VICTORIA -- Tenants of a new luxury apartment building in Langford were turned away Wednesday after learning that the city had not granted the building an occupancy permit.
The building, Hedstrom House, located at 1060 Goldstream Ave., was set to open to residents this month.
However, the building’s developer, Ironclad Developments, says a last-minute request for technical documents and several scheduling setbacks due to COVID-19 have caused the building’s initial move-in day to be delayed.
“What happened – and it’s unprecedented, I should say – is very recently we had an additional request from the City of Langford for some technical information,” said Lauren Clemens, general counsel and director of corporate affairs for Ironclad.
Clemens says that the city will not grant an occupancy permit until the technical documents are received and reviewed. However, both Ironclad and the municipality say they expect the situation to be resolved soon.
On Wednesday afternoon, the City of Langford told CTV News that it had received the requested documents and was in the process of reviewing them.
Once the review is complete and the city has received all required professional assurances that the building is up to code, the city will issue a phased occupancy permit for the building. The municipality says it expects it will be able to provide Ironclad with an occupancy permit on Thursday.
In the meantime, approximately 30 tenants who were expected to move into the building this week have been offered temporary accommodations from Ironclad.
“At this time, Ironclad is accommodating all impacted tenants, including providing and paying for alternative accommodations, storage and gratuitous per diems,” said Clemens in a statement.
While Hedstrom House has 119 units, only roughly 30 tenants were scheduled to move in this week. The remaining residents are scheduled to move in on later dates as part of a gradual opening plan and have so far not been affected by the delay.
Clemens adds that Ironclad has constructed several other buildings in Langford and that all of them have opened without issue.
“We’ve had a really good working relationship with the City of Langford, so this is a really unfortunate situation that’s come up,” she said. “But we will expediate this and get the information and move this matter forward as quickly as possible.”
In December, residents of another high rise in Langford were told to vacate the building after the city revoked the building’s occupancy permit.
The city did so after B.C.’s professional engineering regulator raised concerns about the building’s design and construction. The regulator, Engineers and Geoscientists BC, told the city that one of its members who worked on the building was under investigations due to concerns about their work.
Residents of the building, Danbrook One, were first encouraged to leave the building in December and then instructed to vacate in January due to safety concerns. The concerns centred around the structural integrity of the high rise if a major earthquake were to occur.
