More than two dozen small, loft-style condominium units could be built above the 1911 Sawyer Building on Fort Street.

An application by Hillel Architecture before city councillors today calls for a new six-storey addition to the rear of the two-storey building at 840 Fort St. The site is currently zoned to permit a four-storey building.

The upper storeys would be wood-frame construction over two floors of noncombustible construction. The existing building would be rehabilitated.

Because it's located at the rear of the site, the addition won't crowd the existing building, says architect Karen Hillel.

The proposal has the support of the Downtown Residents' Association.

"We figured it's a pretty decent application mostly because it preserves an interesting old building, which normally would be a pretty prime candidate for a teardown as there's nothing really distinctive about it," said Robert Randall, land-use committee chairman for the residents' association.

"Retaining it makes for an interesting cohesive part of the streetscape and we felt that that justified the new addition on the back end."

While some residents of the nearby Metropolitan and Chelsea buildings expressed concerns about loss of views and privacy, the committee noted the buildings wouldn't directly face each other, so the impact was not too severe.

"We balanced it all out and we felt even though some people were going to be impacted that overall it was a good way of introducing density," Randall said.

The four storeys of residential units would comprise 28 lofts averaging between 375 square feet and 485 square feet. Existing zoning does not include provision for parking and none is being proposed. However, the proposal includes 51 bicycle-parking stalls and consideration is being given to providing apartment owners membership in a car-share

co-op.

City staff say the proximity to major transit routes and downtown mitigates the need for residential parking.

Randall said the absence of parking was reasonable.

"We shouldn't be encouraging people to have cars downtown. If we're talking about bus/rapid transit and LRT and commuter rail and car sharing and building bike trails, it doesn't make sense to counteract that with insisting that a developer have [so many] parking spaces," he said.

The Sawyer Building, which is not on the city's heritage register, has been vacant for five years. The city did receive a development-permit application in 2006 to convert the existing building into a commercial/residential mix with three residential units and ground-floor commercial. That proposal also included a courtyard and a new building at the rear with two new four-storey residential units. It was withdrawn, however, with the applicant citing rising construction costs.

The city's planning and land-use committee will decide today whether to recommend sending the application to public hearing.

bcleverley@tc.canwest.com