General Urban Waterloo Updates and Rumours

[westwardloo]

Maybe they should look at the forever staled post office redevelopment to see what the market is like in uptown waterloo.

[KingandWeber]

Huether Hotel to become an apartment complex with 500 rental units and an arts hub:

https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-...rs9oc1eczk

Call me a NIMBY, but this sounds like an incredible loss to the community. The Huether is one of the most iconic historic buildings left in the Region and it sounds like they're going to just keep the facade and a few other bits and pieces. I'm honestly shocked the whole building isn't protected.

[bravado]

It’s what you get when you “protect” single family homes via zoning. Everything else that’s actually good and pretty is up for grabs.

Instead of futilely protecting one building, Waterloo council could “un-protect” the massive majority of the city and let it be the target of change - but they’d never do that.

[Acitta]

Huether Hotel to become an apartment complex with 500 rental units and an arts hub:

https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-...rs9oc1eczk

Call me a NIMBY, but this sounds like an incredible loss to the community. The Huether is one of the most iconic historic buildings left in the Region and it sounds like they're going to just keep the facade and a few other bits and pieces. I'm honestly shocked the whole building isn't protected.

The Adlys family is responsible for the Huether being what it is today, so I look forward to seeing what they and the developers will come up with. I think that they are sensitive to the heritage value of the building.

[CP42]

Looks like they’ve only developed in BC so far:
https://establishproperties.com/projects/

They also list Turner Fleischer as one of their trusted partners, so expect them to do the architectural work:
https://establishproperties.com/about/

[Acitta]

CTV News segment with comments by Kelly Adlys and Richard Vu.
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/developer-p...-1.6992178
There will be obvious changes but the developer said a lot of it will be at surrounding properties, like 71 King Street North and the buildings behind it on Bridgeport Road.

[CP42]

CTV News segment with comments by Kelly Adlys and Richard Vu.
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/developer-p...-1.6992178
There will be obvious changes but the developer said a lot of it will be at surrounding properties, like 71 King Street North and the buildings behind it on Bridgeport Road.

I think this could actually be great, if they do it right.
However an inexperienced developer doesn’t give me much hope for that.

[nms]

Waterloo condo tower will be taller, slimmer, with more bedrooms but no office floor (The Record, Oct 2)

This article says that 4/36 tower projects that have gone or will go before the OLT have been approved.  If all of the towers are approved, the 40 towers will provide 9531 units of housing.  How does this compare with the other Waterloo projects that have been approved but which have not broken ground yet? (eg looking at you, Strata).  If everything that has been approved so far were built, how many more units would exist in Waterloo?

Location                                       # of towers          # of units              Heights in storeys        Status
Bridgeport Rd E and Devitt Ave N           3                     517                        16 to 27                    Approved in Jan. 2024
Regina St N and Erb St E                       1                    289                            25                         Approved in Oct. 2024
King St N at Highway 85 expressway       8                  1,778                      16 to 28                     Hearing starts Nov. 20, 2024
Northfield Dr W and Conestogo Rd W     12                 3,353                      18 to 35                     Hearing starts Jan. 30, 2025
Bridgeport Rd E and Weber St N             3                   622                        22 to 25                     Hearing starts Mar. 17, 2025
King St N and Weber St N                     13                 2,972                       6 to 35                       Hearing starts Jun. 17, 2025

(My apologies for the lack of table)

[ac3r]

Meh. Who even cares anymore? Waterloo Region is a joke. It's like the Three Stooges of Ontario municipal politics. The fact we have to send these projects to a "provincial tribunal" shows what a total flop this place is. I'm not even kidding.

Waterloo Region had a growth spurt...cool. But it got big before it got mature. Nearly every decision made across this region since maybe 2008-2010 has been embarrassing. If you try to argue otherwise I will have to ask you to refrain from doing so as it is very easy to overdose on copium.

Kitchener is sort of okay. At one point one could argue it's a slightly better Hamilton or London. At best we're a slightly better Brampton. Waterloo is mostly irrelevant now that the tech bubble is slowly deflating. Pretty sure even the city itself gave up on the whole "we're the silicon valley of the north" shtick. RIP BlackBerry. Cambridge...it exists?

I know I always sound cynical but you have to look at it sensibly. Canada is supposed to be one of the greatest countries on this planet. Ontario is supposedly our best province. Waterloo Region as a whole just spent a decade plus branding itself as the most important up-and-coming city. Where the "smartphone was invented", Stephen Hawking has his name on a building, things with space or physics etc happened or whatever, one of the newest light rail systems on the content was opened...and yet we can't even seem to consistently approve housing. Or transit. Or other important infrastructure. Top that off with the Liberal government literally dumping millions of desperate poor people from the developed world into the country - outright scamming them by colluding with colleges - in order to plug holes in the cheap labour and birth rate issues that have already have us on a death spiral and...yeah.

Whether or not the OLT approves all of these towers is irrelevant because by the time they are finished, more and more people will become unhoused and the region will just become a bigger shithole than it already is.

[ZEBuilder]

Meh. Who even cares anymore? Waterloo Region is a joke. It's like the Three Stooges of Ontario municipal politics. The fact we have to send these projects to a "provincial tribunal" shows what a total flop this place is. I'm not even kidding.

Waterloo Region had a growth spurt...cool. But it got big before it got mature. Nearly every decision made across this region since maybe 2008-2010 has been embarrassing. If you try to argue otherwise I will have to ask you to refrain from doing so as it is very easy to overdose on copium.

Kitchener is sort of okay. At one point one could argue it's a slightly better Hamilton or London. At best we're a slightly better Brampton. Waterloo is mostly irrelevant now that the tech bubble is slowly deflating. Pretty sure even the city itself gave up on the whole "we're the silicon valley of the north" shtick. RIP BlackBerry. Cambridge...it exists?

I know I always sound cynical but you have to look at it sensibly. Canada is supposed to be one of the greatest countries on this planet. Ontario is supposedly our best province. Waterloo Region as a whole just spent a decade plus branding itself as the most important up-and-coming city. Where the "smartphone was invented", Stephen Hawking has his name on a building, things with space or physics etc happened or whatever, one of the newest light rail systems on the content was opened...and yet we can't even seem to consistently approve housing. Or transit. Or other important infrastructure. Top that off with the Liberal government literally dumping millions of desperate poor people from the developed world into the country - outright scamming them by colluding with colleges - in order to plug holes in the cheap labour and birth rate issues that have already have us on a death spiral and...yeah.

Whether or not the OLT approves all of these towers is irrelevant because by the time they are finished, more and more people will become unhoused and the region will just become a bigger shithole than it already is.

You can't say Waterloo Region as a whole is bad especially when it relates to housing. Kitchener alone approved over 14000 housing units in 2023 (OPA/ZBA/SPA) obviously it's going to take time for this to get built but the reality is they're trying to make a difference, at the end of the day construction of units takes time, as someone who works in the industry I can say many of the approved projects are progressing behind the scenes, many are working through the detailed design process with quite a few complete in that regard. Developers are just waiting for the market to catch on fire again and then you will see multiple buildings start, again that isn't something the Region let alone city can control. Meanwhile Waterloo and Cambridge did a whole lot of nothing with every other project going to the OLT so you can't blame the Region as a whole when Kitchener is actually trying.

Kitchener got the Downtown bike grid approved and built, they've donated land for affordable housing (Cambridge just rejected like 100 units because the buildings didn't fit the neighbourhood), Kitchener has actually made progress related to complete streets (Highland is a good example). Sure the Region hasn't made as much progress as they should have on important infrastructure like the transit hub but that can't be blamed on the individual municipalities. That is a Province/Region issue. Go Transit should have been 2WAD already but again that is the Province, we should have had more progress on Hwy 7 but again thats the province. The reality is the present issues are not solely isolated to the Region many of them can be linked to the other levels of government.

Sure Conestoga and the Feds have caused their own issues within the Region but at the end of the day that is again something out of the Regions control these issue plague everywhere and aren't isolated to KWC, Fanshawe has it's issues, Seneca has it's issues the list goes on. Hamilton has a homeless problem, KWC has a homeless problem, so does every other major city in the country that is the reality of the current economic environment. You can't directly say that KWC will be a bigger shithole when every city in the country is having the exact same issues, what's to say Hamilton isn't a shithole? Brampton? You need to ask yourself what other cities are doing, what is Guelph doing? What is Hamilton doing? We're all doing similar things to solve the issues ultimately the scale varies by the size of the city but that's expected. The reality is we don't have a society where the issues can be simply solved, we can't just say construction can run 24/7 so we can build more units, unions would freak, existing residents would freak so we're building what we can (Kitchener in particular is doing more than the rest).

Sure big tech stagnated but that wasn't a product of the Region, that was a product of the pandemic. We have great office space not leased, same thing can again be said for every other city in the province, but that is just the reality of the last 5 years. You always make it seem like you have the magical wand that will fix all the problems but the truth is you don't no one does without doing some morally and ethical unsound things. The present issues are not issues that are simple to solve, the housing crisis has been artificial manufactured by the financialization of the housing market and 60 years of zoning policies that have forced SFH and nothing else. If we had made an environment over the last 60 years conducive to midrise development we'd be in a lot better situation then we are know for a whole plethora of reasons. The homeless issue is obviously related to the housing crisis but also the drug epidemic which isn't the simplest thing to solve and when government continuously privatizes and makes less funding available it just compounds the existing problems so the Region is not a joke, it's as much of a joke as every other municipality because we're all facing the same issues.

[plam]

The homeless issue is obviously related to the housing crisis but also the drug epidemic which isn't the simplest thing to solve and when government continuously privatizes and makes less funding available it just compounds the existing problems so the Region is not a joke, it's as much of a joke as every other municipality because we're all facing the same issues.

Exactly. Indeed many of these problems are problems not just in Canada but in other countries as well---comes up in NZ all the time. Expecting a city to fix all the problems is... unrealistic. (But not electing Conservatives goes a long way. They just like to pretend it's 1984.)