Both of Alberta’s major cities are well-known for their sprawling suburbs and underutilized downtowns. But as infrastructure costs grow and young people express more interest in staying closer to the city core, Edmonton and Calgary are creating ambitious projects to bring people back to the inner city.
Calgary’s East Village, a 49-acre neighbourhood with few residents and a hardscrabble past, and Edmonton’s municipal airport both present unique opportunities to build new communities nearly from scratch and bring thousands of people to the centre of the city. The question remains, though: if they build it, will people actually come?
Down but not out
Calgary’s East Village
Image courtesy of CMLC
The Past
In 2002, the latest in a string of attempts to revitalize Calgary’s East Village ended in failure. A controversial partnership with a consortium of developers was abandoned after an inquiry revealed that the city was giving preferential treatment to some developers and selling land for less than half its perceived value. Druh Farrell, then the recently elected alderman of Ward 7, was one of the deal’s most vocal critics. She says that plan, and others like it, failed for a variety of reasons. “One of the reasons that the development had never taken off was there needed to be new infrastructure through most of the community,” she says. “It created a barrier when there was lots of opportunity with other land that wasn’t so encumbered.” Early plans also failed to take advantage of the area’s waterfront and tended to ignore the social issues – poverty, homelessness and crime – that were prevalent in the area.
Just a year later, Mayor Dave Bronconnier and Calgary city council launched a new redevelopment plan for the area. To finance it, the city became the first in Canada to use tax increment financing (TIF), a method of infrastructure funding for rundown areas in which a city borrows against the projected future tax revenue of the neighbourhood. “It was highly controversial,” says Farrell. “There were a number of members of council who thought we should just sell the land to the highest bidder and let it develop, but it hadn’t developed for generations, so I couldn’t see that working.” The city used the money raised by the TIF to create the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC) in 2007, and it has since spent $180 million installing infrastructure, including bridges to connect the area to neighbouring communities and lifting the area out of Calgary’s floodway – or what it was thought to be before the June floods.
The Present
That infrastructure was key to attracting developers to the area, and it paid off. In October 2010, Embassy Bosa, a Vancouver-based developer, was the first to buy a parcel of land in East Village in more than 10 years. The second major deal came in February 2011, with the Mississauga-based partnership of Fram Building Group and Slokker Real Estate Group committing to seven mixed-use, multi-family residential buildings worth more than $300 million. Approximately 60 per cent of the land in East Village has been sold, and Susan Veres, CMLC’s vice-president of marketing and communications, says the area has so far attracted $1.4 billion of planned investment.
Farrell says it’s not a coincidence that the first developers to buy into the area were from outside the province. The local developers the city approached weren’t interested in the project, but Fred Serrafero, Fram’s vice-president of development and construction, says outsiders saw it differently. “When I first saw the project location, I thought it was perfect, but when I started talking to people around town, they would bring up its history, that East Village was a down-and-out part of the city,” he says. “History didn’t have any importance to me. I just saw the opportunity. Maybe it took a developer from out of town to realize that.”
The Future
Promotional materials describe East Village as “the future of downtown living,” but what does the area’s revitalization mean for the future of Calgary? Given the apparent success of the TIF funding model and the redevelopment, it could be a model for future revitalization in other ailing Calgary neighbourhoods. Farrell says developers in other cities are already looking to the city for lessons.
Sixty years in the making
Edmonton’s Blatchford Field
Image courtesy of City of Edmonton
The Past
When the Edmonton International Airport opened to passenger service in Leduc in 1963, Blatchford Field, the small airport four kilometres north of downtown, was slated for closure. The City of Edmonton opted to keep the airport, however, to provide regional air service to Calgary. But in 2009, when city councillor Tony Caterina argued that the airport should allow larger planes (since 1995, it had only allowed flights with 10 passengers or fewer), city council decided to reconsider. Kim Krushell, the ward’s city councillor, became an advocate for closing the underutilized airport. After an acrimonious months-long public debate, council finally voted to close the airport and use the 600-acre site to establish an innovative, environmentally friendly neighbourhood with homes for 30,000 people.
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The Present
One of the City Centre Airport’s two runways was closed in 2010 and the second will be shut down November 30. Meanwhile, Blatchford Redevelopment executive director Mark Hall says the planning stage is well underway. The city engaged Vancouver-based architecture and design firm Perkins & Will to develop a master plan, and Stantec won a contract to design the site’s infrastructure.
Blatchford will follow a similar path to Calgary’s East Village, as the city will first tear up the old airport structures and remediate the land that’s been contaminated by jet fuel and other toxic substances before installing the infrastructure needed to encourage builders to invest in the site.
Krushell says opposition to the project has died down. “The people on the stakeholder committee, which are the community league presidents, plus Kingsway Business Association and Kingsway Mall, they’re moving forward and for the most part are much more positive about the development. I’m not saying they’re all happy, but it’s a lot better.”
The Future
The development could have an enormous impact on the growth of Edmonton’s downtown, and not just because of 30,000 people potentially moving into the area. The airport’s closure could also alter the direction of development in the city core. “That was one of the issues with having the airport there. It did constrain the height of development in the downtown,” says Hall. “So what could the downtown look like if there were no height restrictions? To what extent has that really limited development, and what will happen now? I don’t know. I’d be really curious to see how high it will go in the downtown now.”
Looking for Inspiration
Southeast False Creek, Vancouver B.C.
80 acres
Vancouver began the process of developing Southeast False Creek, the city’s last waterfront industrial area, in 1990, when it removed the region from its industrial land base. In 2005, the city approved its development plan for False Creek, selecting the area as the site of the 2010 Olympic Village. However, the financing for the project was extremely controversial and condo sales were sluggish following the Olympics. The Village went into receivership in November 2010, and despite a bulk sale of 119 units to Bentall Kennedy, a Canadian investment group, the city still owed approximately $300 million on the development as of August.
Distillery District, Toronto, Ontario
13 acres
A National Historic Site designated for protection since 1976, Toronto’s Distillery District was purchased by Cityscape Holdings in 2001. Along with partner Dundee Real Estate, Cityscape restored the area’s 40 historic buildings and transformed it into a pedestrian-only entertainment district. Chain stores and franchises are banned from the area, which is home to a variety of boutique shops, cafés and artists’ studios, as well as the Mill Street Brewery.
Mueller, Austin, Texas
711 acres
Following the opening of the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in 1999, the city shut down the Robert Mueller Municipal Airport and chose the site for a master planned community just five kilometres from Austin’s downtown. Construction started in 2007, and while the site won’t be complete until 2017, some homes are already finished and residents have moved in. When finished, the US$1.3-billion development will be home to 13,000 residents, 650,000 square feet of retail space and 140 acres of green space.
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