The Elm Place mall in downtown Sudbury has been approved to house up to 7,020 square meters of warehousing/distribution centre space, and/or self-storage.
Vista Hospitality owns the building, whose vice-president asset management Samer Ghazi told Sudbury.com that they don’t currently have any tenants lined up, but they wanted the additional use approved by city council so they can market currently unused space within the building.
“The retail has been a big challenge in the last few years,” Ghazi told the planning committee of city council earlier this week, adding that despite offering space to retailers at a “very, very low cost,” they’ve been unable to lease all of their spaces.
The first floor is currently 29-per-cent vacant, and the second floor is 34-per-cent unoccupied.
The office tower portion of the mall is separately owned and not included in the municipal report.
“By having this option to use these spaces to warehouse or self-storage we hope to bring more people to be employed and to use facilities like the food court or other retail spaces,” Ghazi said.
A floor plan of the building shows that the proposed warehouse/self-storage space would occupy parts of the building's footprint situated behind existing retail spaces.
“The focus of this proposal is to redevelop and revitalize this traditional two-storey shopping centre, and really, to increase the occupancy while maintaining future commercial uses within the inner concourse of the mall,” Planscape Inc. senior planner Stefan Szczerbak told the committee, representing the proponent.
“Traditional downtown retail malls or plazas really have been impacted by the evolving social and economic changes,” he said, adding that big box stores have shifted shopping outside of core areas and online shopping has also affected brick-and-mortar stores.
“The focus here is to promote the new uses to occur within the existing empty spaces for warehousing, distribution and commercial self-storage.”
The council-approved rezoning retains existing uses.
The city’s elected officials were near-unanimous in approving the additional use of warehouse/self-storage facilities, with Ward 11 Coun. Bill Leduc the only opponent.
After voting against the rezoning application during Monday’s planning committee meeting, Leduc flagged it for a fresh vote from city council as a whole the following day. During both cases, Leduc notched the only dissenting vote.
Leduc argued that Downtown Sudbury is not a good place for a warehouse/storage facility.
“We’re investing in our employment lands throughout our city in places such as Lasalle and Elisabella Street,” Leduc said on Tuesday. “A storage warehouse facility would be better situated in a place like that.”
“I don’t think we can afford to keep taking retail space away,” he added, making reference to the city’s downtown land purchase/demolitions to make way for the downtown arena and ancillary services.
“If we want to revitalize our downtown ... we’ve got to create foot traffic downtown. A warehouse and storage facility is not going to create foot traffic.”
Ward 4 Coun. Pauline Fortin countered by noting that the mall has been struggling to fill its space with retail and that the section of the mall being filled out isn’t occupied, while Ward 10 Coun. Fern Cormier (who also chairs the planning committee) described these unoccupied as “dead areas” which “aren't suitable for storefront/retail.”
“It’s by no means removing the retail,” Cormier said, adding that the rezoning application seeks to add a use and not take any away, meaning that if a tenant found a way to make retail operations work within the affected building space, they could still do so.
A traffic impact study concluded that the proposed development would generate 60 a.m. and 65 p.m. peak hour trips per day, which “will not cause any operational issues and will not add significant delay or congestion to the local roadway network.”
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.
