Sending this or something like it to the Guelph Mercury and The Corporation of the City of Guelph planning committee. How do you like your property values Matthieu Massie? Opportunity for increase possibly lost :/ Comments welcome before I send it in. Renewal vision eludes southern downtown. ================================== With the release of the Guelph Planning, Building, Engineering and Environment report on the downtown refurbishment plan on July 24 ( goo.gl/KfLNgs ), the overhaul critiqued in these pages is thankfully too far along to stop. Existing infrastructure needs wholesale repair and upgrade, so its an opportunity for a rethink at minimal extra cost. Despite this progressive plan for northern downtown, there is a failure to apply vision to southern downtown. The planned refurbishment of the existing police headquarters entrenches car-oriented operations into the fields of pedestrian-unfriendly parking lots, drive-thrus and monolithic structures with frontage parking that are completely unengaged with pedestrians or city culture and flow. Density requirements mandated by Ontarios Places to Grow legislation will before long force the citys hand to work with developers to remediate brownfields currently buried under parking lots. Every opportunity to plan for this eventuality should be taken. Police HQ is a vehicle-oriented operation and must maintain significant road access (as well as open staging space), barring reclamation of street right-of-way for pedestrian use and retail redevelopment (as planned for Macdonell and Wyndham, already a huge success on Carden). Moving the HQ to the edge of downtown would maintain community access, even by foot; a redesign in a strategic location without forcing cruisers through internal downtown streets would be ideal. Guelphites are under a significant but worthwhile tax burden for the downtown transit hub - it should be leveraged with increased density and tax-generating commercial and retail activity placed where services already exist. The police HQ site would be ideal for mixed residential/retail/commercial redevelopment, integrated with at-grade streetscape renewal similar to northern downtown.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 15:21:22 +0000
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