The Metz (Schneiders site redevelopment)

[taylortbb]

Boring = cheaper. It's not Drewlo (as my daughter said "Copy and paste"), at least, and certainly not The Ghetto, aka, Northdale though.

Unsure how you can convince developers to have better vision, when all they think about money, and really, why wouldn't they? Not like we're going to have people with vision pony up the cash for nicer developments, as I have never seen that happen unless it's goburment. And even then, they like to copy and paste (new courthouse) things to cut costs nowadays. The old courthouse (on Weber) are things we likely won't see any time soon.

Damn, we have some majestic buildings in this area, sadly, most of them were built pre-1970.

I'd take Northdale over the Schneiders plan any day. The new buildings in the interior of Northdale are generally pretty urban, have great street frontages, little parking, an interesting mix of retail, etc. I expect the Auburn towers to just be more suburban towers with zero pedestrian or retail activity. First rule of retail is "be on the way" (unless you're a major destination like a mall), but the Schneider's plan has no connectivity through the site, dooming the units to be visited mostly by residents, who will mostly be driving. It'll support a few local businesses, but nothing significant.

The city can control this through zoning. It's not even about costs, many of the zoning rules actually increase costs while making sites worse. The new development at Erb and Westmount for example, the proposed towers are too tall only because they're at the edge of the property by the road, where they're walkable. If they were in the middle of the site, surrounded by parking, they'd be totally okay within the current zoning at the same height. Building the urban walkable version therefore costs more, in direct re-zoning costs and in time-value-of-money delays to the redevelopment. Kitchener has done a good job of re-working its zoning for the multi-use corridors, but the zoning in much of the rest of the city remains horribly out of date and suburban.