What do you think of this project?

  • Total voters
    27
MakeYEGGreatAgain said:
For 30 years, Edmonton has been bleeding corporate jobs and has been struggling to attract or keep those jobs. Think of Telus as an example.
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Yup, TELUS effectively moved its head office away from Edmonton following its merger with BC Telecom on January 31, 1999.

Business-minded, city booster, right wing mayor Bill Smith was leader from 1995-2004. Followed by business-minded Stephen Mandel from 2004-2013. Not sure how many corporate, downtown office jobs we created downtown during those times.

One of the best decisions was getting MacEwan University downtown under Jan Reimer's term I believe (late 80s, early 90s decision was made?).

I'm not meaning to make this a left or right thing - I think it's very challenging for any municipal government in our city.
 
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_urbanite said:
We have no one to blame but ourselves.

We continuously elect the same type of progressive politicians as mayor and to council that don't focus enough on attracting new companies and jobs to this city
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Yes, and there was also the decision to sell our city telephone company to Telus, before that when there should have been a rock solid commitment to keep the head office here.

As the saying goes, mistakes were made, but perhaps overall the biggest was not realizing the importance of keeping or attracting head office jobs.

I feel that was more a problem with certain mayors more than others, but really I'm not sure very many have been great in this regard and now we are seeing the results of decades of this oversight and neglect.
 
whattheheck said:
^And successive council after council does not seem to care.
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I wouldn't point the finger just at recent councils given 70+ years for tax revenue and design considerations (a la demolition and surface level parking) have profoundly changed Edmonton. I'd argue the councillors of distant past likely did far more damage than the current lot.
 
devobersver said:
I wouldn't point the finger just at recent councils given 70+ years for tax revenue and design considerations (a la demolition and surface level parking) have profoundly changed Edmonton. I'd argue the councillors of distant past likely did far more damage than the current lot.
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Agreed and likely anyone serving on those councils in those days would have done something similar. Many people wanted (and still do) more parking downtown and for their drive to be as fast and easy as possible while downtown.

Of course, streets that are quick to drive through and have lots of parking, is the opposite of what you want for vibrant streets.
 
TAS said:
Agreed and likely anyone serving on those councils in those days would have done something similar. Many people wanted (and still do) more parking downtown and for their drive to be as fast and easy as possible while downtown.

Of course, streets that are quick to drive through and have lots of parking, is the opposite of what you want for vibrant streets.
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There were all those surface parking lots because there was no demand for building new office towers here for 20 or 30 years and the street were designed for a city where it was expected there would be more growth in jobs downtown, not decades of stagnation.
 
Office developments are not the "be-all" and "end-all"-for E... there are 3,762 other possibilities... expand the scope... think BIG!
 
Glenco said:
I remember people in the seventies commenting “Calgary can have all the head offices we have all the jobs”. So naive short sighted and frustrating.
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But Calgary is a greedy corporate capitalist city - the HQ for "Maple MAGA" and Canadian conservatism. Edmonton is a caring socialist city with more diversity, equity and inclusion.
 
Ian, is there a reason you guys haven’t cleaned up this lot after it’s been used as a lay down yard for G4? Is it because you figure it is more prudent to not waste cleanup and de-mob costs since it will soon be a construction site for G2 high rise? Touch your nose if I’m onto something here……
 
Care to share? Nm, can’t wait, will be there in 10 min to take a pic

“Rezoning sign?”
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