Colonnade BridgePort files proposal for 22-storey mixed-use tower near Westboro LRT station

October 22, 2024

Colonnade BridgePort’s site-plan application for the development on Scott Street near Island Park Drive says the proposed building would include 244 dwelling units and 91 underground parking spaces.

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One of Ottawa’s largest real estate companies has filed plans for its next big development project – a 22-storey highrise in Westboro that would feature nearly 250 rental apartments. Colonnade BridgePort’s site-plan application for the development on Scott Street near Island Park Drive says the proposed building would include 244 dwelling units and 91 underground parking spaces. According to planning documents, the suites would be a mix of studio, one-bedroom, two-bedroom and two-bedroom-plus-den units. The proposal also calls for ground-floor commercial space on the northwest corner of the building. The site consists of three parcels of land at 1950 Scott St., 312 Clifton Rd. and 314 Clifton Rd., just west of Island Park Drive. The Scott Street property is currently occupied by a vacant one-and-a-half-storey building that previously housed the International Buddhist Progress Society of Ottawa, while a pair of vacant single-family homes now sits on the properties on Clifton Road. The proposed development would be located about 150 metres east of the Westboro transit station, which is being converted to an LRT stop on the expanded Confederation line. A consultant’s report accompanying the site-plan application says the proposal “meets all the requirements for high-density development” under the city’s new Official Plan. It says the project will “help support and sustain new services with the growth of 15-minute neighbourhoods” – that is, areas that are within a 15-minute walk of services such as food stores, shops, restaurants and other amenities. It’s the latest in a series of major developments in the construction pipeline for Colonnade BridgePort, the city’s largest privately owned commercial property management firm. Farther west on Scott Street, the company is laying the groundwork for a major multi-residential complex on the former site of the Granite Curling Club that would feature more than 800 units. Colonnade BridgePort CEO Hugh Gorman told OBJ last spring he hopes to have shovels in the ground on Scott Street as early as next year. “We’ve got economics that are now starting to make sense, and that will in turn start to attract capital back to the market because the demand side of the curve from tenants and the revenue side of the pro forma is very, very strong,” he said in an interview in February. Meanwhile, the firm has also started construction on a 12-storey, 124-unit “boutique” rental complex on Argyle Avenue near the Canadian Museum of Nature. “On multi-family (projects), we’re just getting to the point where we can get the economics and the pro forma to work,” Gorman said in February. “That’s why we’re much more bullish on the multi-family rental side.” Colonnade BridgePort’s most ambitious proposal is a multi-phased development on a five-acre property at 25 Pickering Pl., just east of the city’s main Via Rail terminal and the Tremblay LRT station. The company is partnering with Toronto-based investment firm Fiera Real Estate to turn the current industrial site into a “mixed-use, high-density community hub” that will eventually include up to 1,200 residential units in a mix of rental apartment highrises, condos and retirement residences, as well as retail space, parkland and possibly a hotel. In a recently filed site plan control application, Colonnade BridgePort said the first phase of the development would consist of two highrises of 14 and 28 storeys that would contain a total of 483 residential suites. East of the train station, the company plans to build five residential highrises with upwards of 1,200 units on a four-acre parcel of land at 2000 City Park Dr., about 450 metres west of Blair Station and the Gloucester Centre mall. The proposal calls for a “planned community” with more than a million square feet of residential space in five buildings of between 20 and 30 storeys that would be arranged around a central park.