Hot desks, beer halls, foosball and more: How 5 old downtown towers transformed to entice smaller startups

This column is an opinion from Richard White, who has written extensively on Calgary's urban development. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

While most of the downtown Calgary chatter these days is about converting old, empty office buildings to residential and other uses, five of Calgary's first skyscrapers have been converted quietly from suiting large headquarters to try to lure small, startup tenants. 

Unlike the old days, the new building owners aren't looking for one major tenant that will take 300,000 or more square feet of space. They're seeking dozens of startups and small businesses wanting 15,000+/- square feet.

The goal of each of the conversions was to make the buildings more attractive to young entrepreneurs by adding amenities that transform stuffy corporate headquarters into contemporary, fun places to work and play.

Individual lunch rooms have become communal lounges, more like upscale private cafés than cafeterias.

Boardroom tables have been replaced with pool and foosball tables.

And parkades have as many bikes as pickup trucks. 

The reason for these conversions? A downtown office vacancy rate in Calgary that's the highest of any major city in North America, lingering at around 30 per cent. Calgary's core has been struggling since the 2014 downturn in global oil prices followed by years of corporate downsizing and mergers in the battered oil and gas sector, then a COVID-19 pandemic that meant many more people working from home. Currently, about 12 million square feet of office space stands empty in downtown Calgary. 

That's helped spur the conversions at:

Yes, the towers have been stripped of their corporate names. 

In an ideal world, only one of these towers would have been converted from a corporate vibe, so it could have been full of small, creative enterprises resulting in synergies that would have animated the building.

Unfortunately, with the five all competing for the same tenants, they felt more like ghost towers when I recently visited. Hopefully, that'll change over the next year as the impact of COVID declines and Calgary's reputation as a tech hub improves.

But here are some of my thoughts on a representative three: the Edison, which was the first; Stephen Avenue Place, which is the most ambitious; and the Palliser, which is a reminder that we've been doing urban renewal projects downtown since the 1970s (and the majority didn't work).

Northeast corner of 9th Avenue S.W. and 1st Street S.W.