Downtown Kitchener Fire Station | 19 fl | Proposed

[ZEBuilder]

During last night's State of the City address the Mayor announced the location of the new fire station (#8) which they've been thinking of for a couple of years now.

It's located at 450/470 King St E, which is the King and Madison corner. 470 is the old B & T before it moved across the street and then 450 is the building containing the Sushi Stars restaurant and an auto shop.

It's planned on including the fire station as well as at least 150 affordable housing units. These units will be a mix of 1-3 bdrm units.

They haven't started any design work yet so there's very little information beyond this. The property is zoned SGA 2 in Growing Together which would allow for a midrise development up to 8 floors however with Growing Together not approved yet it's still on 85-1 which would allow for a building with a max FSR of 4.0 and a height of 24m (roughly 8 floors with 3m floor heights).

Here's the Record article: New Downtown Fire Station

[westwardloo]

This is good new for the downtown/ east end community. 

150 units is quite a few, this would probably end up being around 15-20 stories.

[tomh009]

This is good new for the downtown/ east end community. 

150 units is quite a few, this would probably end up being around 15-20 stories.

It's a big footprint, 0.55 ha, they could certainly do 150+ units in 10 stories or fewer, of course depending on the unit size.

[panamaniac]

There goes my hope for a new park/plaza on that block.

[ZEBuilder]

This is good new for the downtown/ east end community. 

150 units is quite a few, this would probably end up being around 15-20 stories.

It's definitely possible to make 150 units fit on the site without going up to 15 floors you don't even have to go to 10.

Here's a quick mock up of 2 buildings on site with a 1 floor podium across the entire site (including the fire station). This would be 2 midrises each 7 floors ontop of a 1 floor podium. In this mockup the podium is for the fire station/commercial/garbage/parking access/amenity space/community space. In this case you can have 36 3Bdrm units each approx 1200 sqft, 66 2bdrm units each approx 1000 sqft, and 56 1bdrm units each approx 800 sqft. Which would allow for 158 units however these are certainly bigger than your typically market units generally by about 100-200 sqft each so you could fit more.

The setbacks from adjacent properties are up to SGA-2 standards and the buildings themselves are separated by approx 60ft which can definitely be closer together if the midrise is set back from the edge of the podium fronting King. The midrises themselves have slightly smaller floor plates then that of Civic 66. The midrises are cyan, the podium is marked in pink and is the max extent a building could be as per the setbacks.

Mockup:
   

[westwardloo]

Interesting, didn't realize how big the two site are. I that case I feel like they should push the number of units to 300. Make 150 of them kitchener housing (Typically well below market rate) then partner with a market rental company to rent the other 150 (at market rate). 

Seem like they have the room, we my as well maximize the use.

[ZEBuilder]

Interesting, didn't realize how big the two site are. I that case I feel like they should push the number of units to 300. Make 150 of them kitchener housing (Typically well below market rate) then partner with a market rental company to rent the other 150 (at market rate). 

Seem like they have the room, we my as well maximize the use.

Sure they could build taller to fit in more units or make smaller units but either way you will have to go taller to hit 300 units. In order to do so the city would require a ZBA to change from SGA 2 to 3 and then potentially an OPA depending on the official plan designation since SGA 2 zoning can apply to SGA A areas but SGA 3 needs to be SGA B or C areas, I just haven't checked to see which area it is.

Regardless the city spent months making the Growing Together designation so would it really make sense for them to not follow their own zoning and official plan rules that they made?

[Ellensparky]

Is there a design proposal for this or renderings yet?

[ZEBuilder]

Is there a design proposal for this or renderings yet?

No, expect something to become public in the summer.

[ZEBuilder]

Plans will be public in the next few weeks for this. The city will be asking to rezone the land to SGA-3 from SGA-2. They will be requesting a height increase to 19 floors from the existing cap of 8 floors within the SGA-2 zoning. Overall they plan on having 285 affordable housing units in the building along with the fire station. Additional details will be public soon.

[ZEBuilder]

The plans are now public.

For engineering works you have WalterFedy, MTE and CF Crozier all involved in some capacity, mcCallumSather is doing the architecture, and GSP is doing landscape and urban design works. The building itself looks like many of mcCallumSather's other residential projects which aren't half bad, for example YWCA Block Line Rd and 1620 Main (Hamilton).

Overall there are 285 units, 196 one bedroom, 80 two bedroom, and 9 three bedroom units. There will be public community space on the ground floor just under 3000sqft, no commercial space is proposed on the site. As for parking there will be zero parking for the residential portion of the building, however there will be bike parking equivalent to 1 per unit (in conformance with the bylaw). There will be parking for the fire station accessed off of Madison, similarly pickup and drop off laybys are provided off of Madison for residential uses.

There will be a public square along King St (375 sqm) situated between Fire Station 8 and the residential building. Indoor amenity is provided on the 10th floor (192sqm), outdoor amenity space is provided to residents on the roof of the 9 floor podium and on the ground floor to the rear of the site, for a total of 452 sqm of outdoor space. The total amenity space is well below the cities own amenity guideline of 5sqm per unit at 2 sqm per unit, the way that GSP is justifying it is the community space and public square can be considered building amenities as well as a larger public benefit which offsets the decrease.

Some of you may find this next bit interesting but it's not all that uncommon of a situation. The City of Kitchener requires 12.5mm of rainfall to be retained on site, this is why in many new developments you see infiltration galleries (typically massive yellow pieces of plastic) or similar infrastructure being installed under parking lots, boulevards, and around SWM ponds. However not all soils are conducive to infiltration, gravels and sands are, however silts and clays are not. This soil conditions on this site are primarily composed of cohesive and non cohesive silt deposits meaning there is little chance one can retain 12.5mm of rainfall on the site without flooding it, as such all stormwater will convey to the cities system (obviously this comes with a fee). This site also has a rather high groundwater level (measured at 0.8mbgs at one location) so getting infiltration to work to begin with is difficult.

Documents can be found here: sUPPORTING dOCUMENTS

Rendering:
   

Site plan:
   

[the_conestoga_guy]

This looks like a really nice addition to downtown.

General question, not specific to this project: is there any sort of rule in place that requires developers to "reserve" a parking space for a service like Communauto if they're forgoing any other parking? I'm happy to see buildings like this exclude parking to keep the housing costs down, but I think it would still be nice to have space for a carshare.

[ZEBuilder]

This looks like a really nice addition to downtown.

General question, not specific to this project: is there any sort of rule in place that requires developers to "reserve" a parking space for a service like Communauto if they're forgoing any other parking? I'm happy to see buildings like this exclude parking to keep the housing costs down, but I think it would still be nice to have space for a carshare.

The only way the cities could require that is if they made it a requirement of the zoning bylaw where they basically state one parking space shall be reserved for carshare for every X units. 

However where this gets complicated is within MTSAs, the province made the minimum parking requirement within MTSAs zero spaces (Kitchener already had this stipulation), as such requiring a singular car share spot as a requirement would go against the province and that is bound to cause problems.

One could definitely get around that by writing something in terms of parking spaces, for example, for every X parking spaces one must include a car share space. However that could easily be circumvented by a developer by having less than X spaces provided since they legally require zero. The other glaring problem I could see developing is with access to such a spot especially when it's in a private parking structure, so I could see developers trying to get out of it and really fighting it.

[panamaniac]

Too bad the whole site wasn't reserved for an urban park. Missed opportunity, istm. That said, it's not a bad looking project.

[westwardloo]

This looks great compared to the monstrosity across the street.