Downtown Victoria’s 367-stall Broughton Square Parkade may have its days numbered with the emergence of a significant redevelopment play for the block-wide Old Town site, Citified has learned.

 

The three-storey private parking structure, situated along the 600-blocks of Broughton and Courtney streets at Gordon Street, has served downtown motorists since 1960. The facility is not to be confused with the City of Victoria’s Broughton Street Parkade, located below ground at the Greater Victoria Public Library’s main branch in the 700-block of Broughton Street.

 

Proponent GWL Realty Advisors has pitched plans for a 13-storey rental tower comprising over 260 units, plus 21,000 square feet of ground floor retail space. The future building will include around 70 underground parking stalls, however, none are described as available to the general public. A public plaza, though, sized at just over 6,200 square feet, will front just to the east side of the terminus of Broad Street at Broughton Street, to serve as a small parklet flanked by the new residential tower and St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.

 

Described by project consultant Jonathan Tinney as an “underutilized, car-centric space,” the parkade has been an integral piece of vehicle infrastructure in Victoria’s downtown core for 65 years. Victoria's city centre has shed thousands of public parking spaces since the 1990s as mixed-use towers and offices replaced surface parking lots. Now, the City’s second private parkade to make way for homes and commercial spaces in recent decades will cease serving the motoring public (the first being the Hudson’s Bay Department Store parkade on Blanshard Street between Herald and Fisgard streets, where three residential towers now stand).

 

Architecturally, the proposed 13-storey design from Vancouver’s MCMP Architects – already a key player in the downtown core’s architectural scene with numerous towers under their belt dating to the early 2000s – is a block-wide structure broken up into two sections along Gordon Street, with the full height of the building set back, while ten levels front Courtney Street at Gordon Street and 11 storeys rise above Broughton Street at Gordon Street.

 

As an homage to MCMP’s 11-storey Sovereign condominium tower (completed in 2013) immediately across the street at 608 Broughton, the proposal’s balconies are inset like Sovereign’s, with staggered design elements that borrow from Sovereign’s facades. Curved corners overlooking intersections appear to harken to the stately Belmont Building, just a block away on Government Street at Humboldt Street.

 

A large glass curtain wall faces east, and spans from a lower floor amenity area for residents to the apex of the tower. Over-sized glass-clad retail spaces envelope the ground floor of the building.

 

Downtown Victoria's recent phase of residential construction has delivered rental homes almost exclusively. The condominium sector has no pre-sale opportunities currently on the market, a first in about two decades, as developers hone in on investment-safe strong demand for rental housing as the city centre ownership market (both re-sale and pre-sale) struggles to find its footing.

 

The industry cites challenges with social problems in the downtown area, a ban on short-term rentals, provincial changes to secondary home and investment property regulations and taxes, and foreign buyer taxes, as contributing impediments to a thriving condominium market. In turn, no new supply is on the horizon for Victoria's city centre. Elsewhere in the Capital, condominium pre-sales are launching and continue to see buyer uptake. C

 

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