Residential growth key to downtown revival, group says
Replacing vacant office space with residential units and encouraging more people to live in the core is key to the revitalization of downtown Calgary, a group of business and community leaders concluded this week.
The 160 invited guests at Calgary’s Downtown Economic Summit — an event hosted by Calgary Economic Development, the City of Calgary and Calgary Municipal Land Corporation in response to the oil price downturn and a downtown office vacancy rate hovering upwards of 25 per cent — identified “residential densification” as the top priority when it comes to bringing life back to Calgary’s core.
Finding a way to get more people living downtown was ranked by participants as a higher priority than building a new arena or a larger convention centre, two major infrastructure projects that are often touted as vital to downtown revitalization.
Mary Moran — president and CEO of Calgary Economic Development — said while a new arena or convention centre would bring life to the downtown on event days, it might not spur activity the rest of the time. “Adding residential is going to make the downtown more vibrant on a permanent basis, while an arena is going to be for the time an event is going on,” she said, adding that Calgary’s downtown suffered from a lack of activity on weekends and evenings even before the oil price crash.
“We’ve got the highest concentration of downtown office towers of any jurisdiction in the country, and the lowest concentration of residential,” Moran said.
One possible solution, Calgary Economic Development believes, is the conversion of some of the downtown’s vacant office space into residential units. It has been done in cities like Pittsburgh, which is often held up as a poster child for downtown revitalization because of the way it successfully transitioned out of the downturn brought about by the decline of the steel industry.
Scott Hutcheson, executive chairman of Aspen Properties — a Calgary commercial real estate company that owns several office buildings downtown — said having more people living downtown would create the kind of buzz of activity that would spur other economic activity in the core, like retail and restaurants.
But he said that converting an entire office building to condos is a massive project that for most developers, doesn’t make financial sense.
But Hutcheson added there are things the city could do to make condo development in the downtown more feasible, such as amending land use and zoning restrictions to allow for higher densities that could improve the economics of a residential building.
Moran said the city might also want to consider other ways of encouraging development, such as a grant program for developers willing to undertake an office tower conversion.
Calgary Economic Development will present city council with a full report on findings from the Downtown Economic Summit, as well as an action plan, in the second quarter of 2017.