Mixed uses and office conversions: A possible future for urban cores?

Workers have yet to return to big city offices in their pre-pandemic numbers, prompting questions about how to revitalize downtown cores as nine-to-fivers spend more of their days at home and companies forge new structures around hybrid work.

Workers have yet to return to big city offices in their pre-pandemic numbers, prompting questions about how to revitalize downtown cores as nine-to-fivers spend more of their days at home and companies forge new structures around hybrid work.

Some new projects suggest there is room to build more livable communities in office-dense neighbourhoods, with a major mixed-use building in Toronto and office-to-residential conversions in Calgary set to put that idea to the test.

Recent data from CBRE Canada pegged the country’s overall office vacancy rate at an all-time high of 17.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2023. Their report framed the trend as a “once-in-a-generation evolution” driven by new hybrid work realities, with people spending less time commuting to their office desks. The pattern has sparked fears about the recovery of downtown cores and the businesses that serve the workday crowds.

Toronto’s office vacancy rate hit its highest number in nearly 30 years at 15.5 per cent, while Vancouver reached a two-decade high of 10.4 per cent, the report said. Montreal and Ottawa reported record-high office vacancy rates of 16.5 per cent and 13.2 per cent, respectively.

It’s in this environment that downtown Toronto’s sprawling mixed use retail, residential and office project “the Well” is starting to come to life. Some tenants already moved in and construction in its late stages.

The completed building will feature an open-air retail and dining space, two small parks and swathes of public seating amid the residential and office tower complex – elements of a particularly desirable post-pandemic layout that the property’s owners say were a happy accident.

“We're in a fortunate position where the design we came up with checked most of the boxes,” Andrew Duncan, chief investment officer of building co-owner RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust, said after a tour of the space on Wednesday.