LRT impact: What will Waterloo look like in 10, 20 or 30 years? Public meeting planned Tuesday to hear ideas

I'd like to see what we see in many European cities. Barcelona is often pointed out as the ultimate in mixed-use zoning that encourages walkability and transit effectiveness.

  • the bottom storey is stores, restaurants and other businesses that rely on walk-ins without appointments
  • the next storey is businesses that relay on appointments and don't need a store front (health care, accountants, lawyers), or office space that doesn't do face-to-face interactions
  • the third storey is condominiums or apartments

I bet that there's even some businesses that typically end up in light industrial zones which can work in these mixed residential/commercial zones because they aren't as noisy and don't require a high volume of heavy vehicle traffic.

Obviously this should be flexible with multiple storeys per usage class. That way we no longer have solely commercial sectors that turn into ghost towns and people can theoretically walk to work, to dinner, to entertainment, to shopping with a decent variety within a 30 minute walk. (Supplemented by LRT and transit to easily go further without a car.)

Also, while a business generally doesn't need as many square feet for workers as those people need for housing, an all-residential area is just as much a barrier to walkability as an all commercial area is. So while you can have some single-use buildings, you want to discourage them from built next to ones of the same kind.

So instead of traditional zoning by-laws that divide the city into separate residential, commercial and industrial sectors where the property tax rate is the same for every lot in the sector, you need to have multi-use zoning where the property taxes are dependent upon the building use mixture rather than the zone it is in. For example, A building that has 3 commercial storeys and six residential stories gets a property tax rate of

    T = H * Rc * Fc/Fs + H * Rr *  Fr/Fs

Where T is taxes, H is hectares, Rc is commerical rate, Rr is residential rate, Ft is total storeys, Fc is commercial storeys and Fr is residential storeys. It's slightly more complicated but not difficult, and it can be sold to commercial property owners as a rebate on their taxes because residential rates are lower than commercial rates.

Everybody wins! :-)

/r/waterloo Thread Link - therecord.com