General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[ijmorlan]

Does it make sense for the hospital to buy the Sun Life parking lot and CTV Land across the street for expansion?

I don't know if that would work because Sun Life uses half the lot, while the hospital uses the other half for staff parking. Plus, from what I remember hearing they are aiming for a 50 to 60 acre site for the new hospital which is huge, so they wouldn't really fit a whole lot there since that block is even smaller than the one the current hospital sits on. Of course they could build up - something like 12-15 floors - which would grand them a lot of space but there are disadvantages to building a hospital that way. They could also use - as you said - the CTV lot across the street but that's pretty small.

Yes, but the new hospital doesn’t need 50 to 60 acres. They just have this daft idea of consolidating everything from here to Toronto into one mega-hospital, an obviously stupid idea. It should be perfectly feasible to build structured parking on part of the Sun Life lot and a new hospital building on the rest of it. I would go so far as to say that the most likely reason to put 50-60 acres in the requirements is to ensure that the new site is way out in the boonies — somebody has pre-judged that that is where the hospital should be. I won’t go so far as to allege that somebody owns a 50 to 60 acre site in north Waterloo; a more likely scenario is that they’re thinking of the future as to expansion but not thinking of the future where not as many people own a car.

Anyway, the King/Union/Park/Mt. Hope block is approximately 170m square, or 28900m². This is approximately 7 acres. So, a 9 story building covering the entire site would have approximately 63 acres of floor space. In other words, they can build a huge amount of floor space on the site. Now I know it’s not conventional to build a 9 story building covering an entire block, but the point is that they don’t need to go halfway to Elmira to find a site.

Some combination of thinking more about which services go where, which are at multiple hospitals, and which are centralized, would absolutely allow them to keep the hospital more or less where it is. Build a smaller hospital somewhere towards the north part of the City of Waterloo to provide more locations. The north campus at UW has been mentioned.

One final note: 60 acres is approximately 240,000m². This is over half the floor area of the Boeing plant in Everett (400,000m²). We do not need a hospital with floor area half the size of the Boeing plant. We also have amazing technology that allows us to build buildings whose floor area is larger than the building footprint. So I feel even more confident asserting that the hospital does not need a 60 acre site.