5 more downtown office towers will be converted to residential housing

The City of Calgary has taken another step to removing more empty downtown office space off the market.

It has reached agreements with the owners of five downtown buildings to offer them incentives if they convert those buildings to residential housing.

The buildings are:

• Taylor Building (805 Eighth Ave. S.W.) owned by Cressey Developments.
• Petrofina Building (736 Eighth Ave. S.W.) owned by Peoplefirst Development Company.
• Eau Claire Place 1 (525 Third Ave. S.W.) owned by Cidex Group of Companies.
• Eau Claire Place 2 (521 Third Ave. S.W.) owned by Pacific Reach Properties.
• The Loft (744 Fourth Ave. S.W.) owned by Institutional Mortgage Capital.

In total, the city is offering the building owners $36.3 million in incentives.

The conversions will remove nearly 500,000 square feet of empty or underused building space from the market while creating 530 residential units.

Five other building conversions were previously announced by the city.

Mayor Jyoti Gondek said the city incentives for 10 buildings so far total about $86 million. But that money has leveraged nearly $190 million in investment from private owners.

With several other conversion projects that will be announced soon, she said nearly two million square feet of office space will be off the market, with residential units replacing them.

"We are already one-third of the way through the goals that we set for a 10-year program, after only two years," said Gondek.

The city has set aside $153 million for its office-to-residential conversion program.

The director of the city's downtown strategy, Thom Mahler, said that with several more conversion projects to be announced soon, funding for the program may be exhausted.

But there are hopes the market interest in the incentives program will encourage other governments to invest in it.

"We're definitely getting close to running out of money. That's why we do have requests to the provincial government and we're working with the federal government on other avenues for funding," said Mahler.

Several of the companies that own the buildings up for conversion were at a news conference Wednesday and had praise for the city's program.

The managing director for Peoplefirst Developments, Maxim Olshevsky, said the program is an example of creative thinking that makes these conversion projects viable.

"A transformation is taking place in a majority of Western cities and their downtowns, respectively," said Olshevsky. "(The) City of Calgary is at the forefront of this transformation, and people are starting to notice."

As the buildings are converted and the downtown population increases, the city will be providing more amenities and improvements to the public realm in the downtown, Gondek said.

Projects like updating Stephen Avenue and improving public areas along Eighth Street S.W. are among the projects that are under development.

"There's investments that have already been made, and we will continue to ensure that if you live downtown, you are able to experience the very same things that you would in other cities that have vibrant downtowns, that have both a commercial and a residential sector," said Gondek.