It's sad that we can all imagine the subpar product this will likely be based on the elevation, because it's the same as most new 6 storey wood frames in the City. Cheap faux stone trim on the first floor, hardipanel or stucco, and some vinyl siding thrown in if we're lucky. Would love to be proven wrong of course, but a quick browse of the developer website makes me think I'm right.
The thing is, this falls directly on the developers. In Calgary the product being built their seems much higher quality on average, and it's not like home prices are substantially more expensive, but they just seem to be willing to spend a bit more on the design and materials.
We could always legislate architectural quality, for example in the lower mainland many cities require you to register building schemes on title that set standards for materials and architectural styles (even for developments that don't go through rezoning). But that means although nothing new getting built is ugly, it's also not usually particularly interesting and everything looks the same, so I'm really not a fan of it. Not sure if either Edmonton/Calgary has similar, but I find it so strange the discrepancy of quality between Edmonton and Calgary right now .
