Tall & Urban News

A major mixed-use project in Waterloo could bring up to 1,100 new apartments to the Southwestern Ontario city. Westmount Place will be the latest in a series of urban, downtown developments planned or under construction by Killam Apartment REIT, says president and CEO Philip Fraser.

According to Fraser, several converging trends are bringing people back into the downtown areas of Canada’s cities. Couple that with a growing population due to record immigration levels and the atmosphere is ripe for more major multi-residential and mixed-use type projects.

“Every province has the same pressure, the urban centers are getting larger, the rural centers less,” he said, noting several demographics are fueling the demand. “The hospital services are better in the bigger centers, there are jobs, the kids are working there, the grandparents want to be close by, it just adds to the demand.

The proposal for Westmount Place includes five multi-residential towers each featuring a multi-story podium which would contain ground-level commercial, a new four-story parking structure, various amenities and public spaces, as well as some redesigning of the existing retail and commercial mix on the 7.2-hectare site.

The towers would range from 11 stories closest to the existing low-rise housing, to 25 stories at the portion of the property adjacent to existing mid- and high-rise towers.

The development site is roughly bordered by Westmount Road North, Erb Street West and Dietz Avenue. It is also bordered by a large regional shopping center, with almost 300,000 square feet (27,870 square meters) of retail space. It’s just a kilometer from the region’s new ION light rail transit system which links it to a regional GO Train station with direct access to downtown Toronto.

Killam has been compiling land for the Westmount project for more than a year. It bought the largest chunk of the property in early 2018 from Sun Life for CAD$77.8 million (US$59.6 million), including the mall and an existing low-rise office building.

Fraser said Westmount is reflective of Killam’s strategy to focus on urban cores and transit nodes where possible. There is also a not-so-subtle difference between medium-sized cities and the country’s largest centers such as Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal.

“So we are building in downtown Halifax, we’ve got sites we are going to be building in downtown Charlottetown. We’ve got properties in downtown Moncton. If you can walk to the arena, if you can walk to your entertainment venues, if your work is close by in the office towers, that is just as good as walking out and hitting the subway to downtown.

“Some cities are designed and feel better with more of a vibe in the downtown, versus the transit nodes. But once you get into the big centers, by default the ones on the transit become that much more important.”

In Ottawa, it is now occupying Phase I and building Phase II of Frontier, a multi-res partnership with RioCan REIT. The partners will build up to five towers and 840 apartments at the east Ottawa site. It is being constructed on excess land adjacent to an existing RioCan retail site, along the city’s soon-to-be-opened LRT system and its main east-west thoroughfare.

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