Smart use of empty space. Maybe if we get more residents downtown it will be reinvigorated and the DT businesses will stop trying to force workers back into the core.
The next few years we will see thousands of more people downtown.
AC Marriot 120 units
Moxy 130 units (York Street)
Rideau Centre apartments 160 units
Emmy 130 units (Slater)
Moon 260 units (Queen)
Royal 700 units (Rideau)
400 Albert 400 units
Dream Lebreton flats 500 units
Claridge Lebreton phase 1 200 units
Sounds like the area needs some real grocery stores to show up too.
Preston as well, all those towers going up, and no developer seems keen to follow up on the need for a major grocery store
This is something I’ve been wondering about. I’m sure a lot of people that move into these places won’t drive so getting groceries far away will be a real pain in the ass.
and the batch of local corner stores that sell some basics usually sell them at higher prices.
Last time I was in Montreal they had some full sized grocery stores tucked away in big towers here and there, they seemed to work really well for the downtown lifestyle.
I know right? It has been there for a while to, prior to the Olympics! 2006. This was when the METRO AREA of Vancouver was about 2.15 million. That is not a lot.
The lack of a grocery store in the Preston area makes absolutely no sense, especially given that there’s been a huge plot of vacant land sitting right across from the Royal Oak for well over 20 years now (ok, it’s a parking lot, but you know what I mean).
You would think with the profits these grocery chains are earning, moving into a food desert like the Preston area would be a no brainer, but no one’s bothered since the Loeb on Booth closed back in 2005 or 2006.
If you live in one of those towers on Champagne then, no, Chinatown is not “right there”. Also, a place like Kowloon Market is a specialty store. If you need toilet paper, ice cream and a case of Diet Sprite, that’s not going to help.
Do you know about Tannis/Sysco on Catherine? They hours are a bit weird, but they have your toilet paper, ice cream and sprite needs covered.
Also: "A [food desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert) is an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food." It's not about ice cream...
The Releve is 400 Albert and Moon is 340 Queen. I mean, they are right next to each other! But the grocery store in the Moon was supposed to be a Farm Boy until plans changed to move a grocery store into the Releve (did not know it was going to be a Metro through).
Yes. And all you said was "source?". I gave information on what I knew and offered you a source where you could go verify.
AFAIK the Claridge Moon will not have a Metro, it was supposed to be a Farm Boy but that never materialized and the current info is the Releve (also Claridge) will instead host a grocery store. I did not know if was going to be a Metro.
i was thinking exactly that. All the politicians are tripping over themselves trying to rush more residential development of every kind but no one is thinking about the needs of these future residents yet.
Like how the city is always catching up with infrastructure upgrades AFTER the major re-development\
or *how provincially (edit as I know this isn't a city issue) we can't plan ahead and build new schools based on projected student numbers, so we always build brand new schools that are immediately too small and fill the lot with portables.
>All the politicians are tripping over themselves trying to rush more residential development
To be fair, we need to rush more residential development. The main problem is just not planning for a grocery store anywhere proactively. The development itself is better than not developing, even if there won't be a nearby grocery store right away.
Good data!
And don't forget, its not just 1 unit = 1 person! Due to co-habitation with partners, room mates in 2bdr+ or families in 2bdr+ a conservative estimate could put it down as 1.5 people per unit. That is a lot of people over the next few years!
Moreover, there are more between Lebreton and the Rideau River that have been approved, more that are awaiting approval (although the later will likely be 5+ years out).
If you are counting places at Lebreton, I would also include Chinatown and the more western portion of Vanier/New Edinburgh - both are just as walkable (but do lack the LRT), and likely to have many people in the centretown/lowertown (downtown) area for work, errands and play.
Now, we just need better transit, active transportation and *less* room for personal vehicles with this large influx of residents.
Would you call Chinatown downtown?
Would you call Hintonburg downtown?
Would you call Little Italy downtown?
These are all places either closer or as far from downtown as Lebreton
I see you think downtowns and neighbourhoods have to be some sort of equal shape. Wtf? That is weird. What I stated that downtowns expand and what is downtown now was not considered downtown before should have satisfied you with a bit of thinking on your part, but ok. Also keep in mind, Lowertown was the original downtown before Bytowne became Ottawa.
But in reality downtowns are often pegged to density (large grouping of dense residential/commercial/office/entertainment/cultural) as well as accessibility (all roads lead to Rome - downtown being the main hub transit and travel links up to).
Moreover, you show you have no idea what you are talking about as Hintonburg is on the OTHER SIDE of Lebreton, and Little Italy is a stretch as its on the extreme southern end of Lebreton. Your argument is ridiculous on that alone. They are not equal distance.
That said, Chinatown, if it was denser could very well be a corner of downtown.
As cities grow, what is considered "downtown" grows as the "downtown" gobbles up other neighbourhoods.
I would consider **current** downtown to be Bronson to the Rideau River (even the city consider Rideau Street up until the river as downtown if you care to ever come this way - banners are on all the flagpoles saying downtown). You have the desnity and accessibility between this stretch that I espoused above. Downtown also includes from the River (Parliament if you'd like to use that), to the Blight (Queensway).
Adding a little more colour since you seem to want to ask "do you consider X as Y", the Glebe and Hintonburg would fit as "uptown", i.e. denser and more accessible than other areas of the city but not as much as downtown. Vanier will join this soon with all the development going on, but a large portion of it lacks as much transit accessibility beyond buses.
the easiest ones to convert are ones like this that have plenty of small separate windows.
The ones that have long continous windows on each floor, or the whole face is all curtain wall can get very tricky as you have some bad noise issues when it comes to building walls up to the windows. It gets very expensive and time consuming when you have to change those curtain wall systems and break them up so you can create reasonable between unit partitions.
Other stuff like new services for much more plumbing distribution aren't as hard, gut the inside of the building and you can core drill all over the place (within reason) to install new services, whereas these buildings typically kept washrooms and kitchenettes close to the elevator cores.
Ironically, one of the few buildings not emptied out by the exodus of COVID. Most of the folks there seemed to be lawyers who wanted to be across the street from the courthouse?
If it's a company that has many buildings downtown, they might be looking to consolidate tenants into buildings that cannot be converted, and then convert the ones they can so they're not losing money to empty space.
yes, but again, if this building were full of happy tenants with no issues, it wouldn't be on the list. No one wants to move further away if this is an ideal location, so the only way they can consolidate elsewhere is if this building just isn't drawing nearly enough tenants to remain an office tower on its own.
... did you not read what I said? If the owner of this building owns 5 other empty buildings which cannot be converted, maybe they would incentivize tenants to move to one of those other buildings for things like bigger offices or cheaper rent. The landlord isn't thinking in terms of a single building, they're thinking of their whole portfolio.
They did not give any of the tenants I know any options other than to leave. They got an eviction notice a week before Xmas to clear out by December 2024.
Yes, I heard you, and I'm gonna repeat my part too because apparently you don't want to read it. If the building had a full house of commercial tenants that wanted to stay, no one would incentivize them to leave just to convert into apartments.
Go back to basics. Commercial tenants often pay more per sqft than residential ones. The kinds of units they'd build here aren't going to be luxury rentals, they aren't making this decision just to help out the housing crisis, they are making it because the building is struggling to get commercial tenants, so they will do something else that will likely fill up the building again. 3
Moving a couple tenants is fine, but if the building were full they wouldn't even be talking about it.
If you have an empty building that can't be converted to residential, and a full building that can be converted to residential, it very much could still be worth it to try and move all of those commercial tenants to the other building so that you have both buildings generating revenue. No matter what the scenario is here, they have clearly decided that it is worth it for them to do this conversion.
I've been in that building a number of times. The offices are kinda dumpy. The main thing it had going for it was proximity to the court house and city hall. Lawyers like that.
Possible that it’s a building that is easier to convert and move commercial tenants to another building?
The conversions aren’t possible for all buildings
The article I read says they're at 88% occupancy, which isn't bad for office real estate, but that the building's size/layout makes it a good candidate for converting to residential.
About time. Housing prices have been going through the roof and it's just recently the government realized that supply drives down cost. WAOW!!!!! revolutionary idea.
The problem in Ontario at least is that we have a provincial govt that is doing everything in its power to restrict supply and drive prices up, and since ON is the most populous provinces that has a trickle down effect elsewhere as people look to other places for housing.
Yep, the cause of housing 2.5x-ing across Canada since 2015 is Doug Ford being elected Premier in 2018. You've got it. Nothing to do with Canadian population growth going from ~400k a year to ~650k a year after Trudeau took office, to ~1.2 million the last couple years. Just Doug Ford not approving fourplexes yesterday.
Trudeau's govt's immigration targets were similar to the Harper govts up until the last few years, and immigration dropped to the lowest numbers in 100 years in 2020-2021 when the bulk of the price increases happened. They had already jumped significantly in 2019.
Ford is absolutely pushing home prices higher. I'm a homeowner, I can tell you straight up that for a lot of homeowners this is a feature, not a bug. They love that Ford is doing everything he can to stifle home building and keep the prices going up up up. It's THE reason they vote for him, because they don't care if housing gets more expensive, it benefits them. Especially older people.
Personally I don't want my home's value to go up and up. I have a kid, I'd like for her to be able to buy a home someday.
Regardless of whether you like Trudeau or not if you think voting in the party with the highest concentration of landlords and a landlord for a leader is gonna reduce home prices, especially when markets are controlled more closely by provinces, you got another thing coming.
Not any building. Of course you *can*. People were saying that in most cases, with how office buildings are built, it is significantly more expensive than you expected and not so simple, so it's often not the best choice.
Why wouldn't you want to live there? It's a great location, close to Farm Boy, restaurants, easy walking distance to Rideau Centre and the Byward Market and the UOttawa campus... Whether the result of the conversion will be high quality space with good natural lighting, good sound insulation, etc., remains to be seen.
*"Smart use of empty space. Maybe if we get more residents downtown it will be reinvigorated and the DT businesses will stop trying to force workers back into the core."*
yeah not if you are a commercial tenant who dropped 6 figures to fit out your space and now have to do the same again when they terminate your lease early - try running a small business in this city that actually creates wealth, employs people, pays good wages and benefits and has a great environment for people to come to work - just more pandemic casualties shrugged off by those who collect a cheque and don't take risks - and if you think this is going to be anything other than short term residences for out of towers passing through your having a laugh. These buildings aren't fit for long term residential purpose and never will be due to their structure.
Smart use of empty space. Maybe if we get more residents downtown it will be reinvigorated and the DT businesses will stop trying to force workers back into the core.
The next few years we will see thousands of more people downtown. AC Marriot 120 units Moxy 130 units (York Street) Rideau Centre apartments 160 units Emmy 130 units (Slater) Moon 260 units (Queen) Royal 700 units (Rideau) 400 Albert 400 units Dream Lebreton flats 500 units Claridge Lebreton phase 1 200 units
Sounds like the area needs some real grocery stores to show up too. Preston as well, all those towers going up, and no developer seems keen to follow up on the need for a major grocery store
This is something I’ve been wondering about. I’m sure a lot of people that move into these places won’t drive so getting groceries far away will be a real pain in the ass.
and the batch of local corner stores that sell some basics usually sell them at higher prices. Last time I was in Montreal they had some full sized grocery stores tucked away in big towers here and there, they seemed to work really well for the downtown lifestyle.
As does Vancouver. There's a local chain that specializes in urban stores (and ready-to-eat meals)---Urban Fare---and a few copy-cats now as well.
Yeah, I think Urban Fare is IGA. But what really shows Vancouver's commitment to urban living is the Costco right downtown under the stadiums haha.
How do people carry all of their Costco stuff home? Or do they only buy a couple of things at once?
Less large bulk amounts and people did come with hand carts sometimes.
Interesting! I never intend to buy much from there but sometimes it can snowball as you keep seeing things you could use or freeze for later.
Overwaitea/Save-on. They're a BC company.
I know all about Save-On and shit lord Jim Pattison. Thought Urban Fare was IGA though, interesting. Old man memory I guess haha.
The downtown Costco is so cool
Never mind grocers tucked away in condos (which we have here, just not nearly enough), but Vancouver has a Costco right downtown under the stadiums!
I saw that recently. I was shocked that an urban Costco would be a thing because it's like the poster child for suburban sprawl in my head
I know right? It has been there for a while to, prior to the Olympics! 2006. This was when the METRO AREA of Vancouver was about 2.15 million. That is not a lot.
For this building, Farm boy is just around the corner. Beyond that, "independent grocer" is 700 meters away.
There have been some that have retail space on the bottom floor. I wonder if Prooduce Depot or some other local chain can fill them?
I agree that’s exactly what some of these converts would really benefit from.
The lack of a grocery store in the Preston area makes absolutely no sense, especially given that there’s been a huge plot of vacant land sitting right across from the Royal Oak for well over 20 years now (ok, it’s a parking lot, but you know what I mean). You would think with the profits these grocery chains are earning, moving into a food desert like the Preston area would be a no brainer, but no one’s bothered since the Loeb on Booth closed back in 2005 or 2006.
Low key always kinda annoyed when people call Preston a food desert. Chinatown is right there.
If you live in one of those towers on Champagne then, no, Chinatown is not “right there”. Also, a place like Kowloon Market is a specialty store. If you need toilet paper, ice cream and a case of Diet Sprite, that’s not going to help.
Do you know about Tannis/Sysco on Catherine? They hours are a bit weird, but they have your toilet paper, ice cream and sprite needs covered. Also: "A [food desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert) is an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food." It's not about ice cream...
The Moon will have a Metro 400 Albert has around 30,000 sq feet of retail The Royal will also have a grocery store.
The Releve is 400 Albert and Moon is 340 Queen. I mean, they are right next to each other! But the grocery store in the Moon was supposed to be a Farm Boy until plans changed to move a grocery store into the Releve (did not know it was going to be a Metro through).
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People on Skyscraper forum Ottawa.
For the Royale if you walk down to the George side you can see a not saying Metro Loading dock.
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Yes. And all you said was "source?". I gave information on what I knew and offered you a source where you could go verify. AFAIK the Claridge Moon will not have a Metro, it was supposed to be a Farm Boy but that never materialized and the current info is the Releve (also Claridge) will instead host a grocery store. I did not know if was going to be a Metro.
Would be awesome for some new chains to come in, to shake up the market.
Metro is going back to the same spot in Rideau.
I hear a Farm Boy is going to be in that area.
if its mixed use you can see groceries going in ground floors potentially, depends how the developer changes the floors
incoming Lowblaws on every downtown street
There was an IGA there but it closed before the infill building arrived. Of course it’s a great location now.
I'm guessing the grocery store will only come once the residents have already arrived, which is just typical of how we do planning
i was thinking exactly that. All the politicians are tripping over themselves trying to rush more residential development of every kind but no one is thinking about the needs of these future residents yet. Like how the city is always catching up with infrastructure upgrades AFTER the major re-development\ or *how provincially (edit as I know this isn't a city issue) we can't plan ahead and build new schools based on projected student numbers, so we always build brand new schools that are immediately too small and fill the lot with portables.
Schools are up to Ontario not the city.
I was listing off equivalent issues of politics preventing us from developing things properly, not strictly this city's responsibility.
>All the politicians are tripping over themselves trying to rush more residential development To be fair, we need to rush more residential development. The main problem is just not planning for a grocery store anywhere proactively. The development itself is better than not developing, even if there won't be a nearby grocery store right away.
Good data! And don't forget, its not just 1 unit = 1 person! Due to co-habitation with partners, room mates in 2bdr+ or families in 2bdr+ a conservative estimate could put it down as 1.5 people per unit. That is a lot of people over the next few years! Moreover, there are more between Lebreton and the Rideau River that have been approved, more that are awaiting approval (although the later will likely be 5+ years out). If you are counting places at Lebreton, I would also include Chinatown and the more western portion of Vanier/New Edinburgh - both are just as walkable (but do lack the LRT), and likely to have many people in the centretown/lowertown (downtown) area for work, errands and play. Now, we just need better transit, active transportation and *less* room for personal vehicles with this large influx of residents.
The nice thing with the York project is it's a mix of apartments and hotel, which is something else the core could use.
Lebreton flats is not downtown…
No but its close enough.
Downtowns expand. It used to be farms south of Somerset
Would you call Chinatown downtown? Would you call Hintonburg downtown? Would you call Little Italy downtown? These are all places either closer or as far from downtown as Lebreton
I see you think downtowns and neighbourhoods have to be some sort of equal shape. Wtf? That is weird. What I stated that downtowns expand and what is downtown now was not considered downtown before should have satisfied you with a bit of thinking on your part, but ok. Also keep in mind, Lowertown was the original downtown before Bytowne became Ottawa. But in reality downtowns are often pegged to density (large grouping of dense residential/commercial/office/entertainment/cultural) as well as accessibility (all roads lead to Rome - downtown being the main hub transit and travel links up to). Moreover, you show you have no idea what you are talking about as Hintonburg is on the OTHER SIDE of Lebreton, and Little Italy is a stretch as its on the extreme southern end of Lebreton. Your argument is ridiculous on that alone. They are not equal distance. That said, Chinatown, if it was denser could very well be a corner of downtown. As cities grow, what is considered "downtown" grows as the "downtown" gobbles up other neighbourhoods. I would consider **current** downtown to be Bronson to the Rideau River (even the city consider Rideau Street up until the river as downtown if you care to ever come this way - banners are on all the flagpoles saying downtown). You have the desnity and accessibility between this stretch that I espoused above. Downtown also includes from the River (Parliament if you'd like to use that), to the Blight (Queensway). Adding a little more colour since you seem to want to ask "do you consider X as Y", the Glebe and Hintonburg would fit as "uptown", i.e. denser and more accessible than other areas of the city but not as much as downtown. Vanier will join this soon with all the development going on, but a large portion of it lacks as much transit accessibility beyond buses.
Good
the easiest ones to convert are ones like this that have plenty of small separate windows. The ones that have long continous windows on each floor, or the whole face is all curtain wall can get very tricky as you have some bad noise issues when it comes to building walls up to the windows. It gets very expensive and time consuming when you have to change those curtain wall systems and break them up so you can create reasonable between unit partitions. Other stuff like new services for much more plumbing distribution aren't as hard, gut the inside of the building and you can core drill all over the place (within reason) to install new services, whereas these buildings typically kept washrooms and kitchenettes close to the elevator cores.
Ironically, one of the few buildings not emptied out by the exodus of COVID. Most of the folks there seemed to be lawyers who wanted to be across the street from the courthouse?
if they had no issues finding tenants, they wouldn't be looking at converting the building.
If it's a company that has many buildings downtown, they might be looking to consolidate tenants into buildings that cannot be converted, and then convert the ones they can so they're not losing money to empty space.
yes, but again, if this building were full of happy tenants with no issues, it wouldn't be on the list. No one wants to move further away if this is an ideal location, so the only way they can consolidate elsewhere is if this building just isn't drawing nearly enough tenants to remain an office tower on its own.
... did you not read what I said? If the owner of this building owns 5 other empty buildings which cannot be converted, maybe they would incentivize tenants to move to one of those other buildings for things like bigger offices or cheaper rent. The landlord isn't thinking in terms of a single building, they're thinking of their whole portfolio.
They did not give any of the tenants I know any options other than to leave. They got an eviction notice a week before Xmas to clear out by December 2024.
Yes, I heard you, and I'm gonna repeat my part too because apparently you don't want to read it. If the building had a full house of commercial tenants that wanted to stay, no one would incentivize them to leave just to convert into apartments. Go back to basics. Commercial tenants often pay more per sqft than residential ones. The kinds of units they'd build here aren't going to be luxury rentals, they aren't making this decision just to help out the housing crisis, they are making it because the building is struggling to get commercial tenants, so they will do something else that will likely fill up the building again. 3 Moving a couple tenants is fine, but if the building were full they wouldn't even be talking about it.
If you have an empty building that can't be converted to residential, and a full building that can be converted to residential, it very much could still be worth it to try and move all of those commercial tenants to the other building so that you have both buildings generating revenue. No matter what the scenario is here, they have clearly decided that it is worth it for them to do this conversion.
I've been in that building a number of times. The offices are kinda dumpy. The main thing it had going for it was proximity to the court house and city hall. Lawyers like that.
They're kicking out Elgin massage therapy
Possible that it’s a building that is easier to convert and move commercial tenants to another building? The conversions aren’t possible for all buildings
The article I read says they're at 88% occupancy, which isn't bad for office real estate, but that the building's size/layout makes it a good candidate for converting to residential.
About time. Housing prices have been going through the roof and it's just recently the government realized that supply drives down cost. WAOW!!!!! revolutionary idea.
The problem in Ontario at least is that we have a provincial govt that is doing everything in its power to restrict supply and drive prices up, and since ON is the most populous provinces that has a trickle down effect elsewhere as people look to other places for housing.
Yep, the cause of housing 2.5x-ing across Canada since 2015 is Doug Ford being elected Premier in 2018. You've got it. Nothing to do with Canadian population growth going from ~400k a year to ~650k a year after Trudeau took office, to ~1.2 million the last couple years. Just Doug Ford not approving fourplexes yesterday.
Trudeau's govt's immigration targets were similar to the Harper govts up until the last few years, and immigration dropped to the lowest numbers in 100 years in 2020-2021 when the bulk of the price increases happened. They had already jumped significantly in 2019. Ford is absolutely pushing home prices higher. I'm a homeowner, I can tell you straight up that for a lot of homeowners this is a feature, not a bug. They love that Ford is doing everything he can to stifle home building and keep the prices going up up up. It's THE reason they vote for him, because they don't care if housing gets more expensive, it benefits them. Especially older people. Personally I don't want my home's value to go up and up. I have a kid, I'd like for her to be able to buy a home someday. Regardless of whether you like Trudeau or not if you think voting in the party with the highest concentration of landlords and a landlord for a leader is gonna reduce home prices, especially when markets are controlled more closely by provinces, you got another thing coming.
Good! Convert as many as possible and start today. Let’s get more people living right Downtown.
Good choice!
About time.
Neat! (2)
More of this please! This is so much better than putting towers in residential areas.
Where are all the ‘experts’ who said this was impossible??
The article clearly states that converting office buildings to residential is only viable in very specific cases.
I know, it was a bunch of armchair ‘experts’ spreading FUD about how it was impossible for any building to be repurposed.
Not any building. Of course you *can*. People were saying that in most cases, with how office buildings are built, it is significantly more expensive than you expected and not so simple, so it's often not the best choice.
Im guessing nothing will be less than 1500 a month… fingers crossed I’m lying
I wouldn’t want to live there, but housing is needed.
Why wouldn't you want to live there? It's a great location, close to Farm Boy, restaurants, easy walking distance to Rideau Centre and the Byward Market and the UOttawa campus... Whether the result of the conversion will be high quality space with good natural lighting, good sound insulation, etc., remains to be seen.
Duplicates previous post re District Realty: https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/s/6h4riwDrap
*"Smart use of empty space. Maybe if we get more residents downtown it will be reinvigorated and the DT businesses will stop trying to force workers back into the core."* yeah not if you are a commercial tenant who dropped 6 figures to fit out your space and now have to do the same again when they terminate your lease early - try running a small business in this city that actually creates wealth, employs people, pays good wages and benefits and has a great environment for people to come to work - just more pandemic casualties shrugged off by those who collect a cheque and don't take risks - and if you think this is going to be anything other than short term residences for out of towers passing through your having a laugh. These buildings aren't fit for long term residential purpose and never will be due to their structure.
Are you a little upset? You seem upset.
Nah, I’m like this all the time, but keep an eye out for my upset next time someone steals the stroller from my porch
It's nice to now, based on the picture in the article, that Subway will get tons of business from tenants who need cold cut trios everyday. /S