It’s because we accept mediocrity and constantly speak negatively about our own city. How can we expect others to respect a city that doesn’t respect itself? One of the biggest mistakes we made was allowing neighbouring municipalities like Fort Saskatchewan and St. Albert to avoid paying their fair share, while still benefiting from the city. At the same time, some criticize us while contributing to the very social challenges we’re trying to manage downtown.
Amen!
Now that is a good example of how to do it much better despite the challenging current economic environment in Canada and Guelph is a much smaller city, fewer people than Kelowna I believe.
We had historic buildings and tore them down, so that's that.
Guelph is about the same size as Kelowna, but it is very close to the GTA. In fact, close enough that there is a significant number of people who live there and commute to places in the GTA daily, so that does make a difference.
Yes, I feel that sort of goes back to the if we don't respect our city part of this discussion. Although, Guelph is an older city with many more historic buildings and no where near the same growth pressures as we had.
What makes the cost of construction higher? Is it mostly labor or materials/other capital?
Labour and materials (we are pretty far from any other major metropolitan area, so harder to get people to build stuff and also to get the stuff to build).
Edmonton is a major metropolitan area in itself with a sizeable workforce in skilled trades and construction, if anything that should be more of a problem for Guelph.
Not really, Guelph is on the edge of the GTA, which itself is an hour and a bit from the U.S. border. There are nearly 10 million people within a 4300 km radius of Guelph - from a supply chain perspective, two very different things. When you have access to way more markets, products, etc., as well as customers and workforce, costs go down.
I'm surprised about materials. Is it really that expensive to haul them around by freight train?
Then developers in Edmonton should not exacerbate that problem by building cheap crap that keeps rents low -- same story/different players from the 60s/70s when those damn walkups were being reproduced like rabbits.