General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[SF22]

Wowzers! ZE where did you find this? ^

I've been digging through all the public comment documents for Growing Together, there's hundreds of pages worth, there's a pile of development proposals within it, along with your typical NIMBY nonsense, if even half of them come to fruition there will be a lot of height to come. A few of the proposals are definitely quick mock ups for justifying certain zones in Growing Together, (SGA-3 instead of SGA-2, or SGA-4 instead of SGA-3) but there are definitely some that are deemed "complete applications" by the City so we might see some site plan applications or ZBA applications soon.

Once I've gone through all the documents I'll make a post with a summary of them all, thankfully it's not all Vive, some of the renderings certainly look very promising. I'm also working on a 3D model of the future skyline so I'll include all of these proposals in it as well, that will just take a while to complete.

You're a champ, that's amazing work you're doing! Really interested to see what you dig up!

[nms]

The old CTV building has a sold sign on it.

Vive is the owner of this, they now have a early concept for the site, it will certainly will make midtown tall to say the least (55 floors (green), 44 floors(pink), 38 floors(blue), 16 floors(orange)). Sorry for the poor quality concept plan.

Thanks for digging thing through the details!  Unfortunately [attachment=8696] doesn't load for me.

[ac3r]

It seems that in addition to the really large project Vive has proposed near the hospital, they have brainstormed further development of property they also own downtown. These include:

• 46-56 College Street - A 32 floor tower.
  
• 58 Weber Street West - A 32 floor tower.
  
• The long, skinny parking garage at the Crowne Plaza that fronts Charles - A 20 floor, long and skinny tower.
  

The two proposed at College and Weber are interesting. Vive renovated the 2 historic buildings on College, so I would speculate that they don't have any intent to turn these properties into a tower anytime soon.

The one on Weber is similar in that it was renovated in recent years. This may also be hard to redevelop because if I remember correctly, both of those buildings are heritage protected. If anyone recalls, they ended up getting painted black back in maybe 2015. They tried doing the second one and had to stop before getting half of the job done because they realized they couldn't do it. I think...I forget the details. It was reverted back, thankfully. These are actually very nice old buildings, so I'd hate to see them demolished for a shitty Vive tower. What they could do, though, is plop a mid or high rise tower in the back where the parking lot is and then put the parking in the podium. There's more than enough space. 1/3rd that city block is parking lots.

The Crowne Plaza property they have proposed is interesting due to the size. News to me that Vive owns this. It's long, but very skinny. Does anyone from Vive lurk this forum? Hit me up when you need an architect, I'd make a really cool building in that space. Working within constraints is very fun. I'd have a living wall and the most badass CORTEN sculptural facade, something that thousands of people going by in the LRT each day would notice, along with staggered heights to the building so it doesn't become a huge wall... :'p

I won't bother making a thread for any of these, they are very clearly not proposals they expect to happen anytime soon and more studies/information they provided to the city for studying zoning compliance if they ever do go ahead with redeveloping these properties. The Crowne Plaza one is likely to possibly see light of day in the future since it's just a parking garage, but there is no detailed proposal for anything yet. I'd prefer to see them finish at least a couple of the 8 thousand other projects they have been planning for years.

[CP42]

Couldn’t find a thread for it, but the garage that Perimeter Developments built for Google employees got a new sign for its address 2 Stewart St this week:

[Rainrider22]

WOW, that looks great !! (I mean for a parking structure)

[Bytor]

How many Vive proposals actually go through? (Serious question.)

[ZEBuilder]

How many Vive proposals actually go through? (Serious question.)

Short answer is not that many.

Projects Vive has completed:
169 Borden
Otis
Ophelia
Market Flats
64 Margaret
550 Lancaster T1
Woodside Phase 2

Projects Vive has proposed:
50 Borden

Projects Vive has under construction:
3241 King T1

Projects Vive has approved:
Lower Kitchener (Demolition Permit applications)
926 King (Balance of construction application)
1253 King E
744 King (Property was for sale)
332 Charles (demolition permit applications)
87 Weber St E
1770 King E
1668 King E
550 Lancaster T2-T5
Woodside Phase 3
3241 King T2-T3

Additional Projects from Growing Together
46-56 College St (36 floors)
58 Weber St W (36 floors)
698-710 Charles St E (36 floors)
864-872 King St W (55, 44, 38, 16 floors)
Crown Plaza (20 and 20 floors)

[tomh009]

How many Vive proposals actually go through? (Serious question.)

How to answer that? They do have a lot of proposals in the pipeline, and no one knows which ones will be built, either by Vive or someone else.

10 years ago they were very small, and had really done only renos of small apartment buildings etc. They have now completed Market Flats, Ophelia and Woodside phase 2; have collaborated with Momentum on Otis (and, I think, decided that they don't want to be in the condo business); and the Margaret/Victoria and Borden projects are wrapping up. So, that's five (or six, depending on how you count) decent-sized new-build projects, although none of them as big as some of the things they have in the hopper.

[tomh009]

Some nice new 3/4-plex buildings on Wellington near Margaret. More of these, please, to add gentle density, too!

   

[Square]

I wonder if the land at the corner of King and Wellington has been sold to a different developer or are they wanting to change the size now that Growing Together has passed. The shoring has been done for months, but nothing else since then.

[allknowing2012]

Is the left one the fire replacement or is this 2 others that were built?

[creative]

I just counted over 100 resale condos on Realtor in downtown Kitchener. I also noticed that there are still for rent signs on Civic 66 and The Scott as well as the rental building beside the Arrow lofts. If the law of supply and demand plays true, should we not start to see price drops in both resale and rents? Or will the corporate investors swoop in and grab all of the listings? On a side note, I was talking to a friend of mine who owns a local rental property that is currently costing him $1000 per month over and above the rent that he is currently taking in.

[tomh009]

Or will the corporate investors swoop in and grab all of the listings?

Most corporate/institutional investors will not want to invest in a collection of random individual condos. The management of such a portfolio would be much more onerous than one for a purpose-built rental property.

There are lots of condos for sale. Is it a lot as a percentage?

• 33 in DTK
  
• 28 in Station Park
  
• 24 on Garment St
  
• 22 in City Centre/Young Condos
  
• A handful in each of 1 Victoria, Kaufman,  Arrow Lofts, 64 Benton, Market Lofts
  

It does look like a significant (but not massive) number of owners have decided that those new condos weren't a great purchase after all. Anyone have an original price list to compare to the realtor.ca listings to see how the current asking prices compare to the original purchase prices?

[ac3r]

With the rentals, many of those have been sitting vacant because they cost way too much money. Even if people can afford it, they're not going to be willing to pay an excess amount of money - especially if the unit is tiny (which they usually are).

[Acitta]

Grand River and St. Mary’s plan to join together as a single hospital organization

Building on a long history of partnership and collaboration, Grand River Hospital and St. Mary’s General Hospital have agreed to explore a voluntary merger into a single new hospital corporation. The proposed new organization would operate existing hospital sites and services, while continuing to move forward with their joint Building the Future of Care Together capital redevelopment project.