If GibsonSquare (northwest corner of Yonge&ParkHome/Empress) was an twin office tower instead of twin tower 42 storey condo, we'd see 5 times as many people in those buildings and they would all have to go in at 9am and out at 5pm,... that's a whole lot of walkers!
The question is how does areas within Toronto like NYCC, STC, Yonge&Eglinton get more office building built. Yes, there's an issue of taxation rate inequality between office VS residential. And city councillors keep residential property tax rates relatively low to aplease their voters. But that turns out to be a double edge sword because to raise property tax revenue the city have used urban intensification to build upward along some arterial roads and urban hubs to increase tax revenue by increasing the total number of residential properties.
The problem is in the long run, instead of creating urban hubs as the province encourages - city policy with taxation is really creating vertical sleeping community hubs as we see in NYCC where there's been 60 new condo towers built and only 1 complete office tower since amalgamation in 1998. In the long run, all these urban growth centre hubs like NYCC, STC, Yonge&Eglinton, Islington&Bloor, etc,... well become vertical sleeping communities with very minimal office spaces and most offices towers will be downtown,... meaning more folks will be commuting long distances from one end of the city to downtown for work,... which places a large burden on our roadways and transit system.
As for walkability NYCC VS Yonge&Eglinton,... there's quite a bit of NYCC condo folks walking along Yonge Street for evening stroll... weather permitting. NYCC tends to be more multicultural than Yonge&Eglinton,... thus NYCC tends to have more ethnic type stores in closer clusters,... which doesn't exactly encourages people not of that ethnicity into those areas since everything looks foreign and unfamilar to them. Yonge&Eglinton doesn't have these cluster of ethnic stores and isn't as multicultural. Also, the houses in Yonge&Eglinton are on smaller lots (generally 20-25 feet frontage) and thus have higher density than the houses in NYCC which are mostly on 50 feet frontage lots. With higher density houses in Yonge&Eglinton, more people are there to actually walk into their neighbourhoods,... in NYCC with bigger lots people get plenty of fresh air in their own backyards.
Anyways,... before the mods warn me again about going off topic,... back to HullmarkCentre,... or at least the WholeFoodsMarket at HullmarkCentre,... which has been opened almost 2 months now and have settled down from the opening newness buzz. You're right, it's generally not busy at all,... almost as dead as the former Miracle/Dominion/Metro on that site. They're busier on weekends when more families from outside the area do their shopping there,... but the new WholeFoodsMarket at Bayview between Eglinton & Lawrence will take a bite out of that when they open next Fall. Most of my neighbours find it too expensive, and like me will only shop there for little items that we missed on our regular grocery shopping unexpectedly ran out of,... most people walking out of the WholeFoodsMarket only carry about half a bag of groceries.
Personally, I think the WholeFoodsMarket marketing folks are doing a terrible job. They have large billboards on Yonge Street near the WholesFoodMarket,... but people driving by will see the store anyways and they're less likely to stop and shop. The whole idea of this Sheppard & Yonge WholeFoodsMarket store is to get a WholeFoodsMarket store right on the subway line and that's where the huge volume of people are, and here at Sheppard-Yonge subway interchange station where large volumes of people are getting off and on subway trains on their way home, it's rather painless for TTC metropass holders to drop into WholeFoodsMarket to pick up a few items on their way home. WholeFoodsMarket need to advertise on those subway ads at the Sheppard-Yonge subway station to get TTC subway users in their doors! Especially useful in this cold winter weather as both HullmarkCentre north and south subway entrances has direct access to HullmarkCentre parking level (P1 for south and P2 for north subway entrances) where there's access to WholeFoodsMarket without ever going outside - again issue of signage. BTW, HullmarkCentre north TTC subway entrance to Sheppard eastbound platform should open at end of this month or early December.
The WholeFoodsMarket cafe tends to be busier at lunch due to the office crowds.
).
