Hospitals in KW

[ijmorlan]

I still don't get the 60 acres number. Can anyone name ANY major hospital with that large a footprint?

The new Windsor hospital (60 acres) and the new Ottawa Hospital (50 acres).  In  Windsor's case, I gather that it's out in the burbs.  In Ottawa's case, the GofC made Experimental Farm land available.  Edit, I haven't seen an explanation of why the GofO is insisting on such big sites - perhaps to accomodate other medical-related developments down the road?

There is no conceivable reasonable justification for insisting on such a large site.

I mean obviously, ceteris paribus (“all other things being equal”), a bigger site is better, but the real estate market is about as far from ceteris paribus as you can get — a large site is almost certainly out in the boonies, so by specifying that up front they are pre-determining another variable, and pre-determining it wrong.

As an example of how this could go wrong in the other direction, imagine they understood that it’s important for hospitals (specifically, emergency departments, among other parts of the hospital I can think of) to be centrally located. So they specify “within 500m of Kitchener City Hall”. That would force an unreasonable expense for vacant land or require an extreme downsizing of the hospital or probably both.

Unfortunately, we still live in a society where building some huge thing way out in car-only land still isn’t immediately obviously a big fail to most people, so this will probably go forward with a huge site in the middle of nowhere.

Actually, it occurs to me that a lot of our problems, especially around cars, stem from the same sort of consideration. I would argue that, ceteris paribus, it’s obviously good for stores, offices, etc. to have good road access and lots of parking. And that can justify modern zoning, parking regulations, freeways, and suburb design. But this particular “ceteris paribus” is doing a lot of work, and understanding that turns this argument on its head; here in the real world, none of those things are “ceteris paribus”; everything costs a lot to build, it encourages car dependence, causes pollution, and ends up raising costs even more than it initially appears while making it harder for those who choose or want to choose differently. So in reality it’s better to allow and even encourage development that does not cater to motor vehicles or does so to a lesser extent.