Thousands will soon be moving into Calgary's converted office towers. What are they going to do there?

It is a staggeringly ambitious plan. Given the situation, it had to be.

When the economy started slumping in 2015, office vacancies in downtown Calgary began to climb. By 2020, the vacancy rate was sitting at over 30 per cent — about 14 million square feet of office space sat empty.

The value of office buildings in the city's core had plummeted by more than two-thirds over that period, gutting the city's property tax base and creating a revenue crisis at city hall.

Something had to be done.

That something turned out to be the city's Downtown Office Conversion Program, which set a goal of removing six million square feet of vacant office space by 2031 and increasing the downtown population by 20 per cent in the process. 

With a start-up fund of $200 million — and a goal of investing $1 billion over the duration of the program — the city offered developers a sped-up approval process and, more importantly, $75 per square foot in incentives to convert empty office towers into residential apartment buildings.

To date, there are 17 conversion projects in the pipeline, 13 of which are active. These projects will result in the conversion of 2.3 million square feet of office space. Uptake of the program by developers has been so strong that the city announced a pause in October to secure additional funding to meet demand.

The success of the program has other Canadian cities looking to emulate it and generated international attention for its boldness.

But without taking anything away from the grand ambitions of the Calgary plan, or the initial success it's seen (it isn't easy to convert one empty office block into apartments, let alone six million square feet worth), there are a few questions that need to be asked on behalf of the future residents of the 2,300-plus new homes about to be built. For example: What are they going to do there?

Where will they buy their groceries or meet friends for a coffee? Where will their children go to school?

When they step out the front door on a weekend morning, staring down the empty, cavernous expanse of Sixth Avenue, or Fifth Avenue, or Fourth Avenue, where will they direct their feet? (And if your answer was — like the line in the song — "to the sunny side of the street," you haven't spent much time in downtown Calgary.)

Beverly Sandalack is a professor at the University of Calgary's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, and she's a co-director of the university's Urban Lab.

Sandalack says that, starting in the mid-1960s, a massive amount of effort, planning and money went into changing the form and function of Calgary's downtown. Eventually, it lost its human scale, residential population, vitality, sense of safety, and most of its sunshine. An equal amount of effort, she says, will be required to turn it back into neighbourhoods once again.

"Improving the downtown will require radical strategies," Sandalack said.