a new one at that. I had already explained to you that we used to do it with matching glass and cladding. Need I give you the exact same examples as I stated above? Look at Toronto. It is just as expensive in Toronto but they can execute a mixed use development no problem, you wouldn’t even notice it’s a mixed use. Seattle; same thing. Calgary, absolutely! It’s only in Vancouver. Otherwise, prove it to me that it’s the same all over the world.
These developers cheap out on every aspect of these new towers and STILL sell for $2000/sqft. It’s not about making affordable housing. It’s about making maximum profits with doing the absolute bare minimum and it’s become a trend in BC.
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I wasn't getting pissed off at anything.
I was merely triyng to explain to you the financial gymnastics that the developers and architects often have to navigate to get these developments and projects builts.
And Vancouver is not Toronto.
I'm sorry but it just isn't.
You can't compare how projects get executed and done here - and to what market the're sold to in the two places like it makes any sense.
And it's not always just a question of they just decided to go the "cheap and ugly" route.
Some times, some of these developments get specc'ed early on with high-end finishes and cladding systems all the way through both their residential and commercial components, as it's initially proposed in the design permit application phases, but then the financial realities of the market they're trying to sell in begin to set in as they get into the design development and construction permit phase.
At that point the bean-counters and value-engineering enter into the picture and you end up with something that looks much toned down from the initial renders. And the easiest place to cut costs usually tends to be the residential part of the project.
And often times its not even about making
"maximum profit" more than it is about just getting it built and making some of your money back.
Changing City even referred to just completed towers in Metrotown (not sure if they're referring to the same one), but if you look at one like Ledmac's Riviera on Beresford that's barely sold that many units, with majority of the units still unsold -it's definitely not a high-end tower, and in this market they're struggling to get stuff sold and move units.
And this is a development that doesn't even have any retail or commercial component to the project that would drive the overall cost up, with the higher end finishes of those parts.
If they built such a tower with higher-end systems, there's no doubt in my mind they'd be in receivership right now with the prices they'd have to sell the units at to justify the cost - as has happened to a lot of projects and developments around the city over the past few years.
You may be right that its something that used to be done before (and certainly in mixed use projects where you have a hotel as part of the same tower, you'd do exactly that and keep all systems to the level of the commercial higher-end hotel system as City also pointed ), but I don't know whether you've noticed that construction costs and (more importantly) labour costs have been increasing almost exponentially over the last several years and that's changing how everything is getting built nowadays - especially with the market of customers that used to buy those sort of higher-end units not as readily available anymore these days.
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