General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[ac3r]

Windows can be replaced.

And it doesn't even have to be all of them. When I had a condo apartment, I had something like 30 large glass windows and all of 5 of them were openable.

And if they're planning on balconies as some of them are, the balcony door is already your openable window.

Balconies would be a fantastic addition, but I’m somehow doubtful that will happen.

They'd be a total waste of money for the developer in this case. It would be pretty silly to add them in I think, unless they happen to have a ton of money to spend. Good chance they do though.

Overall...balconies are most often totally unnecessary in my opinion. Most people do not actually use their balconies. They're not private, the view begins to suck the denser your city/neighbourhood becomes, they're tiny, they're windy and ultimately really useless. Most people just use it for extra storage space. My condo is on the most upper floors of the taller tower at Harbour Plaza...do I ever use it? Or most of the people in the building? Heck no. It's way too windy (the lake doesn't help, but even without that you always feel the wind) rendering it pretty useless, not to mention the small size of an average balcony. Even here in Waterloo Region, I might see some cheap Home Hardware lawn furniture on balconies but very few people appear to actually use the space.

While this particular building (and 22 Frederick) are pretty short in comparison, it is a huge cost for the developer to add balconies to this. For every 10-12 floors, it costs on average roughly 1.5 to 2 million to add balconies to a new building. Paradoxically, they tend to cause the developer to lose revenue because they are losing actual usable square meters of space per unit that could have...well, been part of the home itself. Of course the cost usually goes down (but sometimes not, depending on the work required) when you are just renovating an existing building but it's still going to cost a fortune in both time, money and materials. All of which, of course, gets passed onto the customers buying or renting the unit. Also in new condo builds, balconies actually cause a developer to lose money. They can lose millions building balconies that will likely never really get used to justify the cost. Yet if they didn't build them, then that could have added many square meters of much more usable space to each unit/floor/building. But there is also a huge added cost to adding new balconies to existing buildings (like that one brutalist office tower in midtown/uptown that is proposed to be turned to residential). The addition of balconies is not likely going to reduce any square meters of space especially as they appear to be protruding, but it will add a shit ton of additional construction costs for something that most residents aren't going to use for much beyond growing some herbs or tomatoes and their bike, probably. That money could, rather, go into improving the building in other ways or staying in the developers coffers so that they can potentially develop more elsewhere.

I've worked in many countries in my line of work and I have found that there's a unique North American obsession with balconies when it comes to renting/buying a home (other countries too, of course). Essentially, it's the urban apartment/condo owners version of a green lawn that the suburbanites have. Totally useless, something they will rarely use and which costs money to have (whether in the up front costs in condo construction, or the constant mowing/watering/etc of a lawn). Quite often the nonsense features developers build like putting a tiny running track on the roof of a parking podium, a "party room" and a cheap Weber BBQ or a communal toilet also known as a hot tub/pool quickly wears off and people stop using them. If you've ever visited a building that has that but which was built in the 80s or 90s...I'm sure you've seen how little use those got over the decades. Heck even the 2000s. My partner used to own a condo in the City Place (Montage Tower, finished in 2008-9) development in downtown Toronto and I remember visiting her and seeing how poor quality and actually disgusting a lot of those skyscrapers were.

Elsewhere in the Western world, though, they aren't as commonplace. Go to Helsinki, you'll find residential highrises without. Berlin, Frankfurt - same thing. Rotterdam? Manchester? London? Stockholm? Similar deal. It's mostly over here that we have an obsession with "luxury" and private property/domain and so developers can grift people into thinking they do want a balcony on the 54th floor of Harbour Plaza or the 8th floor of 22 Frederick when they really don't. The millions that go into useless balconies - and in many cases the frivolous building amenities - could go to improving the individual units in each building or the structural materials used to construct it. I mean if you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a new home then ideally you want it to be a good building, right? You don't want it to fall apart and you want it to look nice.

Of course...if you're not adding balconies then ideally try to add openable windows, especially in a building of this small of size.