03-12-2018, 12:19 PM
(03-12-2018, 09:06 AM)Viewfromthe42 Wrote: Let's be very clear here: the author is going to be someone in an UpTown neighbourhood association. Those neighbourhoods are the enclaves of the well-off. The people living in the42, BPR, Bauer, any of these developments, the majority are not able to afford anything comparable to what the author lives in; to not have built these developments would have meant not having these individuals in UpTown. The few upper-tier options in these developments (like the seven-figure penthouse in the42), were they not built, would mean that the financial heft of that individual/family would have been used to push up the price on something in one of the neighbourhoods around, as the sole other alternative, pricing a current resident out. So no, author, you are wrong, it is your stance that makes UpTown an enclave for the better-off.
Bringing up the missing middle is even more insulting here. The "missing middle" is "middling" in both density AND location. To suggest that townhomes belong here (or as one Kitchener councilor suggested, that townhomes were the correct development scale for King St. at Victoria) is ignoring "missing middle" entirely. There is almost no such development in our region explicitly because of, again, you, author. "Missing middle" is the development that happens in your neighbourhood, away from the nodes and corridors in Waterloo's densification plans. It certainly isn't the scale of 70 King North, likely not even of the42; perhaps it is the townhomes at Park and Allen, were they not at Park and Allen, or BPR Lofts were they not at Bridgeport and Regina. You can do a quick guideline for missing middle in the core; if the road has never been a trucking route, has never been a bus route, and doesn't have bike lanes, traffic lights, or school bus routes on it, that is the kind of road, location-wise, where "missing middle" belongs.
Good post! I especially like that you pointed out that the absence of those large developments would mean the absence of their occupants from Uptown. I am reminded of an article I saw in the newspaper a few weeks back talking about high rents, and somebody said that “we can’t build our way out of this problem”. I just about choked on my cereal to see something so stupid. My immediate was reaction was that, no, on the contrary, the only way out of the problem is building more housing. That’s not quite right, of course: we could also make the city a less pleasant place to live, which could eventually make demand for housing fall.
People also complain that new housing tends to be more expensive than older housing. But in reality, it would be weird if that weren’t the case. How often are new cars cheaper than comparable old cars?