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Originally Posted by blueandgoldguy
Depends how much public money they receive. A significant injection of cash wouldn't make it seem like they are giving away some old unwanted item. It would be like leaving an old piece of furniture on the curb, but with a bag full of cash to reupholster it so it's as good as new.
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When True North was essentially handed the "old unwanted" Eaton's building as a place to build a new arena, with significant site constraints, there weren't all these negative comments.
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Originally Posted by thurmas
Exactly. This news pretty much feels like at this point downtown is a lost cause and the political and business community have no interest in actually improving it. The continual hand me down unwanted downtown heritage buildings to Indigenous groups continues and the white liberal elites will feel good for dropping more dilapidated unwanted buildings on them in the supposed name of reconciliation.
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I had no idea True North and Mark Chipman were members of the Indigenous community, same with Hydro. /s
Instead of hysteria lets talk facts. Canada Life Centre started demo on the site in 2002, almost 20 years ago now, and opened in 2004. It replaced a similar "unwanted" property. It has since gone on to spur a number of other new properties in the area. It has also spurred 201 Portage Ave (aka TD Building) and 360 Main St (aka Trizec) to both undertake some significant upgrade projects.
Shortly after that Hydro Place started construction in 2005 after an extremely competitive bid process which many quality entries. Before the pandemic it brought a significant number of employees downtown every day. It also offered a limited public space which quickly became home to the popular downtown farmers market.
The cancelled plan to move the Liquor and Lotteries HQ to downtown in the form Medical Arts building itself ended up in a win as that proposed sale brought attention to the asset the building was leading to it being redeveloped into apartments.
To be fair there have also been some huge failures outside the Indigenous communities and with healthy tax payer backing. One such example is the Convention Centre and the neighboring block. It was Winnipeg's first attempt at a live-work-play development. The ground floor retail/commerical spaces have for the most part been remodeled or removed entirely and the basement level is like a time capsule people hope is forgotten. The Convention Centre when operating pre-Covid times does pull in a lot of people to the area but for the most part they seem to rarely if ever leave the Convention Centre or the attached hotel. I worked for a number of years in the office building at 155 Cartlon and you could always spot the convention folks.
Another failure from around the same time period the Concert Hall/Manitoba Museum/City Hall/Public Safety Building/etc campus. Outside of the campus buildings themselves there seemed to be very limited positive impacts on the surrounding areas.
You said you like the live-work-play model but the Convention Centre "did things wrong". Well you lucked out as Winnipeg took a second swing at the concept about 20 years later on with Portage Place/Place Promenade/etc. I still recall those apartments being initially marketed as luxury units to young working professionals. Obviously that didn't go as planned. Other issues with the Portage Place concept quickly showed issues too.
I have saved one of my favorites for last though - the WRHA HQ building at Main and Logan. The thinking at the time seemed to be if we just redevelop one of the most challenged parts of the city the problem will magically go away. I think before it even got to the construction stage the design was changed to be a "fortress WRHA" model making it significantly hardened against the outside community and taking great care to ensure the most valued employees of WRHA didn't accidentally haver encounters with "less desirable" members of the area neighborhood.
But sure lets focus all the attention on the CP station and Thunderbird hose as they are the only two projects in downtown Winnipeg which ever had challenges.
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Originally Posted by sleepyeyed
when it was first announced it was empty, I was hoping for something like this for the building. great use. a bit too bad there couldn't be some sort of archives or university but I think this will also open up more plans for the future.
glad we didn't give a bunch of subsidies for a private company to bail on us ala trizec, the bay, etc..
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Agree 100% with this. I think a key step on the reconciliation pathway is working to recognize traditional Indigenous languages in some official way. As in granting them similar levels of support to French however stopping just short of making them a full official language which would require laws, etc to be translated into them. But it should be open to politicians of all levels to speak and write in these languages as part of the duties of their official role, including allowing them to be spoken on record in all levels of Government sessions (ie House of Commons, Leg, City Hall).
While the school/language/archive does not seem to be part of this project it really feels inevitable in a positive way that it will find a home in downtown. Perhaps as a future redevelopment of the old NRC site on Ellice?
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Originally Posted by zalf
Per the CBC article:
Unspecified amount of tax incentives from the city, yet to be voted on by council but sure to pass
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It would not be surprising to see the SCO building (nee Bay) be designated officially as an urban reserve. That would normally exempt it from municipal property taxes and instead result in fire/police/water/etc services being provided from Winnipeg to the site under a services agreement. This would cover the unspecified tax incentives from the city.
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Originally Posted by esquire
Interesting. It looked so old and rickety the last time I was in there (probably about 5 years ago now, at least), I thought it was nearing its end of life.
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Re the Bay Parkade. I remember making similar comments to a Hydro exec at their Hydro HQ public forum. Apparently the structure of the Bay parkade can look horrible and rickety but it was built at a time they didn't try to find "efficiency " in the materials they used. I think they said it used an extremely amount of steel to heavily reinforce the structure as it was being built, effectively a steel skeleton sunk deep into the concrete.
Overall I am very happy with the SCO announcement as it hits pretty close to the vision I dreamed up back in 2020. I hope my lobbying of key stakeholders back then with my seemingly crazy vision in some way helped get a conversation started, not because I want to claim credit but that I deeply feel these are the sort of facilities Winnipeg needs to secure. And not just to help grow our downtown but because we are at a point in history that this isn't going to be the last Indigenous led project of this scale and if Winnipeg isn't working hard to establish itself as the go-to community for them they will find homes in other cities.
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