Brampton Mount Pleasant Heights | ?m | 14s | Argo Developments

ShonTron

ShonTron

Moderator
Member Bio
Joined
Apr 24, 2007
Messages
12,536
Reaction score
9,528
Location
Ward 13 - Toronto Centre
This item is up for debate at Brampton's Planning and Development Committee:

http://www.brampton.ca/en/City-Hall/meetings-agendas/PDD Committee 2010/20100908pdd_G3.pdf

The plan is for a regional shopping mall (over 1,000,000 square feet) plus outdoor lifestyle shopping, offices, condos and recreational uses, perhaps a hotel.

The City is moving to include this in the Mount Pleasant secondary plan, supposedly meant to have a medium/high density node around the GO station and area, though built development have been typical subdivisions with some low-medium residential (townhouses).

Such a mall would have significant impacts on Georgetown and west Brampton.

Site plans start on Page 18.
 
Looks nice, but I can't really see this working in that location. I don't think there's the population to support it. With Bramalea City Centre, and Trinity Commons there seems to be enough retail already. Perhaps they should tear down Shopper's World and put it there.
 
Does Brampton really need another mall? Mississauga can barely support the ones it has. Square One is doing well. As for the rest of them, not so much. Erin Mills has seen lots of retailers leave. Heartland does well but it's not a mall. Dixie is nothing special to look at. Meadowvale, South Common, Sheridan, they're all crap.
 
I think it could work, but it is in a bit of an odd location as you say. Brampton's growing still.

Trinity Common is a big box centre, albeit with a few lifestyle-centre features such as the internal bus terminal and restaurant cluster, and will not compete directly. Bramalea City Centre is the only other major regional mall in Brampton, Shoppers World has always struggled. This new mall (with mostly decked parking, which is nice to see), will have a large trade area that will certainly take in Georgetown, as well as Acton, much of Caledon and parts of Wellington County, maybe Orangeville.

It is kind of sad to see Erin Mills not do as well as it should. It was a nice mall, and I loved the mini-golf there. The other malls like South Common and Meadowvale were never regional malls anyway. Shoppers World was, but I think that BCC and Square One and Heartland sucked much of the life out of it, and suffered from poor management when it should have been renovated in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
 
Last edited:
This is an example of the stupidity of municipal planning. Why haven't local governments learned? They put new single detached homes next to a new GO station... and then 800m east plan a new town centre. Is there any more undeveloped yet developable land next to a railway corridor in the GTA? If I'm not mistaken this is one of the last stretches of railway track within the greenbelt which is undeveloped. It would have been nice to see them put a mall and town centre attached directly to a GO station to show that while it was a long time coming they eventually figured it out. I can't help but think how much better transportation would be had Square One been built 2km south, Scarborough Centre 1.5km east, and Oakville Place on the south side of the 401. Pickering, while not ideal, will at least have a bridge to connect the transit hub with the retail and office hub. Places people go need to be built on the railway and the railway needs to go to places where people go. The province should pass legislation that any building for retail, residential, or office use above a certain square footage needs to be within 1km of a subway line, LRT line, BRT line, or railway line, and that a development within 1km from a subway line, LRT line, BRT line, or railway line cannot be denied based on having too high a density.
 
Of course, the answer to all that would ask the question "why would they build it here....why not there?" is....."they don't own land there....they own it here"
 
EnviroTO said:
Yes, but the city decides the zoning. Land swaps could have been made.
Click to expand...

possibly but it is seldom easy.

The fact is, however, that the vast majority of people who arrives at malls do so by car (even the downtown Eaton Centre requires a massive parking structure).....so the location at the intersection of two major roads is not bad (assuming you want a new regional mall in the first place).

The notion that it could just replace Shoppers World....well, that would not serve the growth in the nw part of town nor would it make RioCan very happy as they would have to give up their mall and their lands. They have repositioned SW to, essentially, be an indoor big box centre......not a regional/anchored mall in the old sense (the Bay store closed down, didn't it?). Ossmington and RioCan are competitors.....competition means stealing/winning business from the other guy.....you don't say "Brampton has enough retail so I will take this retail zoned land I have and grow corn on it"....You say "what value proposition can I develop that will make tenants want to locate here and shoppers want to shop here quite possibly at the expense of my competition".

Someone above mentioned various malls in mississauga as potential reasons Brampton might not need this mall....that might be one of the reasons that the owners are developing it. My teenage daughter and her friends (as a very narrow survey) do most of their shopping at SQ1 because it has a better mix of fashion stores than BCC and is only marginally farther (they measure this in terms of time it takes one of the parents to get them there.....not in distance)........perhaps a new mall at Mississauga Road and Bovaird can take advantage of that perception.

It just strikes me a lot that in discussions about this sort of thing there is feeling that stuff can just be placed wherever and whenever we think it makes sense.....when real estate is held in private hands it is seldom the case.
 
Last edited:
but that is the complaint - we need better cooperation between public and private when it comes to city building. So much of our mindset is development = good just because dollars are changing hands. But so infrequently is development done with the idea of building a better community for the long term. Also I think the numbers are not really there to support this new mall. If built, it will just mean higher vacancy rates at other malls as some tenants are lured wawy to the new location. Also kind of sad to see this rural land get eaten up by sprawl...
 
Redroom Studios said:
but that is the complaint - we need better cooperation between public and private when it comes to city building. So much of our mindset is development = good just because dollars are changing hands. But so infrequently is development done with the idea of building a better community for the long term. Also I think the numbers are not really there to support this new mall. If built, it will just mean higher vacancy rates at other malls as some tenants are lured wawy to the new location. Also kind of sad to see this rural land get eaten up by sprawl...
Click to expand...

I never said that (the bolded part). What I said is that you cannot stop a private developer from utilizing his lands within the legal zoning just because there are alternative places to (in this case) shop. It may be sad to see this land getting eaten up by "sprawl" but it is/was gonna anyway.....the alternative seems to be massive amounts of housing with nowhere to shop other than the malls previously mentioned in this thread so they should clog roads getting to shopping? Or this development which seems to intensify, a bit, the development in the area through a mix of shopping/office/condo ....whether the plans pan out that way or not, that seems to be the plan.
 
FYI here's a link to the thread about the Mount Pleasant Mobility Hub
http://urbantoronto.ca/showthread.php?11428-Brampton-Mt-Pleasant-Mobility-Hub

And the recently approved Mount Pleasant Secondary Plan

Most of the rest of the area around the GO Station was planned for years ago. Fletcher's Meadow secondary plan came into effect in 1998 and Credit Valley secondary plan was approved around 2002. The planning process for those areas would have started years before that (e.g. subwatershed studies for Fletcher's Meadow are from 1993-1995, probably resulting from the big urban boundary expansion in the 1993 Official Plan)
 
Last edited:
Great, just what the GTA needs, another friggin' cheesy, car oriented shopping mall instead of transit oriented, street fronting retail strips. Shoot me.
 
Towered said:
Great, just what the GTA needs, another friggin' cheesy, car oriented shopping mall instead of transit oriented, street fronting retail strips. Shoot me.
Click to expand...

Look, ever since Toronto stopped the Spadina expressway, Toronto has been so busy slapping itself on the back in congratulations that somewhere along the way they forgot that if you are going to stop the construction of expressways, you really need to start building transit - and Toronto did not.

Instead, to make matters worse, the province decided that the cost of building transit should be bourn by the Toronotonians that use it and stopped paying for 75% of transit costs as they had historically been doing. There is simply no way Toronto can afford to pay the billions required to construct the necessary transit on it’s own.

So it’s up to all of us to pressure the powers that be both in Queens Park and in Ottawa to cough up the money. They haven't done so to date and in fact they have repeatedly rescinded approved funds for some of the more important projects and severely reduced funds for others. Many of the previously "approved" subway lines have been reduced to street car lines and had their construction repeatedly postponed.

There is no point in getting angry with developers going forward with car centric developments when transit projects are so far down the list of Provincial/Federal priority lists.
 
A mass transit plan for the GTA ought to be THE BIG IDEA. Simply make it the sine qua non for the ambitious MP or MPP bleating to be elected. Shake up the " priority lists " of the McGuinty and Harper cabals, for once.
 
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top