What's the problem with having taller buildings in the city????

Makes perfect sense. Why try and increase density downtown (which may actually result in more services being located downtown), when we can just approve more empty subdivisions to be created on the outskirts?

The city rolls out a new plan to entice new business downtown, but to build 6 story residential buildings that will bring people to the downtown area is a no-no..?! I did not know that I now live in Bizarro world.

Prince George is one of the most backward thinking cities when compared to other cities of similar size.

One of the biggest on going complaints is new commercial development outside of the city core. There isn't a person in PG that wants to hear another plan for downtown revitilization because, no matter not what we attempt, the nay sayers cut it down and keep the same old same old as the status quo.

The question of 6 story buildings is not so much about wood construction as it is about change and growth in the downtown and surrounding area.

How can you attract investors to the area if you do not allow growth? If you want the downtown to grow you need room to expand.

The area in queestion is ripe for positive development to our cities core.

If you look at Kamloops and Kelownas inside ring around their city centers you will find a diverse set of businesses that have purchased and renovated what was once residential housing. The businesses are classy and upscale and attract thousands of people to the downtown area every day.

But not in Prince George. Let's just keep on saying no to good ideas to ensure that we will still be tripping over ouselves for another 50 years on the subject of downtown revitalization.

My hat goes off to the efforts of those that had the forsite to work on this project and propose it to our population. The proposed area makes perfect sense.

We have 3rd avenue business to the north and Parkwood to the south, city center to the east and institutional development to west.

To cram future growth and development into seven city blocks is ludicrous!

On another note - the concept of the Crescent Neighbourhood is a farce. The decisions for this area is not driven by the population in the subject area shown in the attached drawing. The jumping up and down is being done by a group of staunch and narrow minded citizen living in the actual crescents that are against any development that shows even the slightest possibility of encroachment on their properties and 'perceived' quality of life.

Doubt this all you want but turn out to a meeting of this neighborhood association and check on their addresses. Biggest group of negative backward thinking residents I have ever encountered.

Did you folks not know that the Crescents neighbourhood is handled with kid gloves, as opposed to the neighbourhood around Hollandia, for instance.

Hollandia is about to get a garbage depot expansion by rezoning a residential property to industrial.

The ideal place for higher density housing, the periphery of downtown, does not want it, so City Hall accepts that.

First of all, this entire initiative is as a result of the new building code allowing 6 storey high wood frame construction. In addition, it is about following through with the Smart Growth on the Ground exercise which promoted higher density housing in the Winnipeg-Victoria streets corridor.
I was at that meeting, I skimmed through the report and I watched Council on their new live streaming. The group at the meeting spoke about “transition” areas such as the block or two adjacent to the north side of Parkwood Mall which would be acceptable to them for higher buildings. In addition, there is the Victoria-Vancouver streets corridor which would be acceptable for higher buildings. And the Fourth Avenue corridor. In other words, the Winnipeg-Vancouver streets corridor would be kept to the present 4 storey high (I believe that is the cutoff) max. while its boundaries to the south, east and north would see a transition to taller buildings.

From my point of view, that is all not a big deal. It is not as if there is a great demand for that kind of building. It is also not as if there is no place to put them should someone be foolish enough to build one or more on speculation at the moment.

I would simply, when the time comes, build them in those locations. After all, those perimeter locations are much closer to services, whether shopping, transportation or even the CBD for work and entertainment for the little there is.

In fact, build a few nice units for sale or rent there, including commercial on the ground floor, and people will start to get used to them. Once those regions have some built and they are a true improvement and sought after form of residence, and there is a greater demand then go back to the community to revisit the Winnipeg-Vancouver streets corridor.

I look at it in the same fashion as sprawl in the City in general. Build a compact residential-commercial corridor between Victoria and Vancouver that will work as an urban liveable community and the City will have something to be proud of rather than a bunch of dispersed higher buildings with poorer urban amenities.

I think it is great that the community has forced the City to think less sprawl, because in my mind that is the exact result of that.

I think the real issue is density, not building height. It is also “green” space.

Take a close look at the Courtyard on the northwest corner of Vancouver and 6th. Parts of it are 4 storeys high. That building, and the density it represents, is allowed to be built in the entire “protected” corridor right now. It is the nicest strata/rental residential building there is anywhere in the downtown in my opinion.
If spec builders were interested in building residential apartment/strata buildings in that area, they could build another 55 of those buildings between 5th and 11th avenue. They would have to demolish a few buildings on the way. So let us say if we saved a few of the other existing apartment building till they looked out of place and outdated with all that new stock around, and we saved the seniors centre, then let us give it 45 new “Courtyards”. Maybe some of them could actually have real courtyards if they could purchase the laneway and make that part of a bigger building stretching from one street to the next. But hey, we have few people in town who think that way. Builders in town prefer to build those wonderful new building on Ferry with asphalt between units and great possibilities for show and tell across the windows from each other. ;-)

Housing like that works out to about 40 units per acre. The total acreage in that corridor from 4th to 11th is about 40. So 1,600 units. Let’s drop it to 1,200 units to allow some existing buildings to stay. We have been building less than 300 housing units a year. Let us say that there is a demand of 25% of the new units each year to go into that style of housing and that location. That would be 75 units per year on average. So, that would mean 16 years to fill that area out so as not to tick off the Crescent Community Association.
Now, we have to remember that we also have the Vancouver Victoria corridor, and we have others who will start to watch the clamouring of people wanting those kind of accommodation, so we will see some built in the gateway area as well as the Connaught Hill area, Queensway into Millar Subdivision and then skip the crescents and into the Carney Street area.

I would not worry about giving the Crescent area what they think they have achieved. I have been waiting some 15 years or so for builders to build another Courtyard. I do not think we have to worry about being seen as a backward city with this move by Council. Far from it. The sky is not falling at all.

BUT, if that is the way you are going to portray it to your friends, then yes, YOU will make it look like the sly is falling.

Opine wrote: "If you look at Kamloops and Kelownas inside ring around their city centers you will find a diverse set of businesses that have purchased and renovated what was once residential housing. The businesses are classy and upscale and attract thousands of people to the downtown area every day."

Yu are talking about something totally different. We are talking about a residential zoned area staying residential but keeping it at the maximum 4 storey height rather than moving to 6 storeys.

There is ample opportunity for commercial to replace residential in the Vancouver-Victoria corridor. There has been for decades. And it has changed. But they have been house conversions to commercial within the house or the house with an addition. There have been several proposals for the area over the decades, but they all fell flat on their face.

The difference between Kelowna, Kamloops and PG is that PG has not got a growing industrial base. In fact, it has a shrinking industrial base and it is such additions as UNBC that have slowed the population shrinkage down. Kelowna, on the other hand, has had a growing retirement base. Kamloops has nowhere near the growth of Kelowna.

Take a look at our downtown and count the total floors in the Telus, RBC, HSBC, Scotia and Oxford buildings. That should add up to approximately 40 floors.

I defy you to add that many floors in higher than 5 storey buildings in the CBDs of Kelowna and Kamloops. You will not be able to do it. In fact, you would be lucky to come up with half that number of floors.

Kelowna in particular has allowed its office buildings to spread over the City. The several "gated" communities it has in the southern part of the city along the lake, past the older part of the city, all are served by integrated centres which have both retail as well as office space, along the line of our Bank of Montreal plaza on Central, except considerably larger.

Those communities of $500,000+ homes have left the older housing neighbourhoods intact, just as the "crescents" area is left intact. In fact, a portion of that area is a heritage conservation area with relatively strict guidelines as to what people can do to the exterior of their houses.

THAT is the norm for many civilized cities in all of North America.

Look at Vancouver. There is an old section of high rise apartments in the West End that goes back to the 50s and 60s, and of course the more recent high rise condo area that grew up in Yaletown and on the periphery of False Creek after Expo 86.

BUT, go along Davie and Robson and walk between them and you will find rows and rows of streets with 3 storey walk ups from the same era.

The same works for Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, etc.

Variety makes a place interesting.

NO, that will not make this city anti development. Please be a bit more observant when you visit other cities.

Here is information about the Abbott Street conservation area in Kelowna. Read it and visit it when you are there the next time. Then think about those old die hards in the Crescent area and how progressive they actually are.

http://www.kelowna.ca/CityPage/Docs/PDFs//Heritage/Abbott%20St%20Heritage%20Area.pdf

This is what a progressive city does which encourages growth ...... it makes sure it keeps the character of place.

http://www.kelowna.ca/CM/page85.aspx

Very few people in PG understand that. They have no imagination when they walk through part of this city of what treasures actually are still there. Nor can they imagine waht it would looks like when some of the key character houses were actually to be properly renovated, landscaped and even new "sensitive" infill development build next door. It should be a part of the city which has some of the higher valued properties if people could only be as appreciative as people in Kelowna and Kamloops are.

Brash developers is NOT what we need. Developers who build new throw away buildings are a dime a dozen. We have far too many of them in PG.

I wish this is what our downtown look liked.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rent2010.net/i/Listing933/Squamish-Vacation-Rental-Olympics.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.inetgiant.ca/AdDetails/new-one-bedroom-condo-squamish-downtown-950-1bd/4871008&usg=__dij8K1Ex8MX7ijEE94dr7QPE6SI=&h=600&w=800&sz=425&hl=en&start=80&zoom=1&tbnid=iqXpFVCRBKw2jM:&tbnh=142&tbnw=200&ei=92ZATYGbIImgsQOVuuDoCA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsquamish%2Btownhouse%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Den%26biw%3D1247%26bih%3D616%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C2625&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=563&vpy=151&dur=143&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=84&ty=93&oei=2mZATbjaNIr6swPbnKWdCA&esq=16&page=6&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:7,s:80&biw=1247&bih=616

I wish it would look like this in parts. PG was started later than Nelson and has grown to be larger than Nelson. However, the poeple who founded Nelson and those who founded PG were obviously totally different from the very start, because they built more substantial buildings, almost as if they knew they would stay there for a bit longer than those who founded PG. I really do not think that spirit has changed very much over the century or so.

Also, there are many more small cities and towns in BC that much or substantial parts of their downtown that look like Nelson than there are that look like PG. Revelstoke and Fernie are two others that are prime examples of towns much smaller than PG, yet they have better quality building stock right from the beginning and they have maintained them very well.

THAT, to me, is the sad part.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/trailofdead/405102962/in/faves-zleslie

http://zenportfolios.com/victoriaraedcher/files/2009/11/673px-DowntownNelsonBC.jpg