What do you think of this project?

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Nope, never had comments from locals or visitors about all of the parking lots and/or did you not have older buildings here?

Nope, never.
 
archited said:
^^^^ I haven't met one person in the U.S. who has travelled to the Big E who thinks that Edmonton is a City lacking Character. I think that complaint mostly comes from hometowners.
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I have had friends from Boston and San Diego visit and remark how bad our downtown is. I agree. Aside from 104 st there is not one other nice, engaging, street you want to spend time on. Here is hoping Ice District keeps prompting investment to change that 🤞
 
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Oh yes, 104 Street - the one with a number of nice older warehouse buildings (combined smartly with newer buildings built on the empty lots across the street).

Another gem of Edmonton is Whyte Ave, which has quite a number of older buildings also, to which both locals and visitors flock to despite the limited parking.

Despite the tear down everything urge seemingly deeply embedded in the city's consciousness, it actually works to keep older character buildings.
 
RHW has plans (I've seen them) to mirror (VE ish) what Pangman did for the rest of it, but EPCOR needs to do a bunch of UG work.
 
Edmonton's downtown actually isn't as bad as people seem to make it out to be. Crime is a problem, rampant winter city homelessness is also a problem. These are the major issues that need to be addressed.

However, lots of restaurants, lots of mom and pop shops, lots of park space, and a tremendous amount of festivals make it to me, a far better downtown to visit than Brentwood, Surrey, Metrotown, and in some ways even Vancouver.

I use these as my own immediate examples, all of which are denser communities with higher land values and better heritage preservation/lands planning standards - yet lack that charm I see when I come back for a visit.
 
Stevey_G said:
Edmonton's downtown actually isn't as bad as people seem to make it out to be. Crime is a problem, rampant winter city homelessness is also a problem. These are the major issues that need to be addressed.

However, lots of restaurants, lots of mom and pop shops, lots of park space, and a tremendous amount of festivals make it to me, a far better downtown to visit than Brentwood, Surrey, Metrotown, and in some ways even Vancouver.

I use these as my own immediate examples, all of which are denser communities with higher land values and better heritage preservation/lands planning standards - yet lack that charm I see when I come back for a visit.
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Agreed 100%.

And if we're talking about lack of character, I'll be the first to point out that Calgary's downtown, which a lot of people here love to praise and compare to ours, is much more sterile and generic (albeit cleaner and better kept), than ours.

Edmonton's downtown needs some TLC, for sure. We also need to attract more residents to realize it's full potential, and out of the big cities I've been, in North America, few have so much potential, for one reason or the other.

I believe ICE District is going to be just the beginning of a long, but dramatic change in the city's core, over the next few decades. It'll be interesting to see what we'll look like in 20, 30 years.
 
New development isn't always a good thing. Much of the charm is in mom and pop/local shops. Those get displaced as newer development comes in and those places can't afford rent. Look at 104 Street and some of the vacancy that still exists in developments like Fox. Hopefully the CRUs are smaller in Falcon akin to the Icons. Sometimes new development causes the feeling of sterilization if Landlords can't figure out how to work out deals with small time entrepreneurs. The landscape in downtowns is going to have to shift, because the M-F 9-5 schedule is never coming back - that is what I look forward to seeing in 20-30 years. How do we adapt to that reality and how does it impact downtowns across the board.
 
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