Canadian City Proposals II

[kool maudit]

I think Canada needs to think harder about highrise buildings. We are building some of the worst new urban environments in the world. These towers in places like Kitchener or Ottawa, whatever their height, are not "skyscrapers" in any sense that evokes the iconic or triumphal associations of that term. These are not "skylines" in any way that matters. They are just developed space. Settled land. The absolute minimum.

[kool maudit]

I think back to when that forumer was drawing vague lines between hospitals, retirement homes and condominums scattered haphazardly across a map of Ottawa while talking about this new "big skyline" as though it was going to become Chicago's Loop. It's ridiculous.

[Acajack]

Storage space for humans.

We have a lot of additional humans newly living here.

[J.OT13]

Evolution of an Ottawa proposal at 384 Arlington, highly visible from the Queensway. I was a huge fan of the first proposal, but the subsequent designs have been disappointing.


https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...3#post10336703

[niwell]

Public projects tend to be better but are often the victim of value engineering. Private (residential) towers are overly geared towards investment potential. It doesn't lead to a good result. There are outliers to be sure.

Of course you can build smaller scale projects that are at worst inoffensive and add towards the general urban fabric. We've backed ourselves into a corner with respect to land values that doesn't make that palatable in most cases - even if permissions were greatly relaxed overnight.

Originally Posted by Acajack

Storage space for humans.

We have a lot of additional humans newly living here.

Storage space for investment capital is probably a bigger factor at the end of the day. If our goal was to house as many people as fast as possible the contemporary Canadian residential highrise is not an efficient way to do it.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by niwell

Storage space for investment capital is probably a bigger factor at the end of the day. If our goal was to house as many people as fast as possible the contemporary Canadian residential highrise is not an efficient way to do it.

You're probably right. Either way the public and human urban realm is rarely well-served.

[WhipperSnapper]

Skylines and tall towers are what attract people to the forums. There's also an arrogance that new Canadians are just happy to be living in Canada. There certainly is a subset that are just happy to be in Canada but that euphoria of being in Canada stuck raising a family in a shoebox with views into another shoebox is not going to last either.

Canada is becoming less and less attractive for people to move here permanently. Word will continue to spread that the marketing material used to attract immigrants to Canada is a lie. That will be detrimental to future growth and development discussion in hot beds like Southern Ontario

[Nouvellecosse]

It's true that there should be a greater variety of unit sizes including ones more suitable to families. But the problem isn't that smaller units exist for those who want them. It's that larger units mostly don't exist which forces people into housing types they may not want. Which is an issue for everyone and not specific in any way to immigrants.

It also isn't a reason to oppose a particular housing development for not having large enough units and is instead a reason to support other development with larger units. The reason why is that let's say, 90% of new units are currently small and it should only be 50%. Well it's impossible to say which 40% of units should have been larger because it's about the total, not specific units. It also isn't a matter of views since there have been countless suburban houses with little to no view for decades and no one complained that they have a view only looking toward other houses. So it isn't a highrise issue; it's a matter of the design of specific projects.

[WhipperSnapper]

The explosive population is a driver of the real estate speculation in a place like Toronto. Those real estate speculators are going to build to the low standards of a million plus temp work and student visas requiring rental accommodations than immigrant families and that's the point.

The argument that suburban tract housing doesn't have better views than these planned high rise clusters makes no sense even if you're unaware that views are the primary focus to live on a higher floor. Space for a view is always a quality enhancer for the majority of people in any form of housing

High rises are an issue which is why they are so heavily regulated globally through planning policy compared to commercial high rises. 40 plus storeys and 400 plus units cost more to develop. Family units will have higher prices per square foot. I also can't think of a worst environment to raise young kids with hallways and elevators. In Toronto, you're greeted with a concrete environment as developers take advantage of every square inch of property to build mid rise podiums. That's a tradeoff in the heart of a city. This planned everywhere in Toronto include 30 kilometres away in Oakville.

And the defense for these skyline boosters is that they will house a lot of people and everyone in the GTA should embrace it. @Nouvellecosse is the only one that delves deeper into the fabric being created by these skyscraper clusters. Everyone seems to purposely avoid it. These towers in most posts come across are merely stats.

[urbancanadian]

I agree that the Art Deco City Hall is beautiful. I would be in favour of protecting some space to actually see the building. But activists (incl. on SSP) are in the opinion that the view cones toward City Hall were just to protect the views of the politicians from their offices.

Ironically, in our current poitical environment, there could realistically be more pushback against a plan that preserved the view cone to City Hall.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

The explosive population is a driver of the real estate speculation in a place like Toronto. Those real estate speculators are going to build to the low standards of a million plus temp work and student visas requiring rental accommodations than immigrant families and that's the point.

The argument that suburban tract housing doesn't have better views than these planned high rise clusters makes no sense even if you're unaware that views are the primary focus to live on a higher floor. Space for a view is always a quality enhancer for the majority of people in any form of housing

I think you may have missed the point when saying "Space for a view is always a quality enhancer". The point is that many people, including those affluent enough to afford fully detached houses which are the most expensive housing type, don't consider it important enough to put them off of buying a property that find appealing otherwise. So the fact that its desirable to everyone means it's not reasonable to hold the lack of views against one housing type and not another. Clearly it isn't important enough to many people who have the means to choose but for whom the views are outweighed by other factors. No one other than billionaires gets everything they want in a home. There's always some weighing of pros and cons and making trade offs.

And of course it's true that views are a focus for some (many?) people who buy units with views. But obviously there are plenty of people who buy units in highrises simply because that's what's available in their price range and/or in the location they want. Clearly price, location and availability are equal or greater motivating factors for highrise occupants in contemporary GTA.

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

High rises are an issue which is why they are so heavily regulated globally through planning policy compared to commercial high rises. 40 plus storeys and 400 plus units cost more to develop. Family units will have higher prices per square foot. I also can't think of a worst environment to raise young kids with hallways and elevators. In Toronto, you're greeted with a concrete environment as developers take advantage of every square inch of property to build mid rise podiums. That's a tradeoff in the heart of a city. This planned everywhere in Toronto include 30 kilometres away in Oakville.

And the defense for these skyline boosters is that they will house a lot of people and everyone in the GTA should embrace it. @Nouvellecosse is the only one that delves deeper into the fabric being created by these skyscraper clusters. Everyone seems to purposely avoid it. These towers in most posts come across are merely stats.

I agree that if you just let the real estate industry build what it feels like without guiding it with incentives or regulations then you'll just get what's most profitable rather than what's best for a wide cross-section of society. But I'm not a free market purist so I see no reason why we'd want to do that. And you obviously agree because you don't want a profit driven free-for-all either. But of course we currently have lots of regulations and limits in terms of what you can build and where so that's not the issue. The issue is what specific regulations exist and what they do and don't achieve.

[WhipperSnapper]

First off, detached housing is not the most expensive housing type. Views are undeniably the main feature for the lifestyle of living high up in luxury. You also inferred that people buying single family homes don't care that much about views so that same rationale should be applied to high rises suggesting that views aren't a big deal at all in quality of life.

People are forced into shoebox 30 plus storey high rises with 10 units per floor because that's what the private equity behind the developers support. A 350 square foot unit on the 30th floor is about $500,000. It's absurd that a 350 square detached house on a slab can't be built for the same amount outside of the central cores.

South America is the epicenter of high rise living. They have their share of people warehouses. They tend to be widesuites like the slabs of the modernist era than these bowling alleys on squarish 750 square metre plates that dominate Toronto's new housing market. The middle class high rises have one to three suites per floor with semi-private elevators and a separate service elevator. They are twenty storeys or less.

There is nothing wrong with high capacity people warehouses being built near transit nodes. The problem with Toronto is the sheer dominance of high capacity people warehouses being proposed to meet the city's future housing needs. They're taller and closer spaced than the housing projects in China. It's fucking insanity to think that everything about these from the 10+ plus FAR densities in the middle of nowhere except for a nearby rail station consisting of narrow shoeboxes will maintain Toronto's attractiveness. Unlike low rise wood framed, these units are not adaptable. They will remain the benchmark for the real estate market's housing standard and pricing in perpetuity.

Your opinion remains to find solutions to house the rapid population growth affordability within the existing urban area. I say that's a delusion and say Canada should strive higher than be a competitively low wage version of Mexico for the US.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

First off, detached housing is not the most expensive housing type. Views are undeniably the main feature for the lifestyle of living high up in luxury. You also inferred that people buying single family homes don't care that much about views so that same rationale should be applied to high rises suggesting that views aren't a big deal at all in quality of life.

Umm, yes detached houses are most certainly the most expensive housing type. And quite significantly so. I'm not talking about the price to size ratio or the construction costs but rather the average purchase price. Sure people are getting more space for their money, but they also tend to get a less convenient location and, as discussed, worse views. Which is exactly the point. People who can afford to pay the highest average prices often place a higher priority on other features.

And i have no idea what purpose there was in saying, "Views are undeniably the main feature for the lifestyle of living high up in luxury" because we're talking highrises in general, not luxury highrises. Most highrise condo units being built in Canada are not luxury, regardless of how they want to market themselves. It's true that in some cities (mostly US and Australia) pretty much all the highrises are high end, but that's never been the case in Toronto and has become even less the case during the current boom. But regardless, a place isn't unlivable just because it lacks a "luxury lifestyle" feature.

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

People are forced into shoebox 30 plus storey high rises with 10 units per floor because that's what the private equity behind the developers support. A 350 square foot unit on the 30th floor is about $500,000. It's absurd that a 350 square detached house on a slab can't be built for the same amount outside of the central cores.

South America is the epicenter of high rise living. They have their share of people warehouses. They tend to be widesuites like the slabs of the modernist era than these bowling alleys on squarish 750 square metre plates that dominate Toronto's new housing market. The middle class high rises have one to three suites per floor with semi-private elevators and a separate service elevator. They are twenty storeys or less.

There is nothing wrong with high capacity people warehouses being built near transit nodes. The problem with Toronto is the sheer dominance of high capacity people warehouses being proposed to meet the city's future housing needs. They're taller and closer spaced than the housing projects in China. It's fucking insanity to think that everything about these from the 10+ plus FAR densities in the middle of nowhere except for a nearby rail station consisting of narrow shoeboxes will maintain Toronto's attractiveness. Unlike low rise wood framed, these units are not adaptable. They will remain the benchmark for the real estate market's housing standard and pricing in perpetuity.

Your opinion remains to find solutions to house the rapid population growth affordability within the existing urban area. I say that's a delusion and say Canada should strive higher than be a competitively low wage version of Mexico for the US.

I'd say it's delusional to say that it's delusional. Because most major cities in the world anywhere near Toronto's stature - including in fully developed countries - are denser than Toronto. The only major exceptions are generally in North America and Australia. But even in NA we have the counter example of NYC which has several times the density. The only thing that makes infill density infeasible is the politics. Not that I want the city to be as dense as NYC, Paris or HK, but 50% would be a decent long term threshold and we're even far off of that. NYC is not a discount version of Mexico despite having a huge percentage of homes being in multi-unit structures including countless residential highrises. Yet the city is still desirable.

But yes we completely agree that the average unit should be larger and should be more affordable. And it's obviously possible since apartments were larger on average for most of the city's history. The only thing we disagree on is the blanket statement maligning of highrises are being somehow bad for people. Regardless of one's personal tastes, the data just doesn't support that.

[SteelTown]

An early Christmas gift!

OLT approved a 39-story building at 117 Jackson Street East, effectively ending Hamilton's 30-story height limit. The height will be almost identical to Hamilton's current tallest, Landmark Place.

https://www.thepublicrecord.ca/2024/...adowing-rules/





Source: 117 Jackson Street East @ https://urbantoronto.ca/database/pro...eet-east.51442

[905er]

Landmark place needs to not be a landmark anymore.. Time for a new landmark in Hamilton

[matt602]

Originally Posted by 905er

Landmark place needs to not be a landmark anymore.. Time for a new landmark in Hamilton

I don't think I've ever met another Hamiltonian that actually likes the look of that building. Completely agree.

[ScreamingViking]

Trading up from one old fugly to a new one.

[Coldrsx]

Rossdale Centre off to EDC in January. Killer location, interesting design, will come down to material choices.

[giallo]

The Concord False Creek project has bubbled up to the surface again.



Concord Pacific wants to build 5,000 homes on False Creek's northeast shore, but Vancouver's viaducts are in the way

Dan Fumano
Published Jan 07, 2025



A major Vancouver developer says a recent “alignment of the stars” means it will will go ahead with developing what is likely downtown’s largest undeveloped waterfront property.

On Tuesday, Concord Pacific released preliminary details of its proposal to build 5,000 homes in 12 towers — including skyscrapers taller than any others in the city — as well as dozens of restaurants, shops, and services in False Creek’s northeast shore.


This parcel of former Expo lands, between the Plaza of Nations and Science World, has sat largely empty for decades, except for temporary uses, such as for events like Cirque du Soleil.






Full article:

https://vancouversun.com/news/post-v...oncord-pacific


• Video Link

[WhipperSnapper]

Height and population junkies may rejoice but, IMHO, nothing screams more mega block people warehousing than this. Renderings suggest a cross between Barcelona and Mega City One.