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From this real estate listing 3D tour.
 
Overall I think it turned out pretty well for a high rise in this location. Podium has a pretty good street level interaction, has some weather protection, materials and transparency are good at grade and avoided stampitecture pitfalls of surrounding buildings. The pool and amenity space seems nice and functional and the towers are inoffensive and not imposing. Improvements I think would be nice are: no lay by lane on Mc. Trail, better planting/landscaping along the sidewalks, the brick could be carried in a more linear pattern between the windows, continuous weather protection for pedestrians.
 
As you walk around both buildings, you see there is a lot of ground floor commercial space. In the current environment, it is going to take them a long while to lease it all out. It took Nuera (one block south) several years to fill most of their commercial space. Although there are more people living in the neighbourhood now than say 10 years ago, there is still not a lot of 'street action' that I can see.
 
JonnyCanuck said:
As you walk around both buildings, you see there is a lot of ground floor commercial space. In the current environment, it is going to take them a long while to lease it all out. It took Nuera (one block south) several years to fill most of their commercial space. Although there are more people living in the neighbourhood now than say 10 years ago, there is still not a lot of 'street action' that I can see.
Click to expand...

The area does lack for street action (and some of the 'street action' in the area isn't particularly salubrious). But I'm more optimistic. This project adds two more towers; that's a 20-25% increase in population. Rebuilding the Vic Park LRT may also improve pedestrian flow in the area. And even the increase in other retail in the area; H-Mart may draw more pedestrian traffic to the area than before it opened.

Keynote (one block north) filled it's retail space pretty quickly. Mission 17 (the Torode project that burnt down on 17th Ave / Centre St) also filled up in a year or two. The Fifth (5th St/17 Ave) has the CRUs full today before anyone has moved in; that's a much better location of course, but other marginal Beltline locations like Versus and Metropolitan on 10th and 11th Aves also filled their retail quickly.

I think the long delay on filling the retail space in Nuera could easily be as much the landlord's choice as anything else -- I don't pretend to understand what goes on in the mind of commercial landlords, but some seem happy to keep a space empty for most of a decade rather than dropping prices, and some are more responsive to the market.

Not only might the landlord's choices be different, their motivations may well be different too. If I was building a rental building, I'd find the hippest coffee shop I could and give it a sweetheart deal on rent to be open the day the suites were available for leasing. In a building like BLVD, a cool coffee shop that lets you charge $10 a month more in rent for the average apartment would be profitable even if the coffee shop's net rent was free.
 
I wonder if any of the spaces have a full kitchen option. Dealing with grease ducts on a project and it's a huge pain, so I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't one here. Would be a perfect location for a restaurant or pub. Pig & Duke Stampede has a nice ring to it! lol.
 
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