Developer eyes 3-tower complex
Condos would replace downtown supermarket
Claridge Homes wants to build a thicket of three condos near the corner of Rideau Street and King Edward Avenue, extending the forest of towers that’s grown up east of downtown.
The development would involve demolishing a Metro supermarket and taking up much of its parking lot. Ottawa’s flagship LCBO store, just to the east, wouldn’t be involved.
The 28-storey trio in one of the city’s most prominent spots would have 578 units between them, says the application Claridge has filed with the city, plus a six-level underground garage under a multilevel podium. The project doesn’t need a rezoning: It’s on one major arterial road and close to another, near downtown and within walking distance of a planned light-rail station at the Rideau Centre.
It’s already zoned for tall buildings, though Claridge’s planned buildings reach the absolute upper limit of what’s allowed — in that spot, maximum heights are determined by the views of Parliament Hill, and at least one of the towers Claridge wants to build will have a slightly diagonal roofline, matching very precisely what’s permitted.
Claridge’s vice-president, Neil Malhotra, said the company hopes to find room in the two levels of commercial space it’s planning to fit a new grocery store, which may even be another Metro. The project is still in early stages — the current Metro has years to go on its lease, so the redevelopment won’t happen right away — and nobody’s negotiated anything yet, he said.
But Claridge is, so far, the only developer in Ottawa that’s put a major grocery store on the bottom of a condo development, a 30,000-square-foot Sobeys promised for the base of a two-tower project on Nepean Street that’s still under construction. They’re common in other, more crowded cities but not here.
“Food’s an important amenity we can provide when we do these larger-scale projects and the opportunities are limited,” Malhotra said. “Our projects are kind of bigger scale than most people’s in town. You need a certain critical mass to make a food store work. People like to fantasize about five- and six-thousand-square-foot food stores. It doesn’t work for the bigger food retailers, in our experience.”
If anything, supermarket chains have favoured larger stores lately, as companies such as Loblaw, Walmart and Canadian Tire have elbowed their way into each other’s territory, mixing up food, housewares and clothing in the same big box stores. The 30,000-square-foot Sobeys is about as small a location as a major chain is willing to look at, Malhotra said, but this complex’s commercial floors will have about 90,000 square feet of space in them.
As for the location generally, Claridge has dominated development on Rideau Street in recent years, putting up condo after condo marching east from the Rideau Centre. It’s happy to keep doing so, Malhotra said.
“That intersection of Rideau and Cumberland is a place where a lot of very successful parts of the city meet — a cross-section of one of the great urban neighbourhoods in Sandy Hill, the ByWard Market and the university campus. We find it a very desirable place for people to want to live. It’s one of the urban neighbourhoods Ottawa has that has every sort of amenity that people could want,” he said.
The condo market has slowed in Ottawa lately, as part of a general decline in sales of new homes, but Malhotra said Claridge isn’t perturbed. Sales are down markedly from an annual high of about 6,000 new dwellings of all kinds, but they’re still just at the low end of normal over the past 15 years or so, down at about 4,000 units. In any event, with Metro’s lease remaining on the grocery store, Claridge won’t be trying to sell 578 condos in today’s market.
“This is a few years out,” Malhotra said.