Former hospital boiler room conversion to apartments OK’d
City council also backs 96-unit complex near Riverside Park and Zoo
The building that once housed the boiler room of the former St. Joseph’s Hospital in East City is about to be converted into 18 apartments after city councillors voted on Monday to extend a grant to the developer to help.
Developer TVM Group has applied for funding under the city’s Residential Conversion and Intensification Program, and councillors approved a grant of $130,020 (or $8.51 per square foot of new apartment space).
The approval was preliminary; it now needs a final vote at an upcoming city council meeting.
Through its program, the city offers grants of up to $10 per square foot of new residential floor area in a converted building; if this grant is approved, it will leave the city about $1.2 million for this program.
TVM has applied for similar grants before and has received them; the program is designed to offer incentives to redevelop existing buildings into apartments within the built-up areas of Peterborough.
The redevelopment of the former boiler room — a two-storey brick building at 345 Armour Rd. — will be the final phase of the ongoing conversion of the former hospital into apartments by TVM.
In other apartment news from Monday night’s meeting:
North-end apartments
Three new apartment buildings — with a total of 96 apartments — will likely be built soon across Water Street from the Riverview Park and Zoo.
Developer Triple T Holdings Ltd. is proposing construction at 1341 Water St. on a two-hectare (five-acre) vacant property located on the west side of Water Street, just north of Carnegie Avenue.
A site plan application — which sets out the arrangement of the buildings, landscaping and parking on the property — was approved by city councillors on Monday night at a virtual committee meeting.
Now it needs a final approval at a council meeting for construction to go ahead.
The site plan calls for a trio of four-storey buildings designed by local architect Neil Campbell of Aside Architects, plus 165 on-site parking spots.
There’s another existing townhouse community beside 1341 Water St.; the property is also just east of a newer condominium complex that’s accessed from Centre Line.
The vacant property was historically used as a gravel pit, according to a city staff report, but was remediated sometime after 1966 and has been vacant ever since.
It was conveyed from Smith Township to the city in 2008.
In 2018, the previous city council granted a rezoning to Triple T Holdings to allow residential use of the land (which had been zoned for rural use). That meant construction could happen.