[David A]

The Armature is a dream location for an upscale residential development as it's a very well done streetscape within walking distance of many of the amenities that higher income people enjoy. It's the City's commitment to low income housing for the area that's hindered development. No developer is going to risk building $750K townhomes in the area when there's the possibility of a low income walk-up with vinyl siding going up next door.

The East Village in Calgary was once an area of semi neglected small commercial building similar to the ones found in Boyle. The City of Calgary began redeveloping the area about the same time that the City of Edmonton began the Quarters redevelopment . The City of Calgary committed to an up scale redevelopment while the City of Edmonton committed to low income development. Today the East Village in Calgary boasts half a dozen up scale high rise apartment building while the City of Edmonton is watching its investment in the Quarters wither away.

Photo ops of city representatives beating on drums and smoking a peace pipe with the few elders who still live in Boyle looked good but if low income development was going to work in Boyle it would have already begun. The hotels that were once a hub of activity in the area (say what you will) are gone and so is much of the demographic that frequented those hotels. The area by and large is uninhabited and the demographic which city planers believed would support 118th Avenue style store fronts in Boyle just isn't there any longer.

Low income housing is still needed in the city but it's more suited to the north side of Grant MacEwan so that students or single parents that still want to pursue their education can have reasonably priced accommodation.

There's not much reason why Boyle (change the name to something appealing already) can't be reimagined and made into an appealing neighborhood as Calgary has done in the East Village. And Calgary is far from the only city that's turned a blighted area into something desirable. Gastown in Vancouver was once very rough and now it's a popular tourist destination. Edmonton council just needs to abandon its stubborn adherence to a concept that didn't work and give people the kind of development that they want. .

(PS: East Village in Calgary has a couple of non thoroughfare cobblestone roads. Not sure what cyclists think about them but they look pretty good).

The superficial similarity between East Village and the Quarters can be very misleading. Lest we forget, Calgary has a very different downtown than ours with more than twice amount of office space and far more people working downtown in corporate high paying jobs.

So this is a big reason why it works as an upscale residential area, that and less other available nearby space there for residential. There is still a lot of other more attractive space in downtown Edmonton for upscale development elsewhere, so I really doubt it would work as an upscale residential area.

 

[Out of Towner]

The superficial similarity between East Village and the Quarters can be very misleading. Lest we forget, Calgary has a very different downtown than ours with more than twice amount of office space and far more people working downtown in corporate high paying jobs.

So this is a big reason why it works as an upscale residential area, that and less other available nearby space there for residential. There is still a lot of other more attractive space in downtown Edmonton for upscale development elsewhere, so I really doubt it would work as an upscale residential area.

It's hard to understand the city's logic for envisioning low income housing in Boyle as Boyle is right next door to some of the cities best facilities and attractions and the land in Boyle should have a higher land use value than low income housing does. Consider attending a convention in Edmonton for a moment. Would an attendee have a better impression of the city if there was low income housing or upscale residential next to the convention center. The answer is obvious. No convention attendee wants to return home and tell everybody that they saw the low income housing in Edmonton. That's crazy.

There probably aren't enough jobs in downtown Edmonton to support towers in Boyle but upscale mid rises or live/work developments for the professional person would likely be supported. Get a coffee shop hopping in the Gibson Block, a good restaurant or two, a small comedy club that the convention crowd could go to in the evening, a live blues bar would be supported, and you have an extension of an entertainment district that generates way more tax revenue than low income housing.

 

[Out of Towner]

There would be a societal advantage for moving low income housing from Boyle to the north side of Grant MacEwan. Many people in need of low income housing have kids and recreating an urban ghetto in Boyle serves nobodies best interest. One of the biggest factors for people being unable to escape poverty is because they were poorly educated. If low income housing was located near Grant MacEwan, the City could try and swing a deal with Grant MacEwan to establish an academy for students grade 1-12 students at the University. It would give those students a sense of pride and importance and seamless move them into higher education by embedding them in that cultural surrounding from an early age. That would be much better than building a low income urban ghetto in Boyle and having parents cart off their kids every morning to some school that may itself already be struggling with a cultural bullying or substance abuse problem.

 

[VaultBoy]

Boyle (change the name to something appealing already)

 

[Coprolite]

As seen in any city, if amiskwaciwâskahikan wants to turn the original Chinatown into a successful neighbourhood, it must stop waiting for profiting developers to show up and spend its own money to build it out as it imagines, wants, and frankly needs.

Given how much land in the neighbourhood has ended up owned by the city due to forfeiture, there actually is room to take a direct hand.

 

[Coprolite]

The superficial similarity between East Village and the Quarters can be very misleading. Lest we forget, Calgary has a very different downtown than ours with more than twice amount of office space and far more people working downtown in corporate high paying jobs.

So this is a big reason why it works as an upscale residential area, that and less other available nearby space there for residential. There is still a lot of other more attractive space in downtown Edmonton for upscale development elsewhere, so I really doubt it would work as an upscale residential area.

Upscale residential also amounts to, "You know, all we need to do here is just push the non upper class somewhere else," in what's always been a very working class neighbourhood. I don't mind The Hat being here, but the neighbourhood would lose something if it got copy-pasted with that. Whatever is going to work is going to have to look for what's missing in nearby neighbourhoods and ways to have a more diverse character than just upscale. There are after all a whole bunch of jobs in downtown and along the LRT that aren't high-paying office jobs. There's a lot of office jobs out there that don't pay the big bucks, and a great volume of service jobs, and there's even still some dirty jobs still out there.

 

[Barnaby]

You don't want a neighbourhood full of exclusively one socioeconomic group, ever.

There is plenty of room in central Edmonton for everyone, and talking about moving groups of people around like cattle isn't productive at all. If there's going to be any kind of displacement, it should be across a large area of the city, based on personal choice as much as possible.

 

[Coprolite]

You don't want a neighbourhood full of exclusively one socioeconomic group, ever.

There is plenty of room in central Edmonton for everyone, and talking about moving groups of people around like cattle isn't productive at all. If there's going to be any kind of displacement, it should be across a large area of the city, based on personal choice as much as possible.

Sadly, displacement and hand-wringing has been the usual approach to Boyle Street over the last 60+ years. So many of civic projects of the 1970s and 1980s ended up where they were to clean up our old Chinatown by plunking something modern on top of it.

 

[Coprolite]

I'll stand by my original sentiments regarding the Armature and I'll stand by my last sentiment in my last post to you.

And I stand by being truly, dreadfully sorry that Little Lord Fauntleroy can't enshittify my neighbourhood in the manner that he desires. I will absolutely fetch him the rustiest, sharpest fainting couch of all time.

 

[Out of Towner]

You don't want a neighbourhood full of exclusively one socioeconomic group, ever.

There is plenty of room in central Edmonton for everyone, and talking about moving groups of people around like cattle isn't productive at all. If there's going to be any kind of displacement, it should be across a large area of the city, based on personal choice as much as possible.

You're too late about not wanting to the relocate the people that lived in Boyle. Boyle is probably already one of the least densely populated neighborhoods in the city. There's nothing to speak of along the Armature. The Cities vision of a bustling little bohemian village didn't pan out and its ludicrous to allow that street to deteriorate because it was an ancestral area 130 years. Who cares if it was! That was then and this is now.

If there's so much empathy for keeping Boyle as it was, then why knock down the hotels that were there? Single men without families often live at low cost hotels and when the hotels they live at get knocked down, the ones without the means to pay for more expensive accommodation often end up homeless and living on the street. So if we're talking about moving groups of people around like cattle, Edmonton already did it. The goal now is to create the best possible social environment for the more vulnerable people in society to succeed and for them that's not in Boyle.

 

[Gronk!]

Hey, how are the Jasper Ave renovations coming along? That's the purpose of this thread, right?

 

[Coprolite]

You don't want a neighbourhood full of exclusively one socioeconomic group, ever.

There is plenty of room in central Edmonton for everyone, and talking about moving groups of people around like cattle isn't productive at all. If there's going to be any kind of displacement, it should be across a large area of the city, based on personal choice as much as possible.

Unfortunately, displacement has been most of our approach to "improving" things in the past.

 

[Out of Towner]

The city planning map of Boyle looks like something from 1946 but it serves to show how geographically small and how difficult it would be for a small business to locate and thrive in Boyle. Go down the City's "1946" zoning list and it's only the services in red that have survived in Boyle. The rest in orange have largely gone the way of the dodo bird because of pressure from high volume, low margin retailors that service a wide audience. So asking a "10 block by 10 block" area of low income constituents to support small businesses in the vicinity so that they thrive is not going to work and everybody except the city can see that.

Upscale live / work complexes for one office professionals could work in Boyle because of its proximity to downtown Jasper Avenue, the river valley, and entertainment. Again though, the City seems committed to an outdated "1946" urban plan in Boyle that evidence shows has gone away and one that doesn't work in 2024 either.

 

[David A]

The city planning map of Boyle looks like something from 1946 but it serves to show how geographically small and how difficult it would be for a small business to locate and thrive in Boyle. Go down the City's "1946" zoning list and it's only the services in red that have survived in Boyle. The rest in orange have largely gone the way of the dodo bird because of pressure from high volume, low margin retailors that service a wide audience. So asking a "10 block by 10 block" area of low income constituents to support small businesses in the vicinity so that they thrive is not going to work and everybody except the city can see that.

Upscale live / work complexes for one office professionals could work in Boyle because of its proximity to downtown Jasper Avenue, the river valley, and entertainment. Again though, the City seems committed to an outdated "1946" urban plan in Boyle that evidence shows has gone away and one that doesn't work in 2024 either.

I assume most or all the small uncoloured boxes in the north and eastern part are houses or small residential buildings. It seems to me the main problem here is not so much who lives there but density.

Now I suspect there are even fewer of those old residential (and commercial) buildings and even more empty lots or parking lots. Of course back in the 1940's the city was much smaller and there were no suburban malls, so some of those orange businesses would have served not just the nearby even then insufficient nearby residential area, but people coming downtown from elsewhere.

 

[Out of Towner]

I assume most or all the small uncoloured boxes in the north and eastern part are houses or small residential buildings. It seems to me the main problem here is not so much who lives there but density.

Now I suspect there are even fewer of those old residential (and commercial) buildings and even more empty lots or parking lots. Of course back in the 1940's the city was much smaller and there were no suburban malls, so some of those orange businesses would have served not just the nearby even then insufficient nearby residential area, but people coming downtown from elsewhere.

I believe that is correct. The Boyle trading area was larger in years past and shrank as more competitive retailing models evolved over time and people moved to suburbs. The only thing remaining today is the area's spit and vinegar reputation and I believe that it's an impediment to development of the area.

However, if the area was marketed properly it's actually in a very strategic location in the city and could attract a self employed young professional demographic. It's an ideal location for upscale live / work buildings for young lawyers or accountants wishing to start their own practice. A downtown location for a professional practice gives it more legitimacy than one in a strip mall in the boonies and the consolidation of living and working at the same location is economically advantageous.

The City's bohemian village vision for Boyle is nonsense. Nobody is going to drive to Boyle because a new store opens and even if low income housing is built in the area, there still wouldn't be enough density to support any stores.

At least with a upscale area there's a better chance of bringing people downtown.