04-18-2024, 07:47 PM
(04-17-2024, 11:10 PM)ZEBuilder Wrote: If GRR wanted a permanent place they could have found a location and purchased it, or they could have negotiated a long term lease. Instead GRR negotiated for a crappy lease, 5 years plus a potential additional 5, the lease won't even guarantee them ROI on their climbing walls if it's only for those 5 years which for anyone with any financial knowledge realizes is a ridiculously stupid move on their part. That is not on the developer that is on them. At the end of the day yes what the developer did in negotiating the lease has its moral flaws but at the same time GRR could have done their due diligence to find a location that wasn't going to be realistically developed or negotiated a lease that wasn't going to financially handicap them in the future.
I certainly don't want GRR to leave the community, my friends and I have spent hours in there but the reality is we also need housing, there is little chance my friends and I will be able to afford a condo let alone a house in the city we grew up in, as much as we enjoy GRR we also recognize that we need housing, there is always going to be another empty warehouse that GRR could move into, as centrally located as their current location no but there are other places. If they want to be proactive they could go out and by a piece of land and build a purpose built facility, sure it might not be in a central location like they currently are but they will still exist, they could approach a developer about potentially incorporating it into a podium, however those are all proactive things that GRR is going to need to do if they want to stay downtown, developers are not going to build that kind of space out of the goodness of their heart, especially with the amount of parking a place like GRR demands.
Yeah, I have certainly talked to them about leases in the past and I don't really understand why they are agreeing to the leases that they are. They really should rent from the bank and not from the owners.
I suspect that GRR could survive with a lot less parking than they do right now. There are gyms in Toronto that don't have parking. Toronto is a bigger city, of course, but I would really like things in KW to be less car-centric than they are.