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Posted Jun 29, 2014, 11:49 PM
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BANNED
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Lower Mount Royal, Calgary
Posts: 5,147
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Quote:
Massive urban village planned for Eau Claire Lands
1,100 residences, hotel, supermarket, restaurants, retail and public plaza
By Mario Toneguzzi, Calgary Herald June 27, 2014
CALGARY - A massive urban village is planned for two city blocks in the southwest Eau Claire neighbourhood that will include about 1,100 residences, a hotel, a supermarket, restaurants, retail space and a public plaza, the Herald has learned.
A development permit has been submitted for the blocks, currently two surface parking lots, between 2nd Avenue to the south, Eau Claire Avenue to the north, 4th Street to the east, and 6th Street to the west.
GWL Realty Advisors Inc. is the advisor and development manager on behalf of bcIMC (British Columbia Investment Management Corporation) which owns the land for the Eau Claire Lands project - six residential towers ranging from 19 to 33 storeys, 30 two-storey ground-oriented townhomes mainly facing Eau Claire Avenue, a 350-room hotel, 65,000 square feet of retail space as well as a public plaza and pedestrian walkway.
“The project is expected to break ground in 2015, subject to all necessary approvals, with the first residents in place in 2018. The entire project is expected to be completed over a five to seven year time frame, depending on market conditions,” said James Midwinter, executive vice-president of development for GWL Realty Advisors Inc., adding the intent is to start with the towers mainly on the east block and move westward.
“The concept here is to create a high quality mixed-use urban village . . . The intent is to have a vital, living community where people are able to walk to work, be able to walk to the amenities, the Bow River trail system very close at hand. You’re in an ideal location at the edge of the downtown core with immediate access to the recreational amenities of the Bow River area, Prince’s Island . . . It’s really a vibrant community. We’re not building just one or two standalone residential towers. There’s lots of those being built around downtown. We’re really creating a community here. A neighbourhood, if you will, in which there’s interaction between all of these elements.”
Retail use will include cafes, bakery, spa, restaurants, convenience food, service retail like a hair salon and dry cleaner - the types of services in demand by residents in the area.
“It sounds like an enormous project,” said Maggie Schofield, executive director of the Calgary Downtown Association. “We’re very keen to see a grocery store in the downtown. Over the last seven or eight years, we’ve probably seen six or seven development permits that have included a grocery store and we are still without one. So whoever gets there first that will be great because we need one in the downtown particularly if we are encouraging more residential in the downtown which I believe is what we’re trying to do. So without that, it’s pretty hard to get a serious residential population. They do need those services.
“The hotel is also extremely important within the downtown core. We are under-serviced on the hotel side particularly during the week for business. We are a very strong market there and we just don’t have enough hotel rooms.”
Schofield said a more concentrated residential development that keeps more people in the downtown core after business hours will create a vitality in the area.
“It’s a beautiful community so close to the river,” said Councillor Druh Farrell of the Eau Claire neighbourhood. “Eventhough it’s part of the downtown, in many ways it has a quiet neighbourhood feeling in many other ways because of the geography of the downtown. It has no major streets going through it and it’s quite peaceful.
“For many years, eventhough we had lots of big buildings in Eau Claire, there wasn’t the population to justify a grocery store and we’re finally going to start to see that. Neighbourhood retail and all the things that make a neighbourhood.”
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http://www.calgaryherald.com/travel/...391/story.html
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