Quote:
Originally Posted by Architype
^ The buildings were smaller in scale, with only churches etc. standing out (the faded colours of the photo are also misleading). This is the Nimby's idea of perfection (tiny buildings, no change), resulting in any new construction now having to mostly adhere to this sense of scale. Photos of Vancouver's West End from that era evoke the same comparative reactions to the point of making it totally unrecognisable. In reality modern SJs doesn't actually look smaller in person, but much more impressive.
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That's not a great comparison. Vancouver's West End went from being a neighbourhood characterized by detached housing and small apartments to one of mid and high-rise buildings. Whatever one thinks about that change, it's developed in a clearly more urban direction.
Core St. John's on the other hand was starting from a more urban base point to begin with, and hasn't developed in a way that obviously adds to that urbanism. It's actually mostly unchanged from its pre-war self, except for the loss of some fine-grained commercial buildings for clunky, cumbersome mid-rise office buildings like these:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/kzYWZrsVNwFrk3kN6
It's also lost some other old rowhouse areas (like the Central Slum), and almost all new growth in the past 50 years has come in the form of suburban development. The net result is that core St. John's is arguably no more urban now than it was then, and may even be slightly less so.
It's not really a case of NIMBYism so much as it's a case of the city's post-war development just not being good.