[fjordgard]

Is it now possible to drive from NAIT through Blatchford to Kingsway ave? The satellite image makes it look like the road is finally connected. Cool if so. So weird to think in my (not sooooo long) lifetime: I’ve picked family up from their flight arriving at this airport. Then once commercial flights ended, took a school field trip where we could go on a short flight and hold the controls in a Cessna. Then attended the Edmonton Indy. Then road my bike along the closed runway. And finally, now you can (or soon) drive on public roadways through the site.

Yes! You can drive through but you have to detour up to 119 ave. I believe they did that so people wouldn’t try to fly use it as a shortcut between the two halves of 118 ave.

The bike/walking route goes straight to 118 though which is great.

 

[Edmcowboy11]

I want to see something near or next to the LRT tracks start to be developed.

 

[Coprolite]

View attachment 652172
I’m not sure when these pics were taken, but since then, Landmark and Crimson Cove have broken ground on the properties on the red circles. Things are moving!

It's going to be approximately end March/early April, since the snow is gone, the construction fence is around Landmark's Lois Argue Lane project, and the foundation pouring on Encore's Kensington style houses is underway at the north edge.

 

[Coprolite]

Is it now possible to drive from NAIT through Blatchford to Kingsway ave? The satellite image makes it look like the road is finally connected. Cool if so. So weird to think in my (not sooooo long) lifetime: I’ve picked family up from their flight arriving at this airport. Then once commercial flights ended, took a school field trip where we could go on a short flight and hold the controls in a Cessna. Then attended the Edmonton Indy. Then road my bike along the closed runway. And finally, now you can (or soon) drive on public roadways through the site.

That's been connected for months. I think it was October when that part opened.

 

[Airboy]

The New Fire hall looks very industrial. Very silver

 

[thommyjo]

I'm interested to see what happens to the plans for the entire SE part of this site. I'm a bit worried it will take 30 years to get sorted. It was planned to be mostly mixed use, office, retail, etc. I doubt there's demand for almost any office sqft in there. Maybe a few mixed use buildings, but not 30+ like the plans.

University District in Calgary has amended their plans to basically completely remove all office space.

I wonder what that means for the economics of the site/project too. Commercial has often disproportionately funded projects like this.

 

[thommyjo]

Move all the density from the NW/N of the site into the south, then do a fancy lake district type community in the northern part of the site. We need more "suburbanites" centrally, we need more homes built faster, we need to reduce sprawl, we have SO MUCH land for multi-family projects in and around the core + LRTs that we don't need all of blatchford to be townhomes or denser. Let the parts closest to LRT be dense, but NW can have SFHs imo.

Calgary's Mahogany is like a newer/nicer version of summerside: https://www.mahoganyliving.com/

Make the 2nd lake more this vibe.

 

[Coprolite]

Move all the density from the NW/N of the site into the south, then do a fancy lake district type community in the northern part of the site. We need more "suburbanites" centrally, we need more homes built faster, we need to reduce sprawl, we have SO MUCH land for multi-family projects in and around the core + LRTs that we don't need all of blatchford to be townhomes or denser. Let the parts closest to LRT be dense, but NW can have SFHs imo.

Calgary's Mahogany is like a newer/nicer version of summerside: https://www.mahoganyliving.com/

Make the 2nd lake more this vibe.

What problem is SFH's supposed to solve here, exactly, given that freehold townhomes are selling well, and often sell before the foundations are poured?

Bearing in mind that this won't actually get "more homes faster", because the limit to building speeds of freehold townhomes over the last year has been availability of freehold townhome land that is actually prepared to build, and the exact same infrastructure has to be built for single detached homes (admittedly either supporting fewer homes or providing smaller homes), of course...

Making the "2nd lake more this vibe" basically means having to pause and go back to the drawing board board for a sizeable chunk of the development right after it's finally developed some decent inertia, and will jeopardize the self-funding model. Unless there's some serious forced perspective at play and they're trying to exaggerate their size in every photo and map, those are far larger bodies of water than our storm ponds and a key reason the giant lake concept originally proposed never made it into the plan is due to the challenges of engineering a body of water that's safe to boat on or wade in, and allowed for much less buildable land.

 

[thommyjo]

What problem is SFH's supposed to solve here, exactly, given that freehold townhomes are selling well, and often sell before the foundations are poured?

Bearing in mind that this won't actually get "more homes faster", because the limit to building speeds of freehold townhomes over the last year has been availability of freehold townhome land that is actually prepared to build, and the exact same infrastructure has to be built for single detached homes (admittedly either supporting fewer homes or providing smaller homes), of course...

I think it can address 2 challenges: 1) sell off the northern half of the site to private developers for a full build out by them (so they're not waiting on COE to site prep), 2) get more variety of houses that will attract a variety of buyers. Lots of people will never buy townhomes, but would be open to living in blatchford/centrally if a SFH was an option. (whether we think their reasoning is logical or not...)

We also have 6 multi-family sites that are still empty, 7 years in.

So the plans for more multi-family sites up into the NW part of the site, how are those going to happen? And then what's happening in the south? We could build 1000+ townhomes in the south where office was originally planned. And I've rather see the townhomes closer to kingsway & LRT vs that dirt sit empty for 15 years then them become SFHs while we built car-dependent townhomes in the NW site.

All the medium-high density in the NW should be built out in the "market" area first.

 

[Coprolite]

I think it can address 2 challenges: 1) sell off the northern half of the site to private developers for a full build out by them (so they're not waiting on COE to site prep), 2) get more variety of houses that will attract a variety of buyers. Lots of people will never buy townhomes, but would be open to living in blatchford/centrally if a SFH was an option. (whether we think their reasoning is logical or not...)

We also have 6 multi-family sites that are still empty, 7 years in.

So the plans for more multi-family sites up into the NW part of the site, how are those going to happen? And then what's happening in the south? We could build 1000+ townhomes in the south where office was originally planned. And I've rather see the townhomes closer to kingsway & LRT vs that dirt sit empty for 15 years then them become SFHs while we built car-dependent townhomes in the NW site.

All the medium-high density in the NW should be built out in the "market" area first. View attachment 652810

There has been no issue attracting buyers though, except for where Streetside has tried to copy and paste designs from deep suburbia.

Significant interest in the multi-family mixed-use sites seems to have emerged within the last year, which is also when home building got some decent inertia going.

None of these suggestions seem to solve any actual real problems. Selling land off to a private developer to do their own thing in is actually going to mean that this particular portion of the development goes back to square zero and starts over, and sacrificing the value of work done to date. It might not take seven years, barring another disruption on the scale of the COVID pandemic, but it will take years before they are building anything, while things are actually being built at a decent rate right now.

Correction: apparently it actually is taking about a decade of pre-planning before private developers start to build houses in Greenfield developments. Even finding a buyer to take the project off of the city's hands and conducting the financial portion of such a deal is not going to be anything approaching an instantaneous process.

 

[thommyjo]

There has been no issue attracting buyers though, except for where Streetside has tried to copy and paste designs from deep suburbia.

Significant interest in the multi-family mixed-use sites seems to have emerged within the last year, which is also when home building got some decent inertia going.

None of these suggestions seem to solve any actual real problems. Selling land off to a private developer to do their own thing in is actually going to mean that this particular portion of the development goes back to square zero and starts over, and sacrificing the value of work done to date. It might not take seven years, barring another disruption on the scale of the COVID pandemic, but it will take years before they are building anything, while things are actually being built at a decent rate right now.

Correction: apparently it actually is taking about a decade of pre-planning before private developers start to build houses in Greenfield developments. Even finding a buyer to take the project off of the city's hands and conducting the financial portion of such a deal is not going to be anything approaching an instantaneous process.

Things are still going slower than in other developments and the multi family projects still aren’t moving. crimson cove in 2022 posted plans…3 years and still no chatter.

What do you think will have to the south market area? Do you believe the current plans are possible?

If we portioned out the land and got multiple developers moving on things, including the city, it could move faster. That’s what multiple in the private industry have called for over the last decade. Instead, we build a few streets each year as hundreds of new homes get added to Alces, Stillwater, kinglet gardens, the orchards.

If we actually care about sprawl, increasing transit use, upping our tax base centrally, etc. then we have to get blatchford moving quicker.

 

[BrettB]

The sad reality is that airport redevelopments are hard and take a long time. The Cincinnati suburb of Blue Ash has been going through a similar process with private developers. It was approved in 2016 and while a business park on the site has seen some success, there are still large parcels that have yet to see a shovel in the ground.

 

[whattheheck]

Move all the density from the NW/N of the site into the south, then do a fancy lake district type community in the northern part of the site. We need more "suburbanites" centrally, we need more homes built faster, we need to reduce sprawl, we have SO MUCH land for multi-family projects in and around the core + LRTs that we don't need all of blatchford to be townhomes or denser. Let the parts closest to LRT be dense, but NW can have SFHs imo.

Calgary's Mahogany is like a newer/nicer version of summerside: https://www.mahoganyliving.com/

Make the 2nd lake more this vibe.

Be careful. The mere mention of SFH's for Blatchford will have the majority of posters here tar and feathering you. LOL.

You must drink the urban Kool-aid, and submit. Do not dare question the group think.

 

[Coprolite]

Things are still going slower than in other developments and the multi family projects still aren’t moving. crimson cove in 2022 posted plans…3 years and still no chatter.

What do you think will have to the south market area? Do you believe the current plans are possible?

If we portioned out the land and got multiple developers moving on things, including the city, it could move faster. That’s what multiple in the private industry have called for over the last decade. Instead, we build a few streets each year as hundreds of new homes get added to Alces, Stillwater, kinglet gardens, the orchards.

If we actually care about sprawl, increasing transit use, upping our tax base centrally, etc. then we have to get blatchford moving quicker.

It only seems to be "slow" because it's very easy to armchair quarterback and this project is highly visible, unlike Greenfield developments where most people never actually see how many years of work goes into making them a reality because they remain farmland. When you see "hundreds of new homes" getting added to the very edge of the city, you're not seeing the many years of work that went into the project before so much as a foundation poured.

We have three multi-family projects nearing full completion, and there has been continuous chatter about more.

I would support the use of single family homes if there were some scenario where freehold townhomes were not turning out to be wildly successful and they wouldn't simply cannibalize that success. But since freehold townhomes are routinely selling before they're framed, that doesn't seem to be an actual problem.

I completely anticipate that needs will emerge to alter some portion of the zoning at some point down the road. I do not know for sure what form South Market will ultimately take. I know a bunch of the land at the east edge is slated for NAIT. But the idea that handing things off to developers at this point to do their own thing would make anything go faster isn't remotely true. It's not like there has been anything resembling a gratuitous slowdown in here anywhere. It was literally 1) discovering during environmental audits that remediation was going to be more extensive than initially anticipated, and 2) a pandemic shutting down nearly everything. Anything involving changing plans actually slows things down. Deciding to completely change the drainage and transportation plans slows things wayyyy down. Finding outside developers to take over and do things their own way slows things down. Everything you have actually suggested entails, in the real world, slowing down. There isn't actually a magic make it go faster button, but boy does making big revisions to a plan slow things down.

 

[Coprolite]

Be careful. The mere mention of SFH's for Blatchford will have the majority of posters here tar and feathering you. LOL.

You must drink the urban Kool-aid, and submit. Do not dare question the group think.

Well that's certainly dramatic. You weren't "tarred and feathered". You just didn't do a good job of actually supporting your idea, based your whole argument upon what could easily be determined to be a false premise, and got mad and extremely weird when people dared question you instead of... submitting to your arbitrary insistence.