“If I don’t have 200 rooms, I cannot build this hotel. Now, can I put 200 rooms on this piece of land with less height? Maybe, and we are ready to look at it again,” he said, noting they tried to configure the hotel with 10 storeys but could not get a financier to come to the table. “We didn’t put this proposal together just on a whim. We looked at the cost of construction. We looked at the amount of money that the hotel would produce. … And we asked what can we afford. I have to have a certain amount of rooms … to make the money work — in this case it’s 200.”

Mairet said he intends to get back to work, determine what is acceptable and make another proposal to city council.

“We’ll be very proud of the fact that we have tried. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”

He said it would kill the project is if the city insists the hotel cannot be any more than five storeys.



https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/victoria-council-seeks-changes-to-plan-for-12storey-hotel-in-max-5-storey-zone-10636103

The tricky thing is, that staff can sometimes recommend not approving plans not because there is no merit or they themselves do not like the project, but because it is too far off what the books currently allow. Their hands can be tied procedurally, in other words, but then that’s why we have a council that can see the proposal for what it is and make a decision based on merit, not rules.

We shall see if this idea can still get off the ground. With every month that passes, the viability of the project drops.

That aside, we also saw a hotel approved for Fort at Blanshard that failed to get off the ground.

“If I don’t have 200 rooms, I cannot build this hotel.

The idea that anyone should be weeping about this is ludicrous. The proposal is not worthy of the site, period. Consider all of the excellent past proposals (most of them much smaller than this one) throughout downtown that the CoV killed because they were supposedly too big or too dense. It's absurd that we've been through a lifetime of this drama and yet now we're going to frame this project of all projects as the big game changer?

Hey, isn't this the same city that laid down the law just a few frickin' weeks ago re: scaling back the Capital Iron lands concept? Should I mention how that project was vastly superior to this one? Or how about the time they killed the comparably modest motel expansion plan on Belleville Street? Does anyone remember that one? Does anyone remember anything anymore? Give me a break.

I could rant out a very lengthy essay re: the CHEK news segment about the supposedly unprecedented challenges now facing Victoria re: heritage-versus-economic-development. But I'll keep it short and note the (deliberately?) ironic way they chose to begin the segment.

Anyone who has even vague familiarity with the architectural heritage issue would be aware that most of the noteworthy buildings shown in the 1907 Harbeck film (along Douglas, Yates, & Government) were wiped out many decades prior to today.

Part of me was thinking it was a sly way of making the point that today's supposedly unprecedented challenges are no different than they ever were.

But part of me was thinking there was something more mean-spirited going on there. Wouldn't it be rather tasteless to begin a presentation about the cherished architectural heritage of Hiroshima by showing an aerial pic from August 7?

...despite acknowledging the importance of preserving the physical presence as a reminder of the area’s cultural importance, council did not go with the staff’s recommendation to outright decline the applicant’s proposal.

--

"It's also a neighbourhood that has to be living, and able to be evolutionary, and can't be stagnant."

Right, we all remember how the CoV was emphasizing that point when it was being so accommodating re: the redevelopment of Northern Junk with a frickin' tiny 5-story & very high-quality lowrise building.

My spidey-senses are telling me to brace for something absurd.