Quote:
Originally Posted by a very long weekend
i think one major problem is that you have very little retail off the high streets, so that neighborhoods feel quite dead, particularly with those long blocks. also, the chain shops are one thing, but even weirder is that it seems like even restaurants with just one location are aiming to become chains, so they have that same sterile aesthetic, mediocre offerings and culture. so that even if you put in SF-style formula retail controls, that bland culture would still persist.
this has happened all over midtown manhattan too, and i think that in toronto like up there, it's down to the high cost of commercial leases. it just forces you to go for lowest common denominator/mass culture in order to post your number every month. the obvious move is for the city of toronto to require much more ground floor commercial in new construction, i'm thinking in pretty much every new building, no matter where. flood the market with commercial space, or even just space sufficient to match increase in population density, and the pressures on commercial lease values decrease, and then you'll start to see more interesting shops and restaurants come in.
so even without addressing your architecture problem, the curb cuts every few meters, the long blocks, etc. you could get a lot done by just forcing developers to include commercial space on the ground floor.
|
The thing is that Toronto has such a large number of vibrant, often noisy high streets criss crossing the old pre-war part of of the city, that the side streets running between them are meant to be quiet residential zones -- and doesn't pretty much every city in the U.S. and Canada have residential side streets running off of commercial high streets in neighbourhoods outside the downtown area? I don't see how Toronto is any different in this regard. If you explored these quiet residential areas you'd find that there are plenty of old school corner stores and small family-run cafes tucked into these neighbourhoods, too.
The sheer number of long, busy high streets (which are are full of independent, interesting retail and restaurants) outside the downtown (such as Yonge, King, Queen, Dundas, College, Bloor, Ossington, Gerrard, Danforth, Broadview, Pape, Roncesvalles, Mount Pleasant, Bayview, St. Clair, Eglinton, etc.) makes up for the quiet residential streets in between them, IMO. When you walked down Queen West, did you go past Bathurst? Or even Spadina? If you didn't go that far, you didn't even see what Queen West is all about.
As for commercial space on the ground floor of new developments, that's the norm in Toronto, I'd be hard pressed to think of very many new condos that
don't have commercial space on the ground floor.