Builder plans clash with city’s
LRT vision calls for towers, not strip mall
The city’s hopes for tall, dense neighbourhoods near its expensive light-rail stations are off to a slow start, with plans afoot to convert an old strip mall near Blair station into ... a new strip mall.
The property illustrates a conflict between the city’s dreams of intensification near light-rail stations and economic reality. Shoppers City East on Ogilvie Road is at the far east end of the $2.1-billion LRT system the city now has under construction but it’s exactly the sort of place the city’s planners hope will be redeveloped for offices and condominiums. Anchored by a Shoppers Drug Mart, a Staples and a Giant Tiger, it’s surrounded by a vast parking lot. Over the years it’s had seven owners and not a lot of investment.
“After 40 years, the place is looking a little bit ratty,” said Coun. Tim Tierney, who represents the area. The headquarters of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service is just to the northwest and a billion-dollar complex for Communications Security Establishment Canada is under construction next to it. A knot of mirrored office buildings is next door.
‘It has to make sense for the developer, as well. You can’t just put up a tower and hope somebody’s going to come along and fill it.’
COUN. TIM TIERNEY
The city’s finishing a study, one of several focused on Transitway stations that are soon to become LRT stations, that says much of the Shoppers City site is good for 20and 30-storey buildings. Six storeys on the section closest to Ogilvie. It should be broken up into smaller, easily navigated blocks, says a draft of the study the city presented in September. The idea is to get the most value out of the city’s investment in rail, to make sure as many people as possible can live and work close to its stations.
The city’s planners acknowledge it’s a long-term idea, not anything anybody expects to be done tomorrow, but a total demolition should be an opportunity to get closer to it.
But Shoppers City East’s new owner, Trinity Developments, doesn’t want what the city wants. It wants a strip mall. The company refused to talk about its plan, but documents filed with the city show it wants to break up the one central block of stores that makes up Shoppers City East to put up smaller buildings around the edges of the property, with parking in the middle. It’s leaving a southern section — the area the city’s transit-oriented planners hope will eventually have 30-storey buildings — vacant, which Tierney pointed out would at least leave options open for later.
“It has to make sense for the developer, as well,” Tierney said of the mismatch between the city’s ideas and the landowner’s. “You can’t just put up a tower and hope somebody’s going to come along and fill it.”
That was the mistake the old regional government made when it built the Transitway, he said: Assuming that big bus stations would encourage growth around themselves. They generally didn’t. But light rail is supposed to be different.
Tierney said the area around Cyrville station, one stop closer to downtown, will be more attractive. In Beacon Hill, even the current ratty old Shoppers City fills a need, Tierney said.
“When it comes to the residential side, frankly, there’s not a lot of mall area in that area, so there’s a lot of constituents that are quite concerned that they would lose the ability to do a lot of shopping. I’ve heard that from many people,” he said. Trinity plans to include a supermarket, one with a lot of parking, and that’s very welcome in the neighbourhood. So’s the plan to keep a big pharmacy. People need places to shop.
“You’re going to create food deserts. I mean, it’s great to have residential, but you need to have food retail if you want people to live there,” he said.
The new strip-mall plans include better ways to walk from store to store across the parking lot and outdoor patios. It’ll be immensely more appealing than what’s there now, Tierney said, and that’s the important thing.