One of the things that i have noticed in conversations around mixed-use buildings (retail podium with residential above) on rental projects is that the property management companies that would naturally buy these buildings want it to be either commercial or residential. This is leading to a lot of builders in the suburbs especially wanting to separate single storey retail out from the residential buildings and calling it "horizontal mixed-use". The old Sunnyside Plant store in Bowness is a good example as well as many of Roy-ops sites.
This is because the types of companies that would want to own them in Calgary are staffed up and are used to only managing either residential or commercial, largely because of how segregated these uses have been traditionally through Euclidian zoning in Calgary traditionally. Commercial property managers have built staff and portfolios of commercial properties and residential is vice-versa. So if Boardwalk is looking to buy an apartment building, they don't want to manage a retail podium as well as they don't have a lot of in-house staff to manage that. On the flip side purchasers on the commercial side don't want to manage residential and aren't setup for it.
I would imagine this would make sites like CY33 harder to forward sell to the likes of a Boardwalk, so JEMM probably would prefer to sell it as all residential because the feedback they would have received from the parties they would forward sell this project too would want it to be either or.
This is a problem of the mindsight of the end buyer/property manager and them not wanting to retool there organizations to manage both commercial and residential assets. I would presume that whoever Cidex forward sells to views the retail as a loss leader so they DGAF about renting the retail out in a West Village Towers situation and they just see it as "the City requiring vertical mixed-use" so leave it empty.
It is a part of our entire real estate industry that needs to change to make vertical mixed-use buildings more ubiquitous and palatable to end buyers/managers, just old school ideas that refuse to die and "why change our organization if we don't have to" ideas maintaining over time.