Moving forward requires looking back

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/07/2022 (885 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For its first century, downtown Winnipeg was a vibrant and diverse urban neighbourhood. Streets were lined with elegant red-brick apartment buildings, terrace housing and grand Victorian homes. Canopies of elm trees shaded the sidewalks of a neighbourhood peppered with schools, corner stores, churches and parks.

Portage Avenue and Main Street were busy urban shopping streets, and the stone buildings of the old warehouse district were filled with commerce and industry.

The 1960s saw the beginning of downtown’s slow transition from a neighbourhood into a sterile business district designed for nine-to-five commuters. The population shrank, and the shopping streets were turned into traffic conduits that attracted cars and repelled shoppers.

Boulevard trees were cut down and the streets widened to accommodate more vehicles. Large office buildings replaced apartment blocks, and the houses were razed to make parking lots beside them.

After hitting a low point in the 1990s, several new initiatives were introduced to revive downtown, and for 20 years slow and steady progress was being made.

Then a global pandemic hit, and all the office workers we spent the last 60 years building downtown for stayed home. Almost three years later, it’s becoming clear that many of them aren’t coming back. The pandemic was a seismic event in the history of downtown, and recovering from it will take a seismic shift in thinking.

Thankfully, we know what the solutions are. The future of downtown can be found in its past — as a vibrant and diverse urban neighbourhood.

Building a neighbourhood means creating a place that attracts people. With fewer commuters, there is opportunity to narrow some streets again, and replant the boulevard trees, widen the sidewalks, create parks and public spaces and, of course, build great places for people to live.

With large amounts of commercial space now sitting vacant, cities across North America are looking at empty office buildings as a potential resource to create homes that attract new downtown residents.

Alston Properties, one of downtown Winnipeg’s most creative and innovative developers, has realized the opportunity that underused office buildings can represent. Instead of complete office-to-residential conversions, Alston has been implementing a development model that maintains leased office and retail space, while filling in the empty gaps with residential conversion.

The resulting mixed-use buildings provide an important model for the creation of a downtown mixed-use neighbourhood.

Alston’s transformation of a tired 1970s office building at 433 Main St. into a dramatic mixed-use building stands a successful example of this model. The development strategy was to retain the ground-floor retail and existing office tenants on the bottom four floors, while redeveloping the 10 vacant office floors above into 94 rental apartments.

This presented the challenge of co-ordinating construction work to minimize disruption for office workers, but it maintained a valuable revenue source during development and provided a head start in leasing at building completion.

With the high cost of new construction in today’s inflationary environment, utilizing existing building elements such as elevators, structure and mechanical systems can make building conversions up to one-third less costly than new construction.

At 433 Main, Atlrg Architecture designed a crisp glass façade that modernized the building’s appearance while creatively using the window frames that were already in place. A windowless top floor that was used for file storage presented an opportunity, with new windows installed, to create four large penthouses and a common area “sky lounge” with dramatic views over the Exchange District.

With the success of 433 Main, Alston Properties has now begun redevelopment of two connected six-storey office buildings at 175/185 Carlton St., also built in the mid-1970s. In this development, the office and residential division will occur horizontally, with existing office tenants being located in the north half and 35 rental apartments being constructed in the south half. The ground-floor retail tenants will be maintained across both buildings.

Not all office buildings are appropriate targets for residential conversion, and there are several factors that must come together to find success. Alston Properties has been careful to develop buildings that are in desirable locations. The Carlton Street property is beside a landscaped plaza and is connected to the skywalk, and 433 Main is part of the Exchange District.

Development economics were favourable because the buildings were older, making them less expensive to purchase, but they were both well maintained with robust concrete structural systems, so much of their infrastructure could be upgraded or retained rather than replaced.

Finding buildings with the right proportions was also important, because office buildings often have large floor plates that are not well suited to residential apartments requiring access to windows for living rooms and bedrooms.

The office building conversions Alston Properties has undertaken, along with a similar redevelopment of the Medical Arts Building by Hazelview Investments, represent a new model for growth in downtown Winnipeg. Vacant office buildings have traditionally been seen as an obstacle to a healthy downtown, but they now represent an opportunity to create dynamic change.

The future for downtown Winnipeg must be as a mixed-use neighbourhood, packed densely with mixed-use buildings. Transforming empty office space into places for people to live will be an important piece of the puzzle that comes together to create a prosperous downtown Winnipeg in the post-pandemic world.

Brent Bellamy is senior design architect for Number Ten Architectural Group.