Fairview Park Mall - Grand Market District

[plam]

It seems that the Grand Market is buried, with a stake through its heart. Maybe they were just using it as a pretext for tearing down the Sears building in the first place?

They would have put hundreds of thousands into the plan so I doubt that was the case. The Sears building wasn't heritage protected anyway, the issue only came up after their initial proposal but in the end the City of Kitchener council let the Ontario Teacher' Pension Plan do what they want with the property. And like with many things the very botched way we shut down the world for a couple years to try and stop the unstoppable resulted in an unprecedented global economic collapse, so Cadillac Fairview is likely in no rush to move forward with this right now.

Sorry, I can't let this off-topic remark slide. Looked at excess deaths from NZ versus Canada versus the US? NZ saved thousands of people.

[Rainrider22]

However, Canada's mortality rate has been increasing steadily since roughly 2016 due to aging population... No matter what, more people would have died...

[ac3r]

They would have put hundreds of thousands into the plan so I doubt that was the case. The Sears building wasn't heritage protected anyway, the issue only came up after their initial proposal but in the end the City of Kitchener council let the Ontario Teacher' Pension Plan do what they want with the property. And like with many things the very botched way we shut down the world for a couple years to try and stop the unstoppable resulted in an unprecedented global economic collapse, so Cadillac Fairview is likely in no rush to move forward with this right now.

Sorry, I can't let this off-topic remark slide. Looked at excess deaths from NZ versus Canada versus the US? NZ saved thousands of people.

Perhaps, but the responses caused in unimaginable suffering in their own ways. Grandma dying/not dying was just one possible impact albeit one that got the most reaction because the concept of death is a heavy thing for people. But the ripple effects of these reactions imposed on everyone by the state caused equally catastrophic damages to society that are just as bad as grandma dying. People losing their jobs/businesses/homes/everything, the spike in drug abuse, the mental health impacts and suicides caused by the isolation/financial suffering the state imposed on people, financial markets experiencing a bubble then collapse, the weakening of government/power structures as people got utterly fed up with things, surges in domestic violence and violence in general, the increase of racist sentiments and racial attacks (primarily on East Asian people) and so much more. The damage we did to collective human civilization was large...and a lot of it was done on a whim, blindly, with no actual evidence that what we were doing/told to do was actually the right thing or not. Quite often, it wasn't (i.e. following the arrows in the grocery store lol...or vaccine mandates, until we learned they don't do much to impact transmission). Sometimes it was (masks in crowded settings...if everyone wore them correctly, anyway). And as we're going into 2024, there is now a mainstream acknowledgement that the response to things was an absolute mess and caused immense harm to individuals in society in different ways.

But anyway, my statement wasn't meant to initiate a discussion on the policies or anything. Covid-19 is history (for most of us, anyway...there's still some freaks out there who obsess over it). I was just pointing out that we're in the shit and will be for some time as a direct result of the pandemic and the response to it. Economically everything is a mess so even a company like Cadillac Fairview - with deep pockets, since they are owned by the OTPP - is likely having to carefully strategize where to spend their money which is why this Grand Market District thing has been put on the back burner. It's a good property with a lot of potential but developers have a lot of factors to consider right now...it's why proposals for developments have slowed. This is probably a property they'll just sit on, improving it in smaller phases for now. Once construction costs lower I imagine they'll speed things up. If/when news of the Cambridge line of the LRT being confirmed happens, that would help a lot too.

It does appear that they're currently starting something near the fake smokestack, where they used to have ramps for trucks to unload to the Sears basement. The old documents showed plans for a building there so maybe it's this?

[ZEBuilder]

For those unaware Cadillac Fairview sold Fairway Park Mall to Westcliff in late 2024 (A company based in Montreal with some minor land holdings in Ontario), officially killing the iteration of the Grand Market District that we knew, there isn't anything planned for the property anytime soon now. One thing most of us on here missed is the Grand Market District never touched the lands around the Walmart, which is a separate property.

Now the owner of the Walmart lands are trying to sell it, Walmart has a lease until 2100 on the property, however the lands around the Walmart are zoned SGA-4 through Growing Together allowing for unlimited height save for any airport restrictions. It will obviously take time for anything to happen on the property but the wheels are at least in motion for some kind of change around the Walmart. The city does have a conceptual street network for all the future redevelopment along Fairway so any redevelopment will require those connector streets to be implemented as part of subdivision approval, that is still years away though.

In other news the portion that ac3r pointed out in the previous post is completed, it is a restaurant with a rooftop patio called The Canadian Brewhouse.