A proposed senior’s housing complex on Ospika Boulevard came back before Prince George City Council for a third time at last night’s meeting. (Monday)
The applicant, the Hub Collection, was seeking to amend a section 219 covenant to allow them to build seniors housing at 4500 Ospika Boulevard.
The developers had originally successfully applied to build 256 units of student housing at the location before requesting to switch to 118 units of seniors housing in February.
The project came back before council on April 24th, with some new information from the developer.
However, Council decided there was some information missing, and pushed the vote on the modification back to last night’s meeting.
The information missing was a feasibility report on seniors housing in Prince George.
At the April 24th meeting, Councillor Ron Polillo put forward the motion to have the missing feasibility report brought back to council.
“It makes a compelling case for seniors housing, which we knew already, we know we need seniors housing,” Polillo said last night.
“In the report though, there was, I felt, lack of information on making this location an ideal choice or a good choice. There was a couple, maybe a paragraph or a couple of sentences dedicated to it, but other than that, there wasn’t a lot of information.”
Polillo added he was disappointed by that, and that nothing has changed in the last two weeks.
“Looking at this through perhaps a different lens, I’m trying to see how we can get to yes, and for me it comes down to land use,” said Councillor Cori Ramsay.
“With the student housing building, we have a bigger building, a bigger footprint, initial concerns from the residents about capacity and density, and the question on land use is can a smaller, lesser footprint of a building be put in this location?”
In a letter written to city staff, the developer writes:
“Switching from Student Housing to Affordable Independent Seniors Housing was a necessity based solely on the economic climate facing Canada today. Ongoing financing challenges have seen material interest rate increases and construction costs have escalated by over 200%.”
“The city’s been open for business, they haven’t been able to make the numbers work, others could,” said Councillor Garth Frizzell.
“As far as education goes, the plans at our two institutions are for more programs, are for expanding, I’ve heard numbers as much as 500 more students in the next five years.”
“We bent over more than backwards for this developer,” said Councillor Brian Skakun.
“The onus is on them, if they want to swing a deal, or they want to attract more investment or do whatever they’re going to do, then do it, bring that back to us.”
Council voted to deny the modification.
Councillors Skakun, Polillo, Scott, Frizzell, and Mayor Yu were in favour of denying the modification.
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