[whatnext]

My apologies if this has been posted elsewhere, I'm not usually in the Calgary forum but thought it was interesting to in a major US paper. I'm sure there are bound to be some factual errors Calgarians will know.

Opinion The model city for transforming downtowns? It’s in Canada.
By the Editorial Board
May 18, 2023 at 10:56 a.m. EDT

Almost every direction one looks in downtown Calgary, there’s a crane. The downtown transformation that so many other cities are desperate for is underway in Calgary, a city of 1.4 million in Alberta, which is often dubbed the “Texas of Canada” for its ties to the oil and gas industry. But today, office towers that once housed energy companies are rapidly being converted into apartments. Calgary offers a road map — and a tool kit — for D.C. and other beleaguered cities on how to make the switch rapidly and efficiently.

Calgary got a jump-start on its downtown metamorphosis because of the 2014 oil price crash. Initially, many believed the industry would bounce back, but by the time the coronavirus crisis hit, even the talk at Calgary’s Petroleum Club had turned toward how to reinvent the city.

The numbers were dire: Offices vacancies were at more than 30 percent. There weren’t just empty floors; there were empty towers. Fears spread of the city becoming the “next Detroit.” At City Hall, staff calculated that the value of downtown commercial buildings had nosedived from nearly 25 billion Canadian dollars in 2015 to about 9 billion Canadian dollars in 2021. (One Canadian dollar is worth about 75 cents.) Ultimately, it galvanized the community to take dramatic action.

How can cities revitalize struggling downtowns? We want to hear from you.

The biggest takeaway is to go big and bold. Calgary launched its turnaround plan with 200 million Canadian dollars and a goal to invest 1 billion in the next decade. It included incentives of up to 75 Canadian dollars per square foot for developers, and — equally important — City Hall sped up the permitting process to less than two months. So many developers applied that it was akin to a bidding war.....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...lization-plan/