City announces additional conversion plans for 3 downtown office buildings

Calgary announced conversion plans for 3 office buildings downtown Wednesday. (Photo: X@CityofCalgary)

The City of Calgary announced a trio of building conversions in downtown Calgary Wednesday, including more housing and long-stay hotel suites.

The three projects will add hundreds of new apartments and hotel rooms and remove 675,000 square feet of vacant office space.

The Dominion Centre housing project will create 132 new homes, including 25 per cent that will be rented at affordable rates.

It will also reduce emissions and improve climate resiliency.

Dominion Centre was selected to receive an extra $1.2 million to offset design, construction and performance verification costs related to emission reductions and climate resilience measures. "Taking buildings that are underused and retrofitting them for a new use, instead of demolishing them, helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of materials that would need to go to our landfills," said Carolyn Bowen, the city's director of climate and environment, in a media release.

"The Dominion Centre being awarded the inaugural Downtown Retrofit Challenge funding is a great first step to demonstrate that even retrofit projects in our downtown can achieve high energy efficiency standards and can take the needed steps to support our city’s climate resiliency efforts and to lower utility bills."

The second phase of Aspen Properties' Palliser One office-to-residential conversion was approved for funding, which will add 395 homes to downtown Calgary.

"Calgary’s office conversion programs remain one of our greatest successes and have become internationally recognized as the template for creating new homes in existing downtown office buildings," said Mayor Jyoti Gondek. "It’s exciting to announce three projects today that are tackling office conversions in different ways – through climate resilient initiatives, by building much needed long-stay hotel rooms, and accelerating housing delivery."

In May, the Washington Post published an opinion piece titled, "The model city for transforming downtowns? It's in Canada," which praised Calgary's office-to-residential conversion program as a template for downtown revitalization.

"Calgary offers a road map — and a tool kit — for D.C. and other beleaguered cities on how to make the switch rapidly and efficiently," it said.

The third project at 833 4^th Avenue S.W. was previously designated to be converted to residential but will now become a Westin Hotel featuring long-term stay suites.

The project will convert from an office building into 226 long-term stay hotel suites.

"In the first two years of our office conversion programs, we’ve seen tremendous interest from the private sector in partnering on these transformational projects," said Sheryl McMullen, the city's manager of investment and marketing for downtown strategy. "We have 17 projects in our pipeline currently and are committed to working with other levels of government to secure funding to expand that number as we move into the new year."