Trio of downtown towers get funds for office-to-residential conversions in Calgary

The three projects will get $31.7 million and will remove about three per cent of excess office space from Calgary's downtown market.

The first three office-to-residential projects getting City of Calgary funding were announced Wednesday morning.

Aspen Properties’ Palliser One at 125 9 Avenue S.E., Cidex Group of Companies’ HAT @ Arts Commons at 205 9 Avenue S.E. and Peoplefirst Developments’ building at 909 5 Avenue S.W., all are set to receive about $31 million when the conversions are concluded.

The trio of projects will remove about 414,000 square feet of vacant office space from the market that has reached vacancy rates as high as 30 per cent in the past year, and create an estimated 401 homes.

The city estimates it needs to remove 6 million square feet of currently vacant office space in Calgary’s downtown to help stabilize property values over the next decade.

Mayor Jyoti Gondek called the trio of projects “transformational” in their ability to breathe new life into buildings and spaces that sat empty.

“This is a program that council got behind in my previous term and council got behind yet again in October of this year. We had a brand new council and we committed to not only the money that we had put into this in spring of last year, but we added more to this incentive program,” Gondek said.

Thom Mahler, director of the city’s downtown strategy team, said when the recently-elected city council increased the program to accelerate downtown revitalization from $45 million to $100 million, “it automatically increased the interest in the program.”

“As the downtown picks up momentum, people are getting a sense things are changing,” he said. “We’re out of that really bad spot where we were a few years ago where all we were talking about was vacancy and plummeting property values. Now you can see we’re talking about real investments.”