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Transforming Canada’s empty offices into housing units

Even as remote employees start returning to in-person work, Canada’s downtowns remain filled with vacant office buildings. In Calgary, for example, the downtown vacancy rate recently reached 27.5 per cent. Meanwhile, the demand for housing throughout the country is higher than ever. Calgary’s Strategic Group, a company that manages and develops office, retail and apartment properties across the country, has been working toward a solution: office-to-residential conversions.

So far, the company has converted two office buildings to residential units in Edmonton and one in Calgary, creating 2,100 apartments to date—a mix of one– and two–bedroom and studio apartments. The company is now working on its fourth conversion at the Art Nouveau heritage building in Calgary.

We talked to Ken Toews, senior vice-president of development at Strategic Group, about the benefits of office-to-residential conversions and how they can help solve the housing crisis.

When did you start to think there might be more benefits than just filling the space?

We’re passionate about downtowns in Canada. If you don’t have a thriving downtown, the city suffers. You need office buildings with strong occupancy, but you also need residential space in the downtown core, because that’s what fosters a 24-hour vibrancy. You look at successful cities that have done well attracting, for example, tech start-ups—San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, New York. What all those cities have in common is they have residential units in the downtown core. Without that element, downtowns shut down at 5 p.m., and that’s not a recipe for a vibrant city where young professionals will want to live.

But as we began taking on these conversion projects, a much bigger benefit emerged. I was surprised to learn that construction contributes to 11 per cent of global carbon emissions. We need to do something about that. According to the non-profit organization Architecture 2030, converting and adapting a building produces 80 per cent less emissions than knocking it down and erecting a new structure from scratch.

Frankly, we didn’t realize how beneficial these conversions would be to the environment until after we started. Our four conversions total 500,000 square feet. So far, we’ve saved approximately 17,000 tons of CO2 emissions by doing these conversions instead of constructing new builds. That’s the equivalent of taking 3,700 vehicles off the road for a year....

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