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Edmonton City Centre Mall (Renovations) | ?m | 2s | LaSalle Investment Management

David A said:
I think many aspects of what was done in Winnipeg make sense here too. I agree there are some differences and obviously the parties have come together in Winnipeg sooner, although my sense is they have also probably been dealing with this problem longer and their mall had problems sooner.

Whatever is worked out in Edmonton will probably have less involvement from the provincial government, because it doesn't seem to focus much on Edmonton, so that means the city will probably need to step up more, which I hope they are capable of doing.
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Yeah Portage Place has been rocky for a bit. City Centre was ok 5-8 years ago. Issues started and then got torpedoed over the course of the pandemic. The biggest problem back then was the owners sitting on their hands so as to not let it get ahead of their other property a dozen blocks north.

I'm not saying the plan doesn't make sense in Edmonton. I'm merely pointing out that there's a reason this is happening there first.
 
The pandemic was the final nail, but ECC was slipping for a decade+ and becoming less of an option for many of us.

Urban Men/Women, GAP, Club Monaco, Eddie Bauer, Aldo, Tip Top, The Bay, even Le Chateau all provided a reasonable offering for most needs but then slowly eroded and forced us to go find other options.
 
Yes, but the decline was slow. City Centre in 2015 was ok. Not WEM, Southgate, or Kingsway, but... fine. That's all.
 
Yes, it was fairly slow until COVID, then it became fast. Along the lines of Winnipeg, it would be good to have a health centre here. It would also be nice to see the city support it by using a some store front spaces for some of its various bodies, community groups/not for profit orgs to better interact with the public.

I think as long as the west side is so empty, having only one food court on the third floor of the east side is not the best idea, especially when the new LRT line opens. It would also make sense to open it up to the street.

The nearby office and residential towers do provide some customers probably more than currently in Winnipeg, but some changes are going to have to be made to make it more viable in the long term and delaying them may just prolong the current malaise.
 
David A said:
Yes, it was fairly slow until COVID, then it became fast. Along the lines of Winnipeg, it would be good to have a health centre here. It would also be nice to see the city support it by using a some store front spaces for some of its various bodies, community groups/not for profit orgs to better interact with the public.

I think as long as the west side is so empty, having only one food court on the third floor of the east side is not the best idea, especially when the new LRT line opens. It would also make sense to open it up to the street.

The nearby office and residential towers do provide some customers probably more than currently in Winnipeg, but some changes are going to have to be made to make it more viable in the long term and delaying them may just prolong the current malaise.
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There's a fair bit of offices and residences near Portage Place, and the people who live immediately north of the mall are probably the most predominant patrons of the mall now. City Centre still has more of the office crowd who in Winnipeg would go to Cityplace and Winnipeg Square (other, smaller downtown malls).
 
There is supposedly an advanced polling station at ECC if anyone is interested although I have no idea where it is located
 
David A said:
I went through the mall again today and it was not just busy, but very busy at lunch time.
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As someone who lives in the area, and used to work in the mall, I appreciate how busy it gets at lunch, but unfortunately it doesn't do much for shops. They can't staff for 90 minutes a day and that is certainly when they do most of their business. Although I think offices returning headcount downtown is helpful it really takes all hours traffic to develop sustainability for new tenants to come to ECC. I have a feeling that this revitalization is going to be slow and stuttering, but I remain optimistic. Best thing would be for ECC to convert to mixed use with residential to reduce the number of vacant shops and distribute the demand to the many other vacant CRUs in the buildings around ECC. I don't think the shopping mall model is going to continue to be effective for them. Perhaps they just need to support moving all of their tenants to one half of the mall and then redeveloping the other (as others have mentioned a while back), but unfortunately all of the most "premier" tenants (banks and telcos) are in the West part of the mall, and some of them rather recent (RBC) so it's likely hard to consolidate into the East side. I keep hoping!
 
I realize how hard to get past the still prevailing pessimism. This was a fairly successful mall for decades and I am sure it was always the case of quite busy peak activity was around lunch hour, actually much like it seemed today. So yes, they actually can staff for busy periods.

People are coming back downtown. I realize this is happening over time (a bit more every day and week), so it will take a while for retailers and everyone else to catch up, but it is happening now.

For those of you here who don't like any good news, sorry if I ruined your day.
 
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A very 80's look, so perhaps better this all didn't happen. The mall has a very suburban look to it here, particularly with the empty lots in front of it. I suppose to be fair, Triple 5 did what they did best, which was build a fairly suburban like mall. The only problem with that was it wasn't a suburban location.

However, lets also remember it did do fairly well for a couple of decades or so. I feel toning down some of the Triple 5 mid 80's excess probably helped keep it viable longer.

I think everything in the long discussion here about City Centre mall comes back to the east side being ok and probably viable regardless, but the west side is much more problematic. It was initially two malls and I think whatever solutions are arrived at, need to consider each part differently, even though it is in theory one mall now.
 
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