1216 8th Street | 87m | 28s | Great West Life | Zeidler

Considering how short we are on rentals and overall housing in Calgary right now we sure don’t have many large projects starting. There are on the other hand a crap load of recent and older proposals Downtown, Beltline and the rest of Calgary. Is there a reason we seem to get lots of proposals but relatively few start ups? Is it a lack of Capital? high interest rates? labour shortages? Material shortages? Or something else stopping all these proposals from starting up?
 
Golfing guy said:
Considering how short we are on rentals and overall housing in Calgary right now we sure don’t have many large projects starting. There are on the other hand a crap load of recent and older proposals Downtown, Beltline and the rest of Calgary. Is there a reason we seem to get lots of proposals but relatively few start ups? Is it a lack of Capital? high interest rates? labour shortages? Material shortages? Or something else stopping all these proposals from starting up?
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Costs increases (labour, materials, capital) have outpaced rent inflation. Large concrete tower projects are very difficult to pencil right now. Rents need to go up a lot or interest rates need to come down, before we see a major wave of activity.
 
Very limited knowledge here, but from what I remember working on some real estate projects with GWL, the company took a really big hit in the bond market in 2022. They halted a lot of real estate projects because of it from what I heard, including industrial projects, which was the only thing hot in Calgary at the time. This I would imagine is quite low on their priority list.
 
Dārayavauš said:
They won’t. It’s Calgary.
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In 2022 the City did a major change to the parkign requirements for multi-family districts. The requirement now is only 0.625 stalls per unit, regardless of location. Prior to that, it depended on if you were outer edge, inner ring, or downtown, but sometimes the requiremetns were as high as 1.25 stalls per unit.

That said, there are still some discrepancies or things in the bylaw that don't make a lot of sense. For instance, the Mixed Use districts require 0.75 stalls per unit, and so do some downtown districts (including 0.1 visitor stalls per unit, thus making it 0.85 stalls per unit). The good news is administration is pretty willing to relax these requirements in most instances, and hopefully the new land use bylaw that is currently being prepared resolves these discrepancies.
 
MichaelS said:
In 2022 the City did a major change to the parkign requirements for multi-family districts. The requirement now is only 0.625 stalls per unit, regardless of location. Prior to that, it depended on if you were outer edge, inner ring, or downtown, but sometimes the requiremetns were as high as 1.25 stalls per unit.

That said, there are still some discrepancies or things in the bylaw that don't make a lot of sense. For instance, the Mixed Use districts require 0.75 stalls per unit, and so do some downtown districts (including 0.1 visitor stalls per unit, thus making it 0.85 stalls per unit). The good news is administration is pretty willing to relax these requirements in most instances, and hopefully the new land use bylaw that is currently being prepared resolves these discrepancies.
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That is good to hear. I really hope they follow Edmonton in abolishing them in all honesty.
 
The second is for a 28 storey tower in Beltline, GWL Realty is developer and Zeidler is architect. This building will not replace a parking lot, unfortunately, but it will replace a shitty little single storey retail building that looks to have been built in the '80s or 90s. It'll have 240 units and height of 87.34m/286.47'. Its density was reached in part through a heritage density transfer (sorry, no clue as to from where) so that's also a win. It looks very GWL-ish to me, which I don't see as a particularly good or bad thing.
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Same design as before but nearly double the units. Nice.
 
GWL is the developer. They don't own this and the owner holds the strings on whether to go forward.

Everyone is trying to cash in on the very low interest housing programs. Those approved will get built. Those that aren't, will mainly land in purgatory. The huge funds that entered five to ten years ago are shifting away from rental housing investments as they've been underperforming.
 
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