The upper floors look good, but I'm concerned that the first floor has very few windows, is out of scale with any nearby buildings, and is mostly blank brick walls with a couple garage entrances. Definitely not going to encourage any sort of street life. And I doubt the folks willing to pay $450,000 for a unit in the building will ever let their feet touch the sidewalk in front of the building, especially when they can drive in, park, and never interact with another human. See: snout houses.
Right, unless there is retail on the ground floor that building will just act as another "gap" in any lively pedestrian fabric.
This is why I have started using the term "pedestrian lively" versus just putting a shout out for "pedestrian friendly". Other cities have learned the lesson that, yes pedestrian friendly is good, but in order to have an "active streetscape" you need to have what I call "pedestrian lively" development. I have seen some cities that have zoning along some streets and or incentives to get that type of development. They will explicitly discourage "living at street level" on these streets for they realize that will harm the creation of a pedestrian lively corridor. And some will even go so far as to discourage office on the ground floor and will instead encourage, retail, dining, entertainment, services, etc.
If your looking to create that lively, "main street" type atmosphere, living at street level on those streets will hurt that.
Again am reminded of my last "walkabout" in parts of OKC and thinking.... "It's like they took all the pieces (buildings, shops, living, etc,) of a real city, put them in a bag, shook it up, and then opened up the top and scattered them all out there to land willy nilly with no rhyme or reason. And then in Dallas, streets with lots of living just like this, and the occasional cluster of shops or restaurants, but sidewalks so quiet you could hear crickets.
I am of course still hopeful about our downtown. But this will create a quiet gap there on main street.
