Raise the Hammer

Thx Mahesh. A few points. First off, I only made it through 4 of the links. It's late so perhaps I'll try the long, tiny-font studies another time. Too much for me right now. lol However, in all honesty, I find nothing earth-shattering about the 'vacancy rates in walkable neighbourhoods':

• walkable neighbourhoods usually include a range of housing - condos, apartments, flats, houses etc.... non-walkable areas are usually all single homes or townhomes. Find me a typical sprawl development in Hamilton that isn't 100% occupied 100% of the time. Urban neighbourhoods always have the ebb and flow of renters and sub-renters. I could make a big deal about them randomly picking 20 cities, but it doesn't matter. Walkable, urban neighbourhoods will always have higher vacancy rates than suburban areas.

San Diego condo market: - welcome to the USA. This is true of San Diego's condo market, San Fran's condo+suburban market, and virtually every cities housing market in the past several years. There are entire low-density housing tracts in many US cities that are completely abandoned right now.

Do we need Vancouver? - maybe not, but everyone is better off due to the fact that we've had Vancouver the past 20 years. They continually rank high in quality of life and have a robust housing market. - meeting on the 3rd, 6th and upper floors?? Sorry to whoever wrote that, but it ain't gonna happen. Interaction should take place on the street, not some artificial games room on the 17th floor.

I've lived in Portland and have seen the transformation of many neighbourhoods and the city as a whole on the backs of LRT. There's a reason commercial streets (akin to our Ottawa or Locke) are literally fighting each other over who can get LRT next.

Flex zoning and relaxed regulations are necessary to see the benefits of LRT come to fruition, but to argue that LRT requires some subsidy to make it work is a moot point - check out the subsidy required to make sprawl work. At least LRT results in dense development which can actually make money for a city instead of draining it like sprawl does.

Cheers