Developers of a downtown Victoria condo building that will become the tallest in the Capital Region are asking the city to go even higher.
Townline, the developer behind the Hudson Place project on Herald Street, already has zoning approval for 24 storeys – but wants to build a slimmer and taller structure of up to 29 storeys.
That would make it the tallest building on Vancouver Island, edging out a 27-storey condo tower in Nanaimo, but it has to be approved by city council first.
The company has also released concept art of the proposed tower which features a sleek, contemporary design with lots of glass and garden space.
“We’ve been eager to start this project since Townline originally purchased the site in 2004,” said company spokesman Justin Filuk.
Townline had previously floated the idea of a 30-storey tower in May, but instead settled on seeking approval for the 29-storey design.
The tower will house up to 400 people – residential units that are sorely needed in a region that has a rental vacancy rate of just 0.5 per cent.
Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps said she hasn’t yet seen the revised proposal for the 29-storey tower, but her vote will depend on a number of factors including how the building fits into the neighbourhood.
“The thing we do need to consider is do we want a building built right out to the lot lines with no green space, with no livability, with no breathing room, or are we willing to entertain a bit of extra height?” she said.
As demand for housing grows, so too does the number of projects underway in the Capital Region.
City officials say those projects will add more than 40 per cent to Victoria’s downtown residential population.
“Right now we’ve got about 2,000 units of housing currently under construction just in the city of Victoria, and about another 2,300 or so just in the planning stages trying to move their way toward that,” said planning director Jonathan Tinney. “So a significant amount of growth that the city’s seeing.”
There’s so much construction happening in downtown Victoria that demand for skilled trades workers has made it hard for developers to keep up.
“On smaller projects a lot of the trades, they want to work on them but there’s just so much demand that it’s a challenge,” said Filuk. “We’re inviting trades down from as far as Nanaimo or Duncan, and a lot of trades are coming over from Vancouver as well.”
The approval process for the Hudson Place tower is expected to take between four to five months, with construction possibly beginning in early 2018.
