(09-23-2020, 10:56 AM)westwardloo Wrote: Story in the record today about a "gateway" development in East kitchener. It will be a 3 phased development starting with a 32 storey tower. It will be a whole city block bordering borden, Charles, king and Ottawa. Developer is Vive and they will be submitting plans in the fall with hopes to start construction in 2021. They also criticized the city for parking minimums that will add significant costs to the project when it is right beside an LRT stop. Don't have the link but worth a read.
Oooooo...this excites me...
https://www.therecord.com/news/waterloo-...pment.html
In case you're paywalled:
KITCHENER — The ION train rolls past Stephen Litt as he stands beside an empty factory that he plans to demolish, making room for a 32-floor apartment building.
“The first tower goes right here, from Charles to King Street,” said Litt, who is standing next to 534 Charles St. East.
Litt and his partner Heather are principals in Vive Development, that assembled the land for the development three years ago. Vive now owns all but six properties on the block bounded by King Street East, Borden Avenue, and Ottawa and Charles Streets.
While the block includes two car-repair businesses, a fish and chip restaurant, massage parlour and tattoo shop, it is dominated by empty and derelict buildings.
“It’s really rough,” said Litt.
“There were pieces of land in the middle of the block not owned by anyone, and that took months to resolve,” said Litt.
They renovated a pair of abandoned houses and rented them as single-family homes while they obtain planning approvals from the City of Kitchener for the first apartment building with 360 suites, with an estimated cost of $145 million.
The application for the three-phased development will be filed later this fall. Construction could begin in November 2021.
The first phase will see a 32-storey building straddling the middle of the block. The ground-floor units will be larger than most apartments, and have much higher ceilings. Those units can be marketed as residential, but can easily be converted to commercial in the future.
“The challenge in building something on this site is how much parking do we provide?” said Litt.
A development of this size — the biggest one ever proposed in the central part of the city — calls for 1,200 parking spaces. Each space in a multi-level parking garage costs about $50,000.
The parking garage for this development will cost $60 million and contain five acres of parking spaces on several floors. It will sit metres away from the ION tracks.
“Parking really drives the cost of a project,” said Litt.
After completing a number of projects in and around the city centre during the past 10 years, Litt has come to believe Kitchener should follow the lead of other cities such as Edmonton. In June, the Alberta capital repealed its minimum parking requirements for new developments.
Vive is a partner in two old apartment buildings in the Kitchener core it bought and renovated years ago — one on Weber, the other on College Street. There is no parking for either building. The units are always rented.
“It is never an issue,” he said.
The elimination or reduction of minimum-parking requirements along the ION tracks would help lower rents, he said.
When combined with other initiatives, like a provincial program that helps cover the construction of affordable housing, the city and region would see more affordable units built within a short walk of the ION, said Litt.
Vive Developments used a provincial program called Investment in Affordable Housing to complete a 31-unit project at 25 Linwood Dr. in Cambridge. The province provided a loan to convert the former retirement home into a residential building. If Vive keeps the rents at below market rates for 25 years the loan is forgiven.
Vive’s application for the development, branded “Lower Kitchener,” moves the downtown building boom further east along King Street.
The car lots, repair shops, drive-thrus and gas stations remaining along this part of King are the car-dependent businesses the City of Kitchener has long planned on phasing out.
Years ago the city rezoned both King and Victoria streets a mixed-use corridors: high-density, mixed-use, transit-supported developments are in — car-related businesses are out. Existing business can stay as long as there is no interruption in ownership or operations.
“This used to be Crosby Volkswagen, this is where the Volkswagen Beetle was first sold in Kitchener-Waterloo,” said Litt.
“This area blossomed when the automobile became widely accessible.”
Now, it needs a balanced approach between cars and transit. It is beside the LRT line and close to Highway 8.
“This corner is the gateway,” said Litt, looking at King Street East and Ottawa. “Coming into the downtown this way, it is not very inviting right now.”
