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Jemm's 16thave/centre street proposal intended for the Green Line definitely looks promising. 2 towers, 30 and 17 storey. Currently in the rezoning phase. Probably still a couple years away from construction.
 
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goodcitywhenfinished said:
Will be interesting to see the skyline creep up centre street once the green line gets built.
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I've been waiting for a highrise node to develop outside of downtown since forever! The 2 towers by Westbrook are the closest we have got, everything else usually falls short of 25 stories. I want some well-designed tall buildings clustered together acting as an activity hub around mass transit sites. Basically a Vancouver TOD. It'll add some flavour to our city as well. Right now Calgary is way too flat with low-rises sprawling out. Once your city begins to have little highrise nodes popping up, you know your city is getting big.
 
gsunnyg said:
I've been waiting for a highrise node to develop outside of downtown since forever! The 2 towers by Westbrook are the closest we have got, everything else usually falls short of 25 stories. I want some well-designed tall buildings clustered together acting as an activity hub around mass transit sites. Basically a Vancouver TOD. It'll add some flavour to our city as well. Right now Calgary is way too flat with low-rises sprawling out. Once your city begins to have little highrise nodes popping up, you know your city is getting big.
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Brentwood?
 
Those are all way too small, except for the Westbrook area, as mentioned earlier. I should specify, when I talk about nodes I'm talking about clusters that resemble the heights of downtown/beltline highrises (roughly 25 storeys plus). Areas that can be seen from a distance. All those other names mentioned such as Chinook or University district are only visible once you get within a certain distance or from a high vantage point, they aren't tall enough to be visible from Km's away. Again, I know from an Urbanism perspective it's a meaningless thing to care about but I really do think they can make a city look/feel interesting not only from a ground perspective but from aerial photos/flights as well.

If I'm a tourist with a layover in Calgary and I'm looking out the window of a Westjet flight and I just see flat prairie sprawled out with a big downtown core, I might not be as interested in the city in comparison to looking out of a flight over a Vancouver or London. We're one of the lucky cities to have such awesome landing views of the whole city (if you get the right flight path). It's like looking at a book cover before you actually read it.

Imagine this video a few years from now but with more midrises and highrises. If I'm looking down at Bridgeland in this video as a tourist, I'd be more intrigued to visit the area. It's like a psychological effect, taller buildings, hence you think more people in the area, hence more stuff going on. Once you get clusters of tall highrises, it tends to grab even more attention. Almost like a landmark.
 
Mountain Man said:
Are they the tallest outside downtown?
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Ovation is the tallest outside of the core at 98 meters. The Hub is 2nd tallest at 90 meters. The Pinnacle (Southland Station) is 3rd at 84 meters, with the SAIT Residence close behind at 83 meters. Encore is 80.
 
Mountain Man said:
Yeah lots of highrise nodes are starting. It's not as developed as Metro Vancouver, but it's starting to happen more and more.
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In NW and inner SW we have a good(?) combination of expensive neighbourhoods with far above average % single family home districts, lack of existing apartment supply, multiple employment centres, post-secondary institutions and well established rapid transit corridors. Whether developments are ultimately designed right (reduce parking, true walkability etc.) is one question, but demand for towers and general intensification pressure in the long-term seems likely to continue.

I am curious about the nodes outside of the NW and inner SW:
  • South / Deep SW: MacLeod Trail is always on the list and developers dabble occasionally, but we haven't seen much materialize yet and it's been without exception has been not attractive, car-oriented density. I think the big gap is a concentrated employment node along the corridor, apart from Chinook there isn't really anything for push intensification/interest into any node in particular. If history is a worth listening too, maybe we will see an occasional tower every decade or two?
  • SE: a few towers in the Quarry Park area beginning but those are all master-planned and kind of hard to see where more would go in the area to create a node, short of Quarry Park itself redevelopment in a few more decades. The whole area is so car dominated, Greenline or not. The South Hospital area seems fairly committed to car-oriented density 6-storey and under but maybe a tower one day?
  • East/NE: 17th Ave SE and Marlborough area have lots of the right bones - good job access, established rapid transit but the area is affordable and demand pressure isn't high. Someone might know better, but the recent changes to the AVPA might have triggered some owners along 36 Ave NE to be able to do a bunch more with their land next time they redevelop. I see lots of potential structurally in the area, but economics won't let it happen yet. This could change quite quickly one day but who knows?
I have no doubt we will see more towers, I just struggle to imagine where/if a new node will pop up for the next decade or two - the giant, expensive Vancouver and Toronto super nodes being built out from nothing to thousands of units with 40+ storey towers in only a few years or a decade don't seem likely in Calgary in the medium term. Over the next few decades I think it will still be largely an exercise of building out the nodes we already have at a steady pace - but not seeing any major new ones really rise up.

In the longer run, if we reach 2M people in 40 years Calgary needs to add 700,000 more people. If half of these newcomers end up living in multi-family at an average of 1.5 people / unit that's about 230K new units needed in various formats. A good set of these will be towers. Even our sprawling inner city will run out of space eventually and start pushing interest to other nodes. That's not too dissimilar to Vancouver's story, albeit a few decades behind (Toronto's story too - but it's their suburban apartment tower boom of the 60s - 70s that is the more obvious headline to why they have suburban tower nodes).

The other option may be something more like a Montreal-future of tower clusters - prolonged periods of lower growth never really pushed those suburban tower clusters to generate beyond the regional centres that were established in the higher growth period that predated them (Laval, Longueuil etc.) Combined with deindustrialization that occurred simultaneously, there was more than enough redevelopment room for towers within the city itself, often closer to the core or at existing areas of density. The result is fewer new nodes, but just denser and more established existing ones.
 
Calgary will exceed 2 million in well under 40 years. The metro area, currently 1.57 million, will exceed 2 million in less than 20 years, with the municipality close behind.

Assuming a growth of 1.9% per year (a fair bit lower than usual) over the next 15 years,

2022 - 1,602,000
2023 - 1,633,000
2024 - 1,664,000
2025 - 1,696,000
2026 - 1,728,000
2027 - 1,760,000
2028 - 1,794,000
2029 - 1,828,000
2030 - 1,863,000
2031 - 1,898,000
2032 - 1,934,000
2033 - 1,971,000
2034 - 2,008,000
2035 - 2,046,000
2036 - 2,085,000


So even with a lower growth scenario, we'll be past 2 million by census 2036 in the metro, and past 2 million in the municipality by census 2041 (earlier).
 
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