(07-14-2015, 09:26 AM)tomh009 Wrote: If the city wants to ensure that all residential on King Street has a retail component, then it needs to update the zoning so as to disallow pure residential buildings. Don't blame the developer for acquiring a largely-neglected property and proposing to build a mid-density residential building on it when it's explicitly permitted by the current zoning.
I believe that they should do that. They've designated King Street West (among others) as a "mixed-use corridor." That suggests to me that residential buildings without ground-level commercial should be the exception, not the rule. But within the current regime, what the municipal government can (and should) do is disallow zoning variances for developments that are not mixed-use. If a developer wants to be excused from requirements such as lot setbacks, it should be required to add extra value to the area in return.
Edit: Additionally, a lot of these discussions about vacancy and whatnot tend to be anecdotal, you know. With offices, for instance, we've seen conversions to office space from other uses while lots of purpose-built office space sits vacant downtown, and we're told that this is because of changing preferences in the market. The same could be true for retail, and new purpose-built retail might have much different vacancy numbers that tired, older retail space does. We heard from We're Bitter Together, for example, and others, that it's hard to find space downtown. So it's hard to know what to believe sometimes.