Historic MacDonald Lofts building awaits its fate
The A. MacDonald Building — also known as the MacDonald Lofts — should be one of Edmonton’s most beloved heritage assets. Goodness knows, we’ve spent enough — almost $2 million in public dollars over the last 16 years — to restore the fourstorey, red-brick warehouse as a historic site.
Yet for years it’s been the worst kind of slum housing, infested with mould, cockroaches and bedbugs.
Just last week, Alberta Health Services laid an astonishing 377 charges against the building’s former owners and operators.
Now, the building is officially part of Ice District.
The Katz Group recently closed the deal to purchase it for a cool $4.8 million, not a bad price, given the city’s latest tax assessment was just over $6.1 million. Sadly, that doesn’t mean the future of our past is guaranteed.
Located at 10128 105 Ave., neighbouring Rogers Place, the former grocery warehouse is on the city’s municipal register of historic resources.
It cannot be torn down without the agreement of city council.
It’s on the Alberta Register of Historic Places, which is an even greater protection from demolition.
It’s even on Canada’s National Register of Historic Places.
The building was erected, with panache, in 1913 at the climax of Edmonton’s great prewar boom.
There are all kinds of whimsical flourishes, including recessed spandrels, brick corbels, a front parapet, decorative diamondshaped stonework, and a majestic front entryway flanked with two dramatic stone pillars — the sort that architects call rusticated pilasters.
But instead, says AHS, it’s been a public health disaster, with parts of it unfit for human habitation. AHS isn’t just alleging hundreds of serious health and safety violations. It claims the then-owners and operators of the facility — including Calgary-based Mac Lofts Capital Corp. and Paragon Properties Ltd., which is headed by Abby and Norman Steinberg — failed to comply with health orders, despite more than 100 health inspections and four compliance letters.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Back in 2000, the then-owners of the building, the White brothers, who ran Worthington Properties, received a $1.62-million “forgivable loan” from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. under its Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program to retrofit the old warehouse as affordable housing. Worthington also received $165,368 from the city’s heritage preservation program. And when the building opened for business, it had some 90 bright, sunny clean suites, each with its own bathroom.
Under the terms of the CMHC agreement, the owners had to index all rent increases to the Consumer Price Index for 15 years. When the property passed from Worthington to Paragon, the deal remained in place. The agreement expired on Sept. 1, 2016, at which time the loan was completely forgiven. That was also the moment the owners, freed from the obligation to maintain affordability, increased rents for bachelor units in the rundown, bug-infested building by almost 50 per cent, to $825 a month. It was only when the tenants went to the media that rents were rolled back.
We surely didn’t put almost $2 million of public infrastructure dollars into the place for it to be run as a squalid tenement housing. But while the CMHC loan agreement had all kinds of conditions to keep rents below market rates, it didn’t include any obligation for the building’s successive owners to maintain the heritage property.
It all became exactly the kind of worst-case scenario that makes NIMBY neighbours worry any time someone tries to put supportive housing into a community.
The Katz Group is now in the process of fumigating and cleaning the site and working with AHS and social agencies to “rehouse” the building’s remaining 65 to 70 low-income tenants. That’s not going to be an easy task, given the shortage of supportive housing in Edmonton and the fact many of these tenants are, euphemistically, “hard to house” — people with addictions, mental illness or problematic behaviours.
Tim Shipton, who speaks for Ice District, says it’s too soon to comment on long-term plans for the site. Still, it’s hard to imagine the Katz Group is keen to spend millions on affordable housing next to their shiny arena.
The striking building could be gutted and gentrified — renovated as a boutique hotel, or cool offices, or spiffy lofts. (Though, it must be said, it could end up next door to a safe-injection site, which might limit appeal.) But the built-out Ice District will have plenty of hotel rooms, condos and office space to fill already.
Given city council’s track record, I’m betting they’d cave if the Katz Group asked for permission to demolish. That would be tragic — not just for this elegant warehouse, but for the concept of historic designation itself.
If the province stands firm, though, maybe the Katz Group will indeed see its way to saving this piece of our past for the future.