The only sure thing about the west side of the 1700 block of Blanshard Street is that the shell of a parking structure that’s stood there for nearly eight decades is history.
The parkade, built for the Hudson’s Bay Co. in the 1940s, will start coming down this week, while the group behind the reinvention of what is known as the Hudson District continues to massage ideas for the site.
Townline, which has transformed the historic Hudson’s Bay building into a residential project, added the rental buildings Hudson Mews and Hudson Walk One, is in the midst of building Hudson Walk Two and planning the buildings that will make up Hudson Place on the old parkade site.
“We’re pretty close,” said Justin Filuk, Townline’s director of development. “We were planning on applying for a development permit [for Hudson Place] in the fall but we had a setback.”
As a result, Townline decided to take a step back and reassess what it wanted on that site.
Townline had at one point considered one large tower on the soon-to-be-demolished site, but is now leaning to its original plan for two buildings built in two phases similar to the Hudson Walk projects.
“We do have zoning and density in place for the original design which called for two towers,” said Filuk. There is approval for one 24-storey tower and a second shorter tower. “That is still in the cards.
“We have a lot of density we have to play around with on the site and developers don’t like to leave density on the table.” Density will allow Townline to take advantage of a very strong real estate market, he said.
Ken Cloak, associate vice-president at Colliers International Victoria, and a rental market specialist, characterized the market as robust. “We have a significant amount of demand from investors on a very limited amount of product and as far as tenants go, you’ve seen downward pressure on vacancy rates and upward pressure on rents, that’s an indication of a demand-supply imbalance,” he said.
But that robust market still has Townline approaching this next project cautiously. “There is a strong market in Victoria, but it’s not exactly Vancouver,” said Filuk. “So despite a forecast that it will continue to be strong and that there will be lots of population growth and demand, it’s a big project and we want to make sure we have done our due diligence.”
Townline has yet to decide what percentage of the project will be condominium and what will be rental at Hudson Place. “I can tell you we will bring a market component to it, we are watching the supply and demand very carefully. We know there is pent-up demand for rental units, but we also know there’s a lot of supply coming on,” Filuk said.
Cloak said there could be as many as 1,000 purpose-built rental units delivered to the market in next 18 to 24 months, but it’s unlikely to make much difference to a vacancy rate that remains below 1.0 per cent.
