Kind of a wild story, will be interesting to see the impacts on the store level. Company seems pretty unstable from the outside. Sunterra engaged in cheque kiting, liable to U.S. lender for $35M, judge finds https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/sunterra-alberta-cheque-kiting-ray-price-9.7072579

For me the "off" feeling is that it "plugs into" 17th Avenue the wrong way, all those short-blocks and alleys intersecting with 17th Avenue, preventing it and stagnating it from evolving into a consistent walkable experience. The downstream impact is an area that feels less walkable and...

My hot take is that it seems pretty competitive for the area for me. One thing that will be interesting to watch is how this kind of apartment development performs, essentially there's been no apartments built like this anywhere nearby since... forever? So direct comparable are pretty...

This one is turning out great IMO. Relatedly, the quality of the West LRT is often overlooked as it's the weakest performer in ridership, mainly due to low density land uses near the stations and a relatively weak feeder bus network. Buildings like this will change how people in the are use...

This is the same rationale as the original TransCanada gas pipeline in the 1950s, where there was debate between an easier, seemingly more economic American route or an all-Canadian one through Northern Ontario. National security and maintain control was the central element of the debate...

I get what you are saying about the urban design impacts of high-floor, at-grade rail in downtown, but respectfully the solution isn't to convert to low-floor, it's to convert to a metro tunnel, ideally splitting the lines up. The root cause of downtown's vibrancy issues is not the LRT's design...

There's always trade-offs, but I think the high-floor platforms do a reasonably good job, especially how they are the whole sidewalk wide. As much as building integration isn't always perfect, the number of users and how busy 7th Avenue every day suggest to me that perhaps it's not as big of a...

I like this mystery detective location game. My guess is the "Eighth Avenue Place" pillar clue is actually a red herring, and is just part of the building itself. The building on the back left of the sketch is the back-of-house of either the Cowboys casino or the convention centre. That...

I think a couple things are true, the Ship will probably be fine (in the end), but they are fair to be concerned and shouldn't be assumed to know everything about how the development process works, and the planning process isn't the only tool here that is being confused together. For example, I...

I feel old to have been around long enough to see the full cycle, the chaotic implementation and long-term negative development implications from the road widening project in the 2000s, finally giving way to a changing tide as market conditions and rule change overcame the problems of that...

Every time I visit Edmonton, the expression I keep coming back to is "wow if they had another million people, this would be such a great city". The city has great bones, they just need a bit more meat! They have lots of main streets and historic nodes to build from, have demonstrated more...

It's kind of wild seeing the next set of small, big cities really emerge with consistent growth. Winnipeg: 951K Quebec City: 903K Hamilton: 871K Kitchener - Waterloo: 701K London: 633K To put that in perspective, Winnipeg is currently where Calgary was in 2001. Who knows what the future will...

Thanks for sharing these updated diagrams. Could you elaborate on what you mean about shadowing and "looming mass"? What's the difference? My position on this one remains that height and shadows are a bit of a red herring, distracting the conversation from more material ground-floor...

I am old enough to remember the Iraq War, the Americans spent a ton of time trying to convince the world that weapons of mass destruction were a big threat. There was all sorts of media coverage and debate in the months (years?) leading up to the actual invasion, plus a bunch of summits and UN...

I think that's why some major infrastructure systems like transit and water - once they reach a certain scale - really need to be converted into a regulated utility type structure with a dedicated tax/fee support structure and mandate that can better resist the pressure of short-term and...