Quote:
Originally Posted by Uhuniau
Curiously, there's a huge market demand for old-style urban neighbourhoods, if home prices in the Glebe, Sandy Hill, New Edinburgh, the Golden Triangle, and Westboro are anything to go on... yet the developers aren't building them any more.
|
The problem is that the success of those neighbourhoods is based on their location. They are close to downtown. A lot of these neighbourhoods were either within walking distance of downtown or were streetcar suburbs. It is difficult to recreate this where a car is an absolute necessity, just because of their distance from downtown.
I find it peculiar that these arguments are presented yet when we tried to develop a modern streetcar suburb, namely Riverside South, we soundly rejected the idea. If you want modern dense neighbourhoods to be developed, you need to provide quality transit as an alternative to using a car. This needs to be in place from near the beginning otherwise, massive boulevards are needed to handle the cars which in turn destroys any possibility of density.
I just cannot believe those here who say, why not develop new dense neighbourhoods, but then also say, we can't provide the transit alternative until after all the land is already fully developed. This is self defeating, creating impossible goals.