Condos, Hotel & Offices coming to Uptown Waterloo
The Record has an article in this morning’s paper about a major development underway in Waterloo, Ontario – The Barrel Yards – which will bring the Kitchener Waterloo real estate market some very high quality product over the next few years
When completed, the Barrel Yards – located at the corner of Erb Street and Father David Bauer Drive in uptown Waterloo, Ontario – will be home to a hotel, condos, rental apartments, commercial real estate (office & retail space) and townhouses.
Uptown goes upscale: Barrel Yards development will transform Waterloo’s core
The 28 dump trucks assigned to the job must carry 25,000 loads of dirt from the site, where 10 highrise buildings containing 1,200 residential units will be built over the next five years.
The $350-million project includes a hotel, a seniors’ residence, condos, apartments, live-work units, townhouses, street-level retail, office space, a park and an underground-parking garage with 2,400 spaces.
“This is going to completely change Waterloo’s downtown,” said Dave Coulter, the project manager.
When construction is finished the 5.1 hectares (12 acres) will contain the densest collection of tall buildings in the core and surrounding area. The buildings will range in height from an eight-storey hotel to a pair of 25-storey condominium buildings.
Coulter has divided the work into stages, the first being the hotel and the underground parking to support it. Concrete should be poured for the foundations in about a month. The hotel should be finished by September 2011.
This hotel is going to be a high end property and is eagerly anticipated by the residents of Kitchener Waterloo
University students living south of Erb and west of Euclid will be able to walk through the Barrel Yards on their way to campus, stopping for a coffee or snack along the way in some of the mixed-use buildings at street level.
“We tried to integrate the community as best as we can,” said Stephen Litt, special projects manager for Auburn.
Litt, a graduate of the University of Waterloo’s program in systems design engineering, says the Barrel Yards project is the biggest brownfield redevelopment now underway in the province.
A few small parking lots will be scattered on the surface, but at the City of Waterloo’s insistence, a two-level underground garage will be built to create a pedestrian-oriented environment above.
“Parking is kind of ugly — get it underground and maximize the landscaping above,” Litt says. “The more landscaping you can provide, the more attractive the buildings.”
Waterloo transformed
The Barrel Yards development is one of the final chapters in the transformation of Waterloo from a blue-collar factory town into a creative city.
Waterloo’s old industrial heart stopped beating in 1992, when the Seagram Distillery closed after more than 130 years in business. Not long after that, Canbar closed. The SunarHauserman plant on Father David Bauer Drive also shut down. The Labatt brewery was shuttered.
About 20 hectares of land became vacant in a short period of time. It has taken nearly 20 years to redevelop the former industrial sites.
It is a testament to the brains, heart and determination of our community in Waterloo Region (Kitchener, Cambridge, and all the surrounding towns and villages are an important part of our area too!) that KW had this much industry dissapear, and instead of turning into another depressed area (think: Detroit after it’s heydey) has really thrived and become a major player on the global stage.
Growing up in Kitchener and Waterloo, Litt remembers what the city core looked like when it was dominated by industrial buildings — the distillery, brewery, barrel factory and warehouses.
Now the 27-year-old marvels at the changes and sips a coffee in the Casa Mia deli on Father David Bauer Drive.
“That was the spark that ignited the fire in this area,” Litt says gesturing at the Seagram Lofts nearby.
Even at the height of the recent recession, a 1,300-square-foot Seagram Loft fetched $375,000.
The Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics soon followed the lofts. The Centre for International Governance Innovation was established. A school of international affairs is being built across the street from the Barrel Yards development. A seniors’ residence was built on the former Sunar property and another on part of the old Labatt property.
The City of Waterloo played a critical role in all this. City councillors and bureaucrats stood firm in the face of widespread criticism in 1997 and paid $3.9 million to buy the Seagram lands so the city could control the redevelopment of the sites.
“All of the pieces are coming together today and they are all fitting in,” says Ryan Mounsey, an urban planner for the city who worked on the Barrel Yards file for years. “Difficult choices are controversial, no question, but look at how they are fitting in.”
The city also built the Waterloo Memorial Recreation Complex on Father David Bauer Drive. It leased the land to the Perimeter Institute for 99 years for a dollar. It sold the Seagram Museum at about half its assessed value to a trust for the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
“It’s a tremendous time to be here,” Mounsey says. “It is exciting. It is challenging.”
A world class location, right in Waterloo
The Barrel Yards development will be surrounded by think-tanks, universities and high-tech companies.
“Now we have intellectual industries and we are building to support that,” Litt says.
There are few, if any, five-hectare sites available for development in any downtown and even fewer with the mix of land uses around this one.
“We have great partners and neighbours, Perimeter, the Recreation Centre, CIGI and the Seagram Lofts,” Coulter says.
I’m excited to see Auburn complete the Barrel Yards, I think it’s going to be a great addition to Kitchener Waterloo.
What do you think?
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[...] off our discussion of the new Condos, Hotel, and Commercial real estate coming toWaterloo - the Barrel Yards, here is some information about a new development going in donwtown Kitchener at 30-40 Margaret [...]
[...] off our discussion of the new Condos, Hotel, and Commercial real estate coming toWaterloo - the Barrel Yards, here is some information about a new development going in donwtown Kitchener at 30-40 Margaret [...]