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Vacant Kitchener lot to become affordable housing after city donates land to Habitat for Humanity
Quote:The City of Kitchener has donated a parcel of land worth $5.5 million to Habitat for Humanity to build affordable housing.
The land at River Road East and Ottawa Street North is almost one hectare in size. It's in front of a Kitchener fire hall and across the street from the Stanley Park Mall plaza.
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I wonder what excuses the NIMBYs will have to offer as to why they shouldn't build anything there.
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$5.5 million of public land for a 63-unit building. I hope there's more to it than that.
I wonder what the City was holding onto the land for? And why they are donating the land rather than leasing it?
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04-25-2024, 05:55 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-25-2024, 06:34 PM by ac3r.)
It says they had been holding on to it for a potential community centre or library branch, which makes sense since the library branch in the area is just a small one in the nearby high school and the community centre is pretty small. I guess the plans for either of those haven't been deemed priority, so rather than sit on the land they just decided to donate it.
60 units does seem ridiculously low, though, but I guess that's complicated by the fact it would be Habitat for Humanity that would be behind the project. I guess it's easier for the city to just hand the land over to them, rather than develop and manage their own social/community housing projects. Habitat for Humanity would be limited by available funds and as a non-profit NGO they don't exactly have a lot of those.
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(04-25-2024, 05:46 PM)panamaniac Wrote: $5.5 million of public land for a 63-unit building. I hope there's more to it than that.
I wonder what the City was holding onto the land for? And why they are donating the land rather than leasing it?
The homes are going to be sold, not rented, so it's much simpler if the land is owned. $5.5M in land, maybe $1.5M in development fee waivers (city + region) so, let's say $7M total. For 63 units, that's a city/regional subsidy of about $110K/unit. The article says they expect to sell at half the market price, so that subsidy alone clearly isn't enough.
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(04-25-2024, 05:55 PM)ac3r Wrote: It says they had been holding on to it for a potential community centre or library branch, which makes sense since the library branch in the area is just a small one in the nearby high school and the community centre is pretty small. I guess the plans for either of those haven't been deemed priority, so rather than sit on the land they just decided to donate it.
60 units does seem ridiculously low, though, but I guess that's complicated by the fact it would be Habitat for Humanity that would be behind the project. I guess it's easier for the city to just hand the land over to them, rather than develop and manage their own social/community housing projects. Habitat for Humanity would be limited by available funds and as a non-profit NGO they don't exactly have a lot of those.
They said it would be 63 units at a minimum, and a number of those units will have 2 or 3 bedrooms, so those naturally take up more space than 1-bedroom units. So that's likely part of it.
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Yeah. I don't really mean the size of the space or building, but the money available. It's a decent sized lot that could be densified but Habitat for Humanity is limited by the funding they have, so 60ish units is probably the best they can do.
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It would be good to see them build on one section of the property, and potentially leave some space to expand in the future with additional funds.
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The owner of 111 Hoffman Street in Kitchener has applied to convert the 8 existing units into the building into 15 units. Not sure what the interior of the place is like, but it's a few decades old so they're no doubt shrinking multi-bedroom units to bring in more money while the market is still pre-collapse.
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If it's just a conversion with no expansion, they will all have to be one bedroom or studios, I would have thought, unless the existing apartments are exceptionally large.
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Looking at the exterior I'm surprised there are only 8 units currently. Nearly doubling that would give a snug result, but it could still be doable.
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Looks like a developer is proposing another major mixed-use redevelopment of the plaza near Northfield and Weber in Waterloo
https://www.engagewr.ca/northfield-dr-and-weber-st-n
I guess the towers look nice enough, but the lack of park space is a little disappointing. Feel like they could have removed one of the light industrial buildings and built an functional park between parkside drive and the MUT beside the rail corridor. The podiums are interesting. They are quite the continuous mass, but all seperate parking structures. Also 1 retail space proposed.
This whole site seems like a miss opportunity when it was originally redeveloped in 2011. I am not sure this proposal fixes it. Feels like the whole site including the commercial plaza should be considered as a master planned neighbourhood. Even if they only do work on the this side of the site initially.
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(05-10-2024, 08:50 AM)westwardloo Wrote: Looks like a developer is proposing another major mixed-use redevelopment of the plaza near Northfield and Weber in Waterloo
https://www.engagewr.ca/northfield-dr-and-weber-st-n
I guess the towers look nice enough, but the lack of park space is a little disappointing. Feel like they could have removed one of the light industrial buildings and built an functional park between parkside drive and the MUT beside the rail corridor. The podiums are interesting. They are quite the continuous mass, but all seperate parking structures. Also 1 retail space proposed.
This whole site seems like a miss opportunity when it was originally redeveloped in 2011. I am not sure this proposal fixes it. Feels like the whole site including the commercial plaza should be considered as a master planned neighbourhood. Even if they only do work on the this side of the site initially.
Guess we can scratch the Northfield/Parkside location off our Potential New Hospital Sites list.
It looks like they fully expect to be able to connect through to Randall Dr at some point, with the way that Parkside Dr ends in a circle with nothing directly past it.
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05-10-2024, 12:13 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-10-2024, 12:20 PM by KevinL.)
I imagine the staging here would be to build to the east of Parkside first, then move the office tenants over, then demolish those and build the west part.
Should be quite reasonable demand here given how close the LRT is.
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(05-10-2024, 12:13 PM)KevinL Wrote: I imagine the staging here would be to build to the east of Parkside first, then move the office tenants over, then demolish those and build the west part.
Should be quite reasonable demand here given how close the LRT is.
The proposed plan does not include any "office" space for sunlife or other office Tenants in the east side of Parkside unless they are hoping to move all of those businesses into the "flex Commercial" buildings. If they just built a 5 storey office building or incorporated the office space into the podiums they would be able to provide a large park space for the neighbourhood.
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