236 Victoria St N | 40 & 35 fl | Proposed

[ZEBuilder]

Updated: Kitchener council approves multi-tower Victoria Street development
Indoor climbing gym Grand River Rocks’ newest location will be somewhat short-lived, after Kitchener councillors approved the redevelopment of a Victoria Street North property.

The project will replace two existing buildings — including the former LA Fitness location where Grand River Rocks and sister business Go Bananas plan to open in June — with three towers at 236 and 264 Victoria St. N.

Says that GRR has 3,500 to 4,000 members, which seems like a lot to me, for a place the size of KW. And I do think this is important:

“I feel Grand River Rocks is one of those organizations that’s going to be bouncing around, if we can’t find a permanent home for them.

“I can’t stress the importance of that type of community and what it brings to the city. It’s something that’s very difficult to replicate.”

We need housing, but we also need community.

Nobody actually knows when the developer is going to go ahead with the project, just look at half of the projects that have been approved downtown, this project in particular still needs to get record of site condition, deal with Metrolinx and CN because it's going to need a crash wall/berm (This took months to resolve at Station Park), then they have to get site plan approval, get the holding provisions lifted, then finally get permits. Even if they have those it doesn't mean they're going to build, the Victoria/Park project has had SPA for close to a year, the only action there has been the police raid on the magic mushroom shop, 20 Ottawa has had SPA for a year and nothings happened. So with that being said this isn't going to be an immediate start unless we get into some crazy financial environment making it feasible to build immediately without flooding the market. At the end of the day there are also numerous other places GRR could be located, yes there are other places where towers could be built but at the end of the day developers are going to develop they are a business after all.

If GRR wanted a permanent place they could have found a location and purchased it, or they could have negotiated a long term lease. Instead GRR negotiated for a crappy lease, 5 years plus a potential additional 5, the lease won't even guarantee them ROI on their climbing walls if it's only for those 5 years which for anyone with any financial knowledge realizes is a ridiculously stupid move on their part. That is not on the developer that is on them. At the end of the day yes what the developer did in negotiating the lease has its moral flaws but at the same time GRR could have done their due diligence to find a location that wasn't going to be realistically developed or negotiated a lease that wasn't going to financially handicap them in the future.

I certainly don't want GRR to leave the community, my friends and I have spent hours in there but the reality is we also need housing, there is little chance my friends and I will be able to afford a condo let alone a house in the city we grew up in, as much as we enjoy GRR we also recognize that we need housing, there is always going to be another empty warehouse that GRR could move into, as centrally located as their current location no but there are other places. If they want to be proactive they could go out and by a piece of land and build a purpose built facility, sure it might not be in a central location like they currently are but they will still exist, they could approach a developer about potentially incorporating it into a podium, however those are all proactive things that GRR is going to need to do if they want to stay downtown, developers are not going to build that kind of space out of the goodness of their heart, especially with the amount of parking a place like GRR demands.