Golfing guy
Active Member
Last time I looked there are bus routes up there. The people who live in West District aren’t exactly transit type folks
- Thread starter MichaelS
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Dārayavauš
Active Member
Plenty of white collar workers take the train in Calgary though, that’s why the C Trains ridership is so high.Last time I looked there are bus routes up there. The people who live in West District aren’t exactly transit type folks
UrbanWarrior
Senior Member
I see you're going by the 2018 municipal census numbers for Beltline, but even then it was 8.6k/km2. It's closer to 11k now, even at 30,000 it would be over 10.3k, so im guessing probably 11 now. But yes the point about West District stands. Very impressive.
Sorry for the diatribe
Dārayavauš
Active Member
Truman has applied for a re designation for 90 metres for this location. It looks like the NIMBYs are already out trying to stop it. I for one think this will be a brilliant addition to West District and Calgary as a whole. Hope this does not get denied like the recent one.
I provided my comments in support of this to the city, feel free to as well.
https://dmap.calgary.ca/2717d9c4-74e7-4e37-a012-fd3764da5393
I provided my comments in support of this to the city, feel free to as well.
https://dmap.calgary.ca/2717d9c4-74e7-4e37-a012-fd3764da5393
zzkwilliamcanada
Active Member
can i ask a stupid question, i feel why YYC has some many NIMBYs but YVR and YYZ have so many high rise projects. aren't they have NIMBYs?
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Everywhere has NIMBYs. Toronto and Vancouver have much larger areas that predated modern NIMBY politics/suburban single family zoning in their core that allowed substantial density in lots of areas. This was critical when those cities hit their first skyscraper boom periods in the 20th century. Being larger cities, earlier was a huge structural head start. Calgarians really never had much area for mixed use and apartment development from the beginning in comparison, and our first major booms happened later in peak-suburban experimenting of the 1960s and 1970s.
More recently, I don’t think Calgary’s NIMBY movements have been anywhere near as successful at stopping development than the other cities. It’s partially why infill development is so ubiquitous here in popular low density areas, and less so in other cities.
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zagox
Active Member
NIMBYs have blocked widespread low/mid rise densification in YVR and YYZ, so a lot of that demand gets pushed into high-rise development instead. If you need to fight a multi-year, expensive, contentious, uncertain political process to build something, you want to build 60 stories at the end of it, not 6.
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TooBizzy
New Member
I struggle to categorize this as anything other than "a big blank slate near existing transit" — but, to be fair, this is probably the worst train station in the city right now for land use by far. All the rest at least have some crummy mall or shopping centre adjacent, even if you have to walk through an unreasonably large parking lot to get to it, and most of them have had murmurs of redevelopment bubbling for a while. I just hope to see the day that a 5,000 unit proposal gets pushed on one of these suckers. Phased redevelopment of North Hill, Southland, Brentwood, Marlborough, Sunridge, Crowfoot, Shawnessy, literally anything.
RolleyMakr_168
New Member
CallmeCatbread
New Member
I mean, I know that someone wanted to redevelop it a while ago and then gave up cause the city didn't want to help them. Idk if anything has changed since then.
For a suburban greenfield build, that's huge density. It would make a fantastic TOD if it had a train station in the middle of it.
Not to be a nitpick type guy,
but The Beltline is a bit of a weird neighbourhood for density calculation. If we take the Stampede grounds out of the calculation and use only the residential portion the density is ~16K/km2 Which makes it's way into pretty dense territory.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
Reminded me to dig up my old post in the Statscan discussion here.For a suburban greenfield build, that's huge density. It would make a fantastic TOD if it had a train station in the middle of it.
Not to be a nitpick type guy,
View attachment 623543
In that post, I was thinking about how to compare density better in terms of what it actually means for a city's "vibe". All these density discussions can be rather arbitrary and subject to the geographical quirks about where we draw lines - for me, it seems more compelling to think about the proportion of people living in high density environments, both in a local cluster and as a proportion of the city overall.
Would be interesting to see a few more red (census tracts over 10,000 people / km2) pop up on the map the coming years, including West District
UrbanWarrior
Senior Member
That map will change quite a bit between then and the upcoming census next year. A lot more greens and reds.
I'm anxious to see what the census tracts in areas like Capitol Hill, Renfrew, Mt Pleasant, Mard Loop, etc look like next census. I wonder if they go a darker shade of green. Also will be interesting to see if EV 606 and Arris West will be enough to help push EV to pink?
I could see Mission and Bankview turning to red with all the developments there in the past few years.
I could see Mission and Bankview turning to red with all the developments there in the past few years.
CBBarnett
Senior Member
The majority of census tracts in Calgary are about 2,000 - 3,500 people / sq-km. This represents the majority of the city's area, which are mostly growth areas from the 1970s - 2000s suburban era. Higher density areas are inner city redevelopment areas as well as brand-new suburbs with higher amounts of children per house (and denser community designs).
Of note, the CT with the West District in it was about 3,200 people / sq-km in 2021. Notably, it's a large tract with a large population, I think it's likely to split into 2 new tracts in next census - there's some threshold that Statscan uses when deciding when/how to slice things up. This would likely push at least one of those new tracts into the next bucket up, perhaps over 10,000 people / sq-km depending on how it's sliced. But I am no Statscan methodology expert so someone smarter can tell us!
Many of our CTs include large swathes of parks and/or undeveloped lands. For example, East Village includes Fort Calgary, so regardless of the density in the the neighbourhood proper, the CT is unlikely to show a substantially higher density in the next census. A bunch of communities have similar issues - particularly when we get into those bloated arterial setback era of the 1970s and 2000s. That's a lot of undeveloped land that needs to be amortized over incremental population growth to bump a community from one density threshold to another!
With all that said, it's still just arbitrary lines and data slices - there isn't really a "right answer" here, it's all up to interpretation. I think 10,000 / sq-km is a round and compelling number, but still arbitrary line I invented for this conversation.
Bankview has been sitting at 8,000 to 9,000 / sq-km for decades and is a great neighbourhood - it doesn't have any walkable retail despite that density so there's obviously more to the story than a specific density threshold.