There are plans for a new condo building at the abandoned post office site in my neighbourhood. My neighbours are up in arms about it as the sixteen floor structure threatens to change the look and feel of largely low rise suburb.

I feel ambivalent about the whole thing. On the one hand I definitely do not want skyscrapers popping up on every underused plot of land and I would hate to have a condo building behind my house where the church and the school are now.

On the other hand, from environmental perspective, I cannot object to planned intensification. This might sound hypocritical from a person in a four bedroom corner lot home, but I prefer people to live in pretty condo buildings than sprawl out on farmland the way Ottawa has been growing. Is sixteen stories too tall and if so what is the acceptable height? Apparently the developer paid around $900,000 for the lot and I expect they want to turn a profit. Would ten stories be enough to both satisfy the neighbours and provide profit for the developer? or five? or two? The existing condo building next to the post office lot is eleven floors high.

My main concern is the road that the condo is to be built on. The street has some really nice elements. A few beautiful parks, stretches of pretty to tolerable town homes, our beautiful daycare bungalow, a cutesy co-op apartment complex and even a fire station that never fails to cheer up my boys. On the other hand, there is some ugliness too. There is the telephone central office with an ugly parking lot filled with even uglier service trucks. There is a huge parking lot serving a pink siding church whose architecture looks like it has been made by a bunch of kindergarteners on too much sugar. There are a strip mall and an indoor mall that are visually pleasing enough but are filled with empty spots and businesses and groups not really suited to malls. If it wasn’t for the barber shop I would never set foot into the indoor mall and I certainly never visit the strip mall and yet these shopping locations are intended to serve my neighbourhood.

For me it comes down to not having a problem of condo buildings being built on ugly locations but I would be really upset if they were built on pretty ones. My hope is that with increased population in the neighbourhood, the services (such as bus routes) and businesses will return here and I will no longer have to drive to Westboro to get decent coffee served in real cup with a saucer. I’d love my neighbourhood to not only be walkable but be walkable with purpose – i.e. contain more than half a dozen businesses and services that are worth walking to. Will new condo buildings be a catalyst for this to happen, I don’t know but I certainly hope so.