Quote:
Originally Posted by lrt's friend
As we move shopping away from transit nodes to suburban power centres along with general employment to similar business parks, transit becomes less relevant no matter how many condos we build at LRT stations.
If those condo residents need to use a car to go to the business park jobs (example DND) and to shop at the power centres, they too will not be using transit. Unless jobs and retail are reasonably centralized, urbanization will not really be successful.
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There's now condos being built with less parking than there are units. It's actually rare to see anything but single family homes that have space for 1 car or more per dwelling. There's a proposed development on Cyrville of all places with zero parking for residents. Transit is becoming more relevant. Not less.
Yes, there's some suburban office parks. But by and large the generations that are coming detest them. There's a reason that companies like Shopify will spend tens of millions to locate in the core rather than a suburb. That's where their employees want to work. And increasingly where they live too. In the long run, suburban office parks are probably the most vulnerable to the Work From Home trend going forward because they are the least conveniently located.
As for suburban power centres. Just like malls they are reaching their limits. It's not just online shopping. Young people are increasingly not getting driver's licenses. And the larger a city gets, the less they need to drive. And even if they do drive, they might not own a car full time. Charsharing, ridesharing, etc. is all supplementing transit and active mobility too. All that means is that the days of spontaneously driving to power centre are coming to an end. And that will hurt the power centres in due course. The best case scenario for most of them is to evolve into lifestyle centres like Shops at Don Mills in Toronto. But then those are easy to add residential to. The privatized open spaces suck. But they are at least better than the traditional mall or power centre.
Ultimately though, there's no getting around the fact that we are substantially over-provisioned with retail space. And there will have to be readjustments in what we allocate space to. This is unsustainable on so many levels:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Harley613
They do not have anywhere near 867,275 sq ft. of retail space, try more like 500,000 and change INCLUDING the empty Sears. So much of the GLA at St. Laurent is non-retail. Herzing College, Cinestarz movie theatre, Canada Games/Skate Canada/Intact Insurance offices, sears underground warehouse, Goodlife Gym, a bunch of professional services.'
Edit: Just checked their current leasing brochure and it states 376,950 sq. ft. of CRU (commercial retail unit) tenants. Whether or not that is current and accounts for all the empty stores I don't know.
https://assets.mallmaverick.com/syst...pdf?1539625054 |
I absolutely agree that they could do with less retail. Realistically, there's stores in there that would close and never come back if the mall closed. They should probably be aiming to keep less than 300k sqft in retail space. And then aim to add a minimum of one housing unit for every 50 sqft of retail and 2-3x as much in commercial office space. Morguard should be looking to wring out more value from this site. That mall really can't be delivering that much in return to them. And it's probably going to be worse post-pandemic.
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