Sorry for the bump, but I missed this thread because it's tucked away in a forum I don't visit. Found it while searching for something else.
The City's proximity bylaw for licensed liquor stores is 300 meters. The establishments in this case are in my community, Beltline.
Our planning group standing policy committee of the community association has historically argued that 300 meters is an arbitrary number that ought not to be applied as a blanket rule across the City. This is a densely populated and visited area where 300 meters, in this context, has a different meaning than it does in most other areas of the city.
Two liquor stores (or restaurants or convenience stores or whatever) located within 300 meters of each other can indeed serve the demand in this area without having appreciable negative effects as if they were in less dense areas of the city. This is especially true in this case (and another I'll discuss below) because the establishments are selling to two different markets. The 300 meter metric is actually one that is tailor-made to prevent 2 liquor stores being located in the same suburban strip mall, as two strip malls are usually located no closer to each other than that. It doesn't make sense here. The appellants usually use the rule as a means to stifle competition. Actually, technically a physical liquor store doesn't even have to exist. If there is a development permit for a liquor store, but it actually hasn't been built, they can appeal a new permit application. We actually saw this once where a liquor store had been granted a permit from the city but was hung up with the Province getting their license (and likely wouldn't attain it due to the small square footage of the space). They appealed a new application for a liquor store on the 300m proximity rule.
We actually helped an applicant out in a very similar case a year or two ago. When Vine Arts, (corner of 13th Avenue and 1st Street SW) applied for and was granted their development permit, Royal Liquor Merchants a few blocks up on 10th Avenue and 1st Street SW appealed on very similar grounds. The appeal was overturned with the help of our submission, however they were not allowed to sell beer (similar to the issue being discussed here). After they opened, they later appealed the beer restriction and also won that and began selling micro-brew beer a couple months ago.
We did some research and used AutoCAD to draw a 300 meter radius around all the existing liquor stores in the community. We found that, if the rule were strictly applied either through application or appeal, that there were only a two or three half-block faces in the entire community where a liquor store could locate (excluding the Stampede grounds, which are within our community boundaries). Going beyond liquor stores, we feel that businesses (such as licensed restaurants and drinking establishments - you may have seen this issue come up in the news recently as well) should not be regulated in this way during the development process but rather as part of business licensing. Business licenses should be reviewed on an annual or bi-annual basis and can be revoked based on the history of the establishment (police calls, incidents, complaints, etc.). As it stands now, the bad businesses (Royal Liquor Merchants, et al) are staying and keeping the good new businesses from gaining a foothold based on poorly applied bylaws.
We have developed policy (not yet adopted by the City) that would see the 300 meter radius be reduced and the only restrictions would be that they could not be located within view of a school or an alcohol treatment facility (such as Alpha House on 15th Avenue near MacLeod Trail)
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