General Retail News

[danbrotherston]

Damn. I was hoping it would be a great spot for the new hospital building that's being talked about. The land the power centre sits on, plus the land within the highway interchange next to it, would be a huge and potentially very suitable parcel if it weren't for the inability to build higher.

Even with the height restriction you can still fit a building a bit taller then Charlie West in it so it's not that they can't build anything tall such as condos, it just won't be anywhere near the expectation for downtown Kitchener (40+). It would definitely be a good place for a future hospital with easy access to much of the city and the future LRT line but you'd have to convince Lowes, Staples and Zehrs to all vacate.

I mean, that height restriction isn't that significant. You could still build a ton of mid rise (4-6 stories) combined with some high rise (7-12 stories) and not even come close to the limit, and it would already be an extremely dense node.

We don't need tall buildings if we are willing to build midrise (which everyone claims to want).

That being said, I don't really know how the economics work...but I cannot for a second believe that 33 acres of 3-12 storey buildings with shops and homes intermixed could possibly be less financially sustainable than 33 acres of mostly surface parking with a few cheap single story big box stores dotting the parking lots.

FWIW, I think the biggest obstacle to building an actual place would be lack of effective transit. The site is highly unwalkable and disconnected from any of the surrounding areas (not just by the highway interchange, but also by Ottawa St., even McClellan park--literally across the street---would not be a place kids could walk to). There are buses, but they aren't well oriented to the site, and are far too infrequent, and the LRT is too far to walk.

Any realistic low car development would have to include a significant transit investment.