Strata | 16 & 22 fl | Proposed

[Viewfromthe42]

I would suggest that the floor and height limits on King Street and how far back they reach from King Street, towards Regina/Caroline, are effectively pushing for a St.Jacob's-esque core, coupled with the neighbourhood associations wanting zero change within their neighbourhoods. Have we reached a decade of waiting for the Alexandra School development to happen?

Is that related to the neighbourhood associations?

Have we reached a decade of waiting for the Alexandra School development to happen?

Assuming this is the future development between the school and Red House, it surely will not be happening until the Barrel Yards development wraps up. Auburn has three projects under way in the region at the moment (Barrel Yards, Arrow 2 and Schneider's) and I don't expect this one to get done until that list gets shorter.

Understandably yes, Barrelyards takes some focus and attention, but we've been through a lot of proposals for development by the Alexandra school, each time generally met with the response that this is no place (a block from King, short steps from LRT) for density.

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?

There are a few cities where they have actually built sufficient housing so as to see rental prices fall, but few cities allow for it. Locally, this is what we saw exclusively in the student housing around Northdale. While a lot of new buildings went up with high price tags, after a while, it made the prices of many other older rentals (multifamily buildings and partitioned homes) go down. This would be nice to achieve not only for people in the 18-22(ish) demographic, but in the 23-99+ age demographic as well.