Coprolite
Active Member
That we spent the last 60+ years grunting out suburbs and neglecting the core and that this has heavily dictated what the real options are in this city, and TOD options have been largely nonexistent and even now after this supposedly big push there just isn't much out there that isn't just a transit-adjacent but still car-centric development.
Or at least that's what the other half and I found when we went looking for a larger place where we could consolidate our lives and have our offices close at hand with good transit access, good walkability, and good bike access. Real TOD options are nearly nonexistent. Downtown condo options larger than a typical two bedroom apartment were largely absent, and what was extant was things like luxury suites high in Ice District towers. There were some attractive houses in the central core, but a lot of which were bizarre, screamed of maintenance nightmares and long-term projects, or had been ruined by house flipper type renovations. Our realtor provided us with no shortage of options which were bleak suburban crapscape, and the missing middle was indeed quite a thin slice. In any list of ten options were were provided, it was normal for us to rapidly reject nine of them for obviously failing key criteria.
Our best compromise was Blatchford, which is so far more of a notional TOD than an actual one because actually reaching the LRT is a bit all-terrain still. And the bike connections to the outside world are a bit ad hoc. But at least it's one of the few places in this city where you can find an actual townhouse that isn't out in the far boonies in some parody of a neighbourhood and built to the absolute lowest standards.
