Long-delayed office space in Quarry Park switching to residential
CBC
The owner of a seven hectare site in Quarry Park has a new plan for its future.
Construction started on the site a decade ago with several office buildings approved for a single client.
However, when Calgary's economic boom at the time went bust, construction was halted in 2015. Only a large underground parkade and nine concrete elevator cores — each rising five storeys in the air — were completed.
The silent sentinels have stood fenced off since then.
A suburban office recovery still hasn't materialized. A couple of years ago, Remington hired a consultant to take another look at the site as a candidate for possible residential development.
The company's representatives were before city council this week, seeking a land use change.
The president of the firm B&A, Kathy Oberg, spoke to council on Remington's behalf.
She said the company needed to establish two things before deciding how much residential development could be supported at the site.
"Firstly, the location and sizes of the existing elevator cores needed to work for residential floor-plates and the building code and secondly, the structural capacity of the existing parkade needed to be assessed for a residential floor-plate and it was determined that it would be able to support eight floors of residential," said Oberg.
With that in mind, she said the plan is to construct three buildings of eight storeys each above the parkade. Two thirteen-storey buildings and two buildings of four storeys each would follow in subsequent phases.
In total, it estimates there could be up to 1,400 new residential units built.
All of the buildings would include an underground connection to the parkade which has a 950 stall capacity.
And the site is a couple of hundred meters away from the future Quarry Park LRT station on the Green Line.
City council gave the land use change unanimous approval at its meeting this week.
