[Full Mountain]

Originally Posted by Tropics

Nah, I want almost exactly what is in the Westbrook Redevelopment Plan PDF's from the City of Calgary, nothing gated as I will not live there but I live in the community and I would love a central hub of higher end retail and shopping in the area that is currently now Westbrook.

The city is trying something very specific at Westbrook, they are trying to move towards high density communities as a alternative to the suburbs, but that is only possible by giving the people who can afford to live in the suburbs a living experience that actually reflects their income and is a viable option to a house, or they will simply take their money and buy a house.

It is not the people with $250,000 that the city needs to get to start buying condos, that is my income bracket, we are already buying condos because we cannot afford a house in this city, we don't create the sprawl. To stop the urban sprawl and get people who can afford a house in Calgary to instead buy a condo you need a condo to become a really attractive alternative at their income level. That means making the whole community really nice with fancy coffee shops and a nice high end supermarket and a nice wine shop and a fancy central park with green spaces, ect... Westbrook needs to be nice, really nice, or you will get people saying "nah, not nice enough, I am going to go buy a house with a yard in the burbs 3 minutes drive from Aspen Landing and its nice shops and restaurants".

The city needs to come to grips that building high density in the near city communities is not enough to slow urban crawl, they need to start making the areas super nice and desirable so that the people with higher incomes start to see it as a viable alternative lifestyle that still reflects their income bracket. They still want that high end retail shopping, they want the fancy wine store, they want a Sunterra Market, they want the higher end restaurants chains at their doorstep. They want at least Kensington level shopping or they will pass on it. The people with real money want the Westbrook Redevelopment plan down to a tee, and they wont settle for less. Cut the scope of the project back, make it not "quite that nice" because of restrictions and handcuffing the developer and all that will happen is they will take their money elsewhere.

The developers know this, once they get handcuffed and cannot build the project like they need to because their bottom line gets cut into by that affordable housing requirement they will target the middle end 200's to 400's for a 1-2 bedroom condo bracket where that affordable housing is actually less of a cut into their profits because they are closer to the value of the other units. That is what took place at the Bridge development. That does not help the city in doing what they actually want to see Calgary start to move towards. They need to actually start to target the higher income brackets with condo developments and Westbrook is an obvious place they thought hard about doing that given the redvelopment plans and the vision they show.

I think the population your referring to is quite a bit smaller than the middle income bracket who buys houses around 400-600k and wants the Costco and Wal-mart next door and they want a back yard too, these are the people that you need to convince to buy into these developments, the high end market is served well downtown already.