(09-16-2021, 05:13 PM)jeffster Wrote:(09-16-2021, 01:33 PM)Chris Wrote: Headline = 25-storey rental tower slated for midtown Kitchener, across from Grand River Hospital
Quote:Some in the nearby Mary-Allen neighbourhood in Waterloo are worried about additional traffic congesting their streets.
Legally, do they even have a say? Not their city.
Lol...checkmate, NIMBYs.
And in a sense, it is checkmate. Out of the tri-cities, we're the ones "winning". Kitchener is happily, rapidly densifying and modernizing by permitting everything from 44 floor skyscrapers in its core to having beautiful 16 floor condo developments proposed basically next to farm fields like 1593 Highland Road West, in addition to all of the other infrastructure, green and social improvements we're doing for everything from cyclists to homeless people. Heck, you can have a campfire in your backyard in Kitchener.
Meanwhile, Waterloo has achieved next to nothing uptown (if you ignore the student ghetto of buildings, which really don't count). There's The Barrelyards - which has taken over a decade and is still not done - and a couple other ugly, forgettable condo towers a few blocks south...but that's it. What happened to Isabella Residences? The two towers next to Sun Life? 87 Regina? Strata? Oh yeah, they went nowhere and now no developer is willing to waste their time trying to get anything built there now. Even the Westmount Place project is still stuck trying to negotiate with NIMBYs (they agreed to reduce the tower heights) yet that project still hasn't had full approval. I'll be surprised if that actually gets off the ground.
At this rate, Cambridge is going to do better than Waterloo because there is a lot of interest, new projects and plenty of new proposals all around the city and the LRT hasn't even been extended there yet. Wait until that's finished...Cambridge will enter a renaissance period and become one of the most unique cities in all of Ontario: two beautiful rivers running through it and tons of nature, 3 distinct "downtowns", beautiful historic architecture, a strong and highly visible industrious background (which really helped Kitchener have its renaissance moment), light rail rapid transit, direct access to the 401. The company I work for right now expects Cambridge to become a very, very, very desirable place and we're currently working on a few research projects regarding it as well as letting designers and interns play around with designing theoretical projects/towers.
Apart from the University of Waterloo...Waterloo - as a city - sucks. Their only contribution has been Kik and Blackberry ... :^)